UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Friday unveiled a new global expert panel on artificial intelligence, calling for “less hype, less fear” about the fast-evolving technology while emphasizing that human control must become “a technical reality” rather than merely a slogan.
Speaking at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Guterres announced that the United Nations General Assembly had confirmed 40 members for the group, called the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence.
“Science-led governance is not a brake on progress” but can make it “safer, fairer, and more widely shared,” Guterres told the summit. “The message is simple: Less hype, less fear. More facts and evidence”.
The advisory body—aiming to be to AI what the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to global warming—was created in August. Its first report is expected to be published in time for the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in July.
“AI innovation is moving at the speed of light, outpacing our collective ability to fully understand it, let alone govern it,” Guterres said Friday. “We are barrelling into the unknown” .
“Our goal is to make human control a technical reality, not a slogan,” he said. That “requires clear accountability, so responsibility is never outsourced to an algorithm”.
The UN’s 40 members were selected from more than 2,600 candidates after an independent review by several UN bodies and the International Telecommunications Union. They will serve three-year terms.
Among the panel members are journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa of the Philippines, and Canadian artificial intelligence pioneer Yoshua Bengio.
The panel aims to help governments regulate AI as the fast-evolving technology sparks global concern over job losses, misinformation, online abuse, and other challenges. Guterres highlighted that “this panel is designed to help close the AI knowledge gap and assess the real impacts of AI across economies and societies so countries at every level of AI capacity can act with the same clarity”.
The UN’s General Assembly voted 117-2 to approve the panel, with the United States and Paraguay voting no, and abstentions from Tunisia and Ukraine.
Lauren Lovelace, the US representative, called the panel “a significant overreach of the UN’s mandate and competence” and said “AI governance is not a matter for the UN to dictate”.
Despite US opposition, the country still has two representatives on the panel: Vipin Kumar, a University of Minnesota professor, and Martha Palmer, a retired University of Colorado professor and linguistics expert.
Guterres emphasized that the panel’s goal includes ensuring “meaningful human oversight in every high-stakes decision” and maintaining transparency so that people can