All human rights “are at risk, including the rights to life, food, privacy, health, and security,” due to the accelerated development of artificial intelligence (AI), warned the UN High Commissioner Volker Türk on Monday.
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“The current race towards increasingly powerful AI represents a qualitative leap towards greater existential risks for all aspects of our lives,” said the UN human rights chief in a statement, after employees in that tech sector urged slowing down the advancement of that technology.
Agentic AI, which goes beyond conventional AI and can make its own decisions, is showing failures that “could paralyze essential services, fracture communications, destabilize critical infrastructures, and strike at the very heart of democratic institutions,” warned Türk.
“Entire populations could be left without access to water, heating, or financial services,” added the High Commissioner, who stated that AI “is already accelerating the pace of wars, expanding their scope, and eroding the safeguards that stand between us and the launch of weapons of mass destruction.”
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The warnings from the UN human rights chief come after personalities such as Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; and magnate Elon Musk called for deliberately slowing the pace of development of the most advanced AI models in the face of risks such as loss of control over systems.
According to Türk, states and companies must urgently mobilize through multilateral forums to govern AI based on international law and human rights.
“No country can govern this technology alone, no company should be able to decide alone what risks the world must accept, and no person should be forced to give up their human rights in exchange for promises of technological progress,” summarized the Austrian High Commissioner.
