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Anthony Rowley

To describe the uncontrolled adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) as a “mixed blessing” is a grotesque understatement. It is better termed a miscalculated risk that reflects the world’s present sad and potentially tragic lack of responsible leadership, in Western nations especially.
On the one hand, we are assured AI will raise productivity and economic growth. It will be a particular blessing for developing countries, such as those in Asia, enabling them to leapfrog the centuries it took the West to reach its current state of development.
On the other hand, evidence is emerging that AI has “gone rogue” in some places, revealing its power to wreak widespread destruction upon us all if left unchecked. Some informed opinion is demanding controls over AI development before the technology itself takes control of us.
World leaders appear to be slumbering on this important issue, much as they seem insufficiently concerned about the threats posed by climate change or drone warfare. For the financial community, meanwhile, AI seems to be of interest mainly for its assumed potential to generate massive profits.
Some recent reports have underlined the dichotomy of opinion between how serious the AI threat is and where the balance lies between its potential for good and ill. One came from the World Bank in its annual World Development Report.
The World Bank still has some influence in international affairs, even during the reign of US President Donald Trump. Possibly in an effort to avoid angering Trump – whose own vested interests in AI, tech and cryptocurrency assets are considerable – and to placate financial moguls on Wall Street and beyond, the World Bank hedges its bets on the claimed virtues and vices of the AI revolution.


However, it is obvious the world and its leaders were caught off guard by AI’s sudden advance. The technology was initially seen as a way to boost profits and improve efficiency in government and private business. What may not have been foreseen was the vast investment in supporting infrastructure and data centres and the scale of the impact on jobs.
The World Development Report attempts to fill some of these gaps. It suggests that 14.2 per cent of jobs in high-income countries and 4.5 per cent in low- and middle-income countries are at risk of being automated by generative AI. Meanwhile, 16.2 per cent of jobs in developing economies are expected to benefit from AI-driven productivity gains.
The report expresses optimism about AI’s potential to address long-standing market failures. For example, it can help in credit markets, where banks can provide loans to more people by using AI algorithms to trace people’s digital presence and assess their creditworthiness. AI also has the potential to fill skills gaps and address the dependency that comes with relying on a few large technology companies based in high-income countries.
That is all very well in theory. However, rosy predictions about the promise AI holds for developing countries assume they are provided with the resources needed to achieve rapid, AI-supported development.
In a concept note accompanying the report’s release, the World Bank suggests that unbridled optimism is out of place. “Without appropriate safeguards, AI can reinforce biases, misdiagnose needs or result in flawed decisions that could make the solution worse than the problem,” it said. It went on to note that AI might benefit owners of capital more than workers and skilled workers more than unskilled workers.
In short, the World Bank is saying that leaving AI adoption to market forces instead of being rolled out in the context of a planned economy could either be beneficial or a disaster.


What of the peril of uncontrolled AI adoption? Katrin Bennhold addressed this threat recently in The New York Times. She discusses the July incident in which popular developer platform Hugging Face reported a sophisticated cyberattack that didn’t look like the work of a criminal gang or a hostile nation state.
It turned out no humans were involved at all. Instead, an agent powered by two OpenAI models had gone rogue during a cybersecurity test, escaping their testing environment and roaming the internet unnoticed for days. Later that month, OpenAI competitor Anthropic announced it had reviewed its systems and found three incidents of its Claude AI models breaking into outside organisations.
This, Bennhold wrote, “is the stuff of science fiction, or at least it was until recently”. These events have sparked intense debate about the dangers of AI and its potential to spiral beyond human control.
Since the global AI race also involves China, Bennhold wrote that “any agreement on AI safety would require international coordination” and that while the obstacles to international coordination effort remain high, “the first step would be agreeing that humanity has a problem”. It is time international leaders lived up to their responsibilities and took that step.


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Artificial intelligence (AI)

Global leaders must wake up to threat of unbridled AI adoption

US President Donald Trump closes his eyes before signing an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on August 10. Photo: AFP

AI boom enters its ‘nasty’ phase as economic realities set in

A man walks past an electronic screen showing the SK Hynix stock price outside a foreign exchange dealing room at the Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul on July 31. Photo: AFP

OpenAI agent’s autonomous hack a warning to the world

A woman uses artificial intelligence to assist in her administrative tasks at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 11. Photo: AP

Behind the AI stock market bubble lies a weak yen

Pedestrians pass a foreign currency indicator board showing the rate of the US dollar against the Japanese yen in Tokyo on August 3. The yen surged against the US dollar, reaching its strongest level in about three months after Japanese and US monetary authorities conducted a coordinated intervention to buy the yen for the first time in 28 years. Photo: EPA

China’s Kimi K3 AI model escapes isolated sandbox during security test: researchers

The Kimi K3 incident follows similar ones  involving closed frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Photo: Getty Images

Kimi K3 was released last month by Beijing-based Moonshot AI. Photo: Reuters

World Bank urges developing countries to embrace AI ‘lifeline’ or be left behind

The World Bank says AI could help extend vital services to underserved billions in developing economies in a decade that would otherwise take a century. Photo: Reuters

A view of a building damaged by a strike in March amid the Iran war. The economic fallout from the conflict is battering countries around the world, the World Bank says. Photo: Reuters

The World Bank calls on developing countries to start working with localised AI tools and solutions now. Photo: SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

Opinion

World Opinion

Tech

Big Tech

Much like their drowsiness on climate change, world leaders have been lulled to sleep by promises of AI’s benefits to efficiency and profits


Much like their drowsiness on climate change, world leaders have been lulled to sleep by promises of AI’s benefits to efficiency and profits.


World Bank Group

Regulation

Macroscope

United States

Anthropic

The New York Times

OpenAI

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Column

Global leaders must wake up to threat of unbridled AI adoption

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Much like their drowsiness on climate change, world leaders have been lulled to sleep by promises of AI’s benefits to efficiency and profits

Much like their drowsiness on climate change, world leaders have been lulled to sleep by promises of AI’s benefits to efficiency and profits