AI’s Rapid Growth Poses Real Risks

Users of AI tools are projected to reach 729.11 million by 2030, a 132% jump from an estimated 314.38 million users in 2024 and a 529% surge from 2020, data as indicated by data supplied by Statista.

With users of AI tools set to grow extensively through this decade, to almost three quarters of a billion users, it is critical that principles for trustworthy AI are developed and adopted broadly.

Lucia Rossi, an economist and policy analyst at the OECD’s AI division, commented that “We see that policymakers across the globe are issuing different regulatory frameworks … we encourage interoperability across jurisdictions and encourage co-operation across these players”.

Paris-based OECD has been focusing on AI for nearly a decade, and in May 2019 its member countries adopted the OECD AI Principles, the first intergovernmental standard on AI.

Regulations should be designed to protect “human rights, privacy, transparency, safety and accountability”, and any principle should “set a guide, a blueprint for policymakers and all stakeholders to set a common ground that we all must find to foster a thriving AI ecosystem”, Ms Rossi added.

Among the biggest risks when it comes to AI are bias and threats to authenticity, especially with its growing user base, Don McGuire, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Qualcomm, said at the panel.

The emergence of generative AI, propelled to the forefront by OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2023, has accelerated its expansion.

Growing interest in the technology, due to its advanced conversational skills, led to a scramble by technology majors such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle, and corporate leaders such as X owner Elon Musk to enter the space.

Apart from guiding principles for Ai, the new tech also threatens other elements of our civilisation. At the Bosch Connected conference in March, Elon Musk was quoted as saying that “The artificial intelligence compute coming online, appears to be increasing by a factor of 10 every six months. Like, obviously that cannot continue at such a high rate forever, or it’ll exceed the mass of the universe, but I’ve never seen anything like it. The chip rush is bigger than any gold rush that’s ever existed.” He also cautioned that the next threat would be a lack of transformers to power the industry and then followed by electricity shortages.

Ai’s sudden rise has also raised questions about how data is used in AI models and how the law applies to the output of those models, such as a paragraph of text or a computer-generated image. These and other questions of ethics and survival are important for the industry to address before they become existential issues for humanity.