NEW DELHI UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Friday called for “less hype, less fear” surrounding artificial intelligence, as he announced the formation of a new expert panel designed to ensure human control over the rapidly evolving technology.
Guterres said the United Nations General Assembly had confirmed 40 members to serve on the newly established Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence.
“Science-led governance is not a brake on progress,” he told delegates at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. “It can make innovation safer, fairer and more widely shared. The message is simple: Less hype, less fear. More facts and evidence.”
The advisory body — created in August — aims to play a role for artificial intelligence similar to that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on global warming. Its first report is expected ahead of the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in July.
The panel is intended to help governments develop effective regulations as AI advances at breakneck speed, raising concerns over job displacement, misinformation, online abuse and other risks.
“AI innovation is moving at the speed of light, outpacing our collective ability to fully understand it, let alone govern it,” Guterres said. “We are barrelling into the unknown.”
He stressed that a better understanding of AI systems is essential to designing smarter safeguards. “When we understand what systems can do — and what they cannot — we can move from rough measures to smarter, risk-based guardrails,” he said.
Earlier this month, Guterres unveiled a proposed list of experts for the panel, including Filipino journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa and Canadian artificial intelligence pioneer Yoshua Bengio.
“Our goal is to make human control a technical reality — not a slogan,” Guterres said, emphasizing that this requires clear accountability so responsibility is never outsourced to an algorithm.
Later Friday, dozens of world leaders and ministers were expected to issue a joint statement outlining their vision for managing artificial intelligence, concluding the five-day summit dedicated to the technology.
