Artificial intelligence (AI) threatens democracy – at least that’s what the new risk report from the World Economic Forum says. For the first time, artificial intelligence is featured prominently in the report, which has experts assess the world’s major risks every year.
However, the approximately 1,500 experts do not present AI as a panacea or a threat to civilization, as is particularly common in Silicon Valley. Instead, it appears as a tool that exacerbates existing trends: AI can worsen social divisions, disinformation and cyber threats. These are well-known problems, but they are being turbocharged by new technologies.
In the eyes of the experts, AI is merely an accelerant and not a nuclear bomb, but as such it should not be underestimated: elections will take place in 60 countries in 2024, sometimes more, sometimes less free. Over three billion people go to the polls worldwide. AI is used to produce misinformation on an industrial scale. These could destabilize candidates and new governments. Shared truths could be lost, the report warns.
Of course, the technology also allows enormous gains in economic productivity. But “if commercial incentives and geopolitical imperatives” continue to guide the development of artificial intelligence, the report says, low- and middle-income countries will be particularly excluded. Existing inequalities worsened. Those who cannot afford the new digital infrastructure will be left behind and will only experience the negative, not the positive, sides of the new technology.
Snowy Davos: The World Economic Forum will take place here next week.
(Photo: DENIS BALIBOUSE/REUTERS)
Without a global approach to regulating dangerous AI applications, state and non-state actors will in the long term gain “access to a superhuman breadth of knowledge” with which they can develop “malware and biological weapons.” This could lead to a flare-up of old and new conflicts and wars – at least in the long term. The particularly serious concerns about AI, however, are the short-term and political ones: social dislocation due to AI-generated disinformation.
“Environmental risks could reach a point of no return.”
However, respondents see climate change and the increasingly irreversible consequences for the planet as the greatest medium to long-term threat. “Environmental risks could reach a point of no return,” the report says.
A worrying finding from the survey: While experts from society or governments see climate change as an acute danger that needs to be combated in the present, private sector actors only see it as a long-term risk. The report conclusively points to the risk that this deviation poses to the global climate, biodiversity and increasingly scarce natural resources. Without a shared time frame, critical moments for interventions could be missed and climate tipping points could be exceeded. The adaptive capacity of entire nations “could be overwhelmed” and make it impossible for some countries to “absorb the acute and chronic effects of rapid climate change.” It’s the same sobering conclusion, similar UN climate reports or of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change been pulling for a long time. However, there has not yet been enough international cooperation – 2023 was the hottest year since records began and the 1.5 degree target could now be exceeded in the early 2030s.
And so the Global Risks Report 2024 ends on a decidedly bleak note. Locksmith in the past year still with that now This time he acknowledges that it is the moment to act together: “In a world in which everything is increasingly fragmented and in flux, cooperation comes under pressure.” The polarization fueled by AI technologies, together with recessions triggered by climate and crises, are creating more and more conflicts and exacerbating inequalities. The coming crises are pushing the world into uncertainty that is making cooperation more and more necessary and at the same time more and more difficult. According to the report, the window of opportunity for joint action is slowly closing.