At the end of September representatives of the world gathered in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Alongside of the official events many side meetings considered aspects of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including information technology.
In concert with this, USAID produced a report which emphasized the role of AI in global development. The report noted the global community is on track to meet just 17% of the SDGs by 2030, and progress has plateaued or regressed in many areas.
When used effectively and responsibly, AI holds the potential to accelerate progress on sustainable development and close digital divides but challenges in scaling AI for social-good initiatives are persistent and tough, notes a May McKinsey report. Seventy-two percent of the respondents to a McKinsey expert survey observed that most efforts to deploy AI for social good to date have focused on research and innovation rather than adoption and scaling. Fifty-five percent of grants for AI research and deployment across the SDGs are $250,000 or smaller, which is consistent with a focus on targeted research or smaller-scale deployment, rather than large-scale expansion, says the report. Aside from funding, the biggest barriers to scaling AI continue to be the same problems that plague AI projects in the North: data availability, accessibility, and quality; AI talent availability and accessibility; organizational receptiveness; and change management.
Two additional often overlooked issues add to the difficulty of deployment in the Global South:
* Nearly three billion people are not connected to the Internet, cutting them off from AIs for any purpose
*Even if they can access Al and want to use large language models the Global South faces the problem that the underlying data available on the Internet is skewed towards the global North and male centric. We are, in fact, in danger of imposing our views, encoded in AI models and agents, onto those who were once the subject of physical colonialization.
Just as the Northern empires and missionaries cited the aid they brought to the suffering, it can be argued that helping with the literacy and numeracy of all children will increase living standards across the Global South, but it also introduces new issues.
I was recently talking to a teacher who asked students to look up the origins of World War II in different languages. The German, Russian and UK versions differed dramatically. If students in the Global South are to be able to use AI for more than learning math and language, then whose truth will be pushed to them? Who will determine this and how? Given that there is a prediction that by summer 2025 there will be more AI created data than human created data, it is hard to imagine how to resolve this.
Other issues also need our attention. A Brookings Institution report notes that the lack of robust data protection and AI policies in the Global South could potentially lead to greater levels of misuse as AI grows in reach. And there are significant ethical issues. For example, in a country which has one doctor to serve 27,000 people would it be better to deploy an AI triage agent, knowing that it might cause some deaths but also help that one doctor save more lives, or is it better not to deploy the AI at all?
Another Brookings report, published during the UN General Assembly, talked about the massive financial investment needed to get anywhere near reaching the SDGs .
The following week a consortium of Nvidia, Microsoft, Softbank and others invested $6.6 billion into Open AI and Google paid $2.7 billion for Character Al. It seems very unlikely that these investments will be used sufficiently to bridge the ever-widening gap between North and South. If countries in the Global North have been unable to keep up with the developments in Silicon Valley due to lack of funds, this applies even more to the South.
There is much to be done but as ever it will require significant commitment from wealthy countries and companies. Indeed, we need to wait to see if the Global South can be seen as a growth market for AI solution providers. It has not been the focus of attention to date.
Last week, when asked about the impact of AI on climate change former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has made considerable investments in AI, said “My own opinion is that we are not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we are not organized to do it and yes, the needs in this area (AI) will be a problem. But I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it [AI].”
It should be noted that climate change does not equitably affect the Global South. Energy guzzling data centers in the North will contribute to climate change and more suffering in the South without any guarantee of an upside.
We need to work together to ensure that the latest technology does not, again, fail the rest of the world, and work with those in the Global South to ensure the lofty aims of the SDGs and the Global North create benefits and not further harm.
Kay Firth-Butterfield, one of the world’s foremost experts on AI governance, is the founder and CEO of Good Tech Advisory. Until recently she was Head of Artificial Intelligence and a member of the Executive Committee at the World Economic Forum. In February she won The Time100 Impact Award for her work on responsible AI governance. Firth-Butterfield is a barrister, former judge and professor, technologist and entrepreneur and vice-Chair of The IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems. She was part of the group which met at Asilomar to create the Asilomar AI Ethical Principles, is a member of the Polaris Council for the Government Accountability Office (USA), the Advisory Board for UNESCO International Research Centre on AI, ADI and AI4All. She sits on the Board of EarthSpecies and regularly speaks to international audiences addressing many aspects of the beneficial and challenging technical, economic, and social changes arising from the use of AI. This is the seventh of a planned series of exclusive columns that she is writing for The Innovator.
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