Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has positioned the UK as a global leader in securing fast-growing technology as the UK hosts a global artificial intelligence summit in November in the home of Britain’s World War II codebreakers.
The government said on Thursday the summit would be held on November 1-2 at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, where mathematician Alan Turing cracked Nazi Germany’s Enigma code.
Executives from tech companies, government officials and academics will meet to consider the risks of AI and discuss how to mitigate them.
An administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the summit could discuss issues such as how to prevent artificial intelligence from spreading misinformation during elections and using the technology in warfare.
“The UK has long been home to the transformative technologies of the future, so there could be no better place than Bletchley Park to host the inaugural Global AI Safety Summit,” Sunak said.
“To fully embrace the extraordinary opportunities of artificial intelligence, we must seize and mitigate the risks to ensure the safe development of artificial intelligence in the years to come.”
Sunak announced in June that the UK would organize a summit after meeting US President Joe Biden in Washington, saying he wanted the UK to be the intellectual and geographical home for AI regulation.
Governments around the world are grappling with how to rein in the potentially negative consequences of artificial intelligence without stifling innovation.
Tech entrepreneur and expert Matt Clifford and former top diplomat and deputy national security adviser Jonathan Black have been named to lead preparations for the summit.
The UK has chosen to assign regulatory responsibility for AI to agencies tasked with overseeing competition, human rights, and health and safety, rather than creating a new agency dedicated to the technology.
Leaders of G7 economies including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union in May called for standards to create trustworthy AI and set up a ministerial forum known as the Hiroshima AI Process .
© Thomson Reuters 2023
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