UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper has issued a stark warning regarding the rapid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) development. In an essay published by Chatham House, Cooper emphasized that the world is in a crucial and dangerous phase if it does not immediately establish a binding international legal framework to limit the risks of this technology.
Cooper explicitly compared the potential threat of uncontrolled AI to the horrors of the Hiroshima atomic bomb tragedy. According to her, the international community must not wait for catastrophic consequences to emerge before taking preventive action. She referred to the history of nuclear policy, where a global consensus was only formed following unavoidable mass destruction.
In her view, the issue of AI governance will be the most dominant agenda in global foreign policy over the next two years. She urged nations with major technological power, such as the United States and China, to immediately sit down together to formulate clear boundaries, given that AI could be misused by rogue actors, criminal organizations, and extremist groups to trigger global instability.
Similar concerns were also expressed by tech figure Elon Musk. The co-founder of OpenAI has previously highlighted the existence of AI as an existential threat to humanity. Musk pointed out a first-of-its-kind phenomenon in history where humans must contend with an entity possessing an intellectual capacity far exceeding the cognitive abilities of even the smartest human.
