00:00Donald Turk is the former president of Slovenia.
00:03If there is no regulation, if there is no framework for use and further development of artificial intelligence,
00:11we may end up with disasters.
00:13And I think that everybody should be interested in not coming to that point or in preventing disasters.
00:22That's why I think the motivation for trying to find the regulatory framework has grown very quickly.
00:30But very recently. It's a fairly new need, felt very strongly.
00:35But the problem of difficulty in regulation is not new.
00:40I would like to remind ourselves that when the discussion on regulation of nuclear energy was started several decades ago,
00:49it also looked as if this was an impossible task.
00:52It looked as if the sovereign states were so committed to develop their own capacities without any limitations
01:00that it took quite a while to come to an agreement to establish an international agency,
01:07the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is based in Vienna and which is now an important regulatory mechanism.
01:15And of course, I know that the nuclear energy is very different from artificial intelligence.
01:20No doubt about that. But the challenge was similar because it looked at the beginning that it's not going to
01:26work
01:26and it's not going to succeed. But then with serious effort and with the awareness that there is a danger
01:34that has to be
01:35that has to be managed and prevented. And therefore, that eventually succeeded.
01:41President Xi stressed that the United Nations should perhaps play a central role in artificial intelligence governance.
01:49How should this new organization work with the United Nations without creating overlapping or competing systems?
02:00Well, there will be a need for innovation. And I would like to mention two facts in this context.
02:06First, that last year in 2025, all of a sudden, it became possible in the United Nations General Assembly to
02:16agree on our conference
02:17on artificial intelligence, which took place earlier in July in Geneva.
02:22Now that was seen as a big surprise because the political conditions for such sensitive matters are simply not there.
02:30But there was a sufficient level of concern which allowed a consensus decision that this matter has to be discussed
02:38with a view to figuring out what kind of regulatory mechanisms have to be put in place in the future.
02:44So that's number one. Number two, the historic experience of the United Nations is this.
02:51One doesn't have to follow a particular model of arrangements within the wider United Nations system.
02:59The International Atomic Energy Agency is not technically speaking a specialized agency of the United Nations,
03:06but it is very closely connected with the United Nations.
03:10It retains its own autonomy, its own specific structure, its decision-making process,
03:16which is, of course, under influence of the countries that possess the nuclear energy and so forth.
03:24So there are ways in which these specific solutions can be found to deal with specific issues.
03:31And this is the case with the artificial intelligence today.
03:35I'm not denying the complexity of the task or the difficulty of the task or the imbalance which exists in
03:43the world.
03:44All these are very real problems. But we know from the past that real problems can find real solutions.
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