The World Government Summit in Dubai has held under the theme of “Shaping Future Governments”. The Summit will bring thought leaders, global experts and decision makers from around the globe to share and contribute to the development of tools, policies, and models that are essential in shaping future governments.
Heads of state, ministers and hundreds of decision-makers were descending on Dubai’s Madinat Jumeirah complex to debate the future of government, the global economy and how technology will affect our lives.
Mohammed Al Gergawi, Minister of Cabinet Affairs and chairman of the World Government Summit, welcomed thousands of delegates to the three-day forum. Among them Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director General of the World Trade Organisation; UAE’s two top space officials, Mars mission chief Omran Sharaf and Sarah Al Amiri, chairwoman of the UAE Space Agency; Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El Sisi; International Monetary Fund managing director Kristalina Georgieva and many others.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk with much-anticipated online appearance took centre stage on the final day of the World Government Summit in Dubai.
Elon Musk said governments may need to put the brakes on artificial intelligence to allow for it to be safely regulated. “Artificial intelligence is something we need to be quite concerned about,” he told the audience.
“ChatGPT (Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue) has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become. It has been advanced for a while, it just didn’t have a user interface that was accessible to most people. And there are much more advanced versions that are coming out.
We need to regulate AI safety, frankly. If you think of any technology which is potentially a risk to people — aircraft, cars or medicine — we have regulatory bodies that oversee public safety. And we should have a similar oversight for artificial intelligence — I think it is actually a bigger risk than cars, planes or medicine.
This may need to slow down AI a little bit, but I think that could be a good thing,” said Musk
He was also asked his predictions for the future, and he touched on the shift away from fossil fuels: “Because of the massive industrial base of the current fossil fuel economy, even if all of the cars in production were 100 per cent electric, it would take 20 years to replace the fleet. So this is still something that is quite gradual in at least 30-40 years’ time.”
Musk advised parents to supervise their children’s use of social media and be aware of the algorithms that could program them. He suggested that parents should take note of what their children are watching and intervene if they disagree with the content; “I think, probably, one needs to supervise children’s use of social media, and be wary of them getting programmed by some algorithm written in Silicon Valley.”
Musk questioned the current education system, stating that some classes, like advanced mathematics, are not useful for most people. He suggested that instead of teaching subjects that are unlikely to be useful in real life, critical thinking should be taught to children at a young age to help them distinguish truth from falsehood.
He expressed concern about too much cooperation between governments, stating that it could lead to a civilizational risk. He clarified that he was not advocating for war, but that too much unity could cause the whole system to collapse: “If we are too much of a single civilization, then the whole thing may collapse.”