UN Secretary General Discusses AI, UN Reform, Dire World State at Press Conference

Referring specifically to artificial intelligence, Secretary General Guterres said that both national action and “a coordinated global effort” are necessary to identify and address the “threats” posed by AI. “Artificial Intelligence will certainly be a major topic in my discussions with world leaders next week--and the United Nations will continue to explore practical ideas and approaches in the immediate days ahead,” he said. One such initiative already underway is the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, which was set up, Secretary General Guterres said, to bring “together global scientific expertise to ensure that policy is guided by evidence.”

We have been down this road before with international bodies that were established to address the supposed “existential” threat of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) meets annually and accomplishes very little except adding to the global carbon footprint from all the private planes flying to and from the meeting sites. The Paris Agreement on Climate Change, from which President Trump wisely withdrew, has failed to meet its objectives. China – the world’s number one emitter of green gases – has gamed the Paris Agreement to its national economic advantage. 

The UN Green Climate Fund and the Loss and Damage fund, which operate under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, are essentially globalist “climate social justice” schemes to redistribute wealth from successful developed countries to developing countries. Even China, which the UN still considers to be a “developing” country, has in the past obtained funding from the Green Climate Fund to pay for mitigating the greenhouse gas emissions that China itself was increasingly spewing out. Not surprisingly, at his September 16^th press conference, Secretary General Guterres went out of his way to praise China’s President Xi Jinping as “a staunch defender of a world order based on multilateralism with the UN at its centre.”

It is naïve to expect any different result from an agreed-upon international governance mechanism to address the risks of potentially out of control AI technology. China will manipulate the system, as usual, to its national advantage. Developing countries will have their hands out, as usual, for more money from developed countries.

Moreover, terrorist non-state actors like the Iran-backed Houthis, who are already using AI technology to develop advanced guided weapons, would not be covered by any UN AI agreement among member states and would not abide by it anyway. During his press conference, Guterres’ answer to the Houthis’ military advance to control the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait, jeopardizing global oil shipments and threatening nearby internet cables that carry nearly one-fifth of the world's web traffic, is “negotiation.” You can't get anywhere trustworthy negotiating with terrorists.

Secretary General Guterres stressed the need to reform the United Nations and other international multilateral institutions through what he called “a redistribution of power.” He pointed specifically to the need to reform the Security Council and the Bretton Woods international financial arrangements. Look under the hood and it will be evident that “redistribution of power” to him means giving more power to the free-loading developing countries at the expense of the successful developed countries that are carrying the financial freight.

Commenting on his lack of real geopolitical power as UN Secretary General, with no army or intelligence services at his disposal, Mr. Guterres said that even so “it's very important that the Secretary-General of the organization is a reference in relation to defending in all circumstances and without double standards, the Charter, international law, international humanitarian law, and the values of the UN.” He expressed his belief that this “has been done.”

No, it hasn’t been satisfactorily done, especially with respect to the Palestinian Israeli conflict. Secretary General Guterres and his senior team have continually displayed a double standard and bias against Israel in their remarks. Right after the horrific October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks by Hamas and its fellow thugs inside Israel, for example, Secretary General Guterres said that the attacks “did not happen in a vacuum,” implying that Israel brought the attacks onto itself. In response to Mr. Guterres’ harsh criticism of Israel’s military response to the terrorist attacks and efforts to make sure that they do not happen again, Israel’s UN ambassador at the time, Gilad Erdan, said “The time has come for you to differentiate between good and evil. The very least you can do is call out the terrorists. Stop whitewashing the crimes of Iran and its terror proxies!”

When asked by a reporter whether he could have imagined when he began serving as Secretary General ten years ago that the world would be in its current state, Mr. Guterres provided a grim response. “I think that 10 years ago no one could have predicted that we would reach such a dire situation regarding peace and security,” he said, “with such a dramatic level of inequality as we now face, and with two issues that pose existential risks: climate change and Artificial Intelligence. It would be hard to imagine a scenario as threatening as the one we’re facing right now.”

Putting aside all his gloom and doom for a moment, however, Secretary General Guterres said that one thing he is proud of is “the fact that we are reaching parity between women and men in the United Nations.” He added that “I am very happy that the UN is giving the example that only with full equality between women and men it will be possible to have a more peaceful and more just world.”

If only the United Nations would set a scientifically-based example and stop defining a woman as including a biological male identifying as a woman!