SJCMUN2022

Committee: General Assembly 1

Topic: Regulating the use and development of AI technology and weaponry
Delegation: United States of America
Name: Izwirashe Mabureza

Like computers and the internet in the 1990s AI technology and weaponry is a new and emerging
technology that few understand and from its inception if used poorly can completely ruin the world as
we know it. In the modern day the rapid worldwide development of this field along with the lack of a
universal international stance on how it must be regulated leaves many institutions (at national level
especially) in limbo as to how it must be controlled. In terms of the US, we have seen a meteoric rise in
terms of the use and effectiveness of the technology as the Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall
stated that in September 2021, the U.S. Air Force, for the first time, used AI to help to identify a target
or targets in “a live operational kill chain.”. He stated this as an example of his No. 1 priority. Despite
these views expressed by the US and similar views stated by the UN chief stating that the use of this
technology is, “morally repugnant,” these technologies are still having large and deadly effect on the
Ukraine Russia war and other strikes over the past few months. A large part of this issue is the
unregulated privatization of this industry with the U.N. Panel of Experts on Libya stating that lethal
autonomous aircraft may have been deployed with killer robots attacking soldiers and they believe that
some of the machines came from the Kargu-2 drone, which is made by Turkish military contractor STM.
All of the above problems have been caused by no internationally recognized legislature that outlines a
plan to avoid misuse, international regulation of the private weaponry sector and a way to punish
national misconduct by ways such as sanctions etc. Russia has nothing and no one who can realistically
stop them when it comes to their AI use in the same way China has no one stopping them. The same
way the internet was a dark and scary place in the first few years as a lack of knowledge led to a lack of
regulation. AI though is not exclusive to weaponry as that is only one narrow field in which AI is used.
The other uses of AI although are less directly deadly they have the greatest influence on our society.
With examples of misuse of AI being China’s use of AI for the racial profiling of Uighurs and for border
citizen surveillance through facial recognition but AI is not completely bad contrary to robot-apocalypse-
believing conspiracy theorists would have you believe with examples of positive uses being the USA’s
use of this technology with examples including mapping technologies, spam filtering, language
translation, and more.

The UN mayn’t have been as quick as we may have appreciated regarding the regulation of the Internet
but once the recognized the issue, they were swift in their measure with the Internet Governance Forum
(IGF) formed in 2006 by the UN Secretary General which aims and seeks to bring policy cooperation
regarding this issue, often addressing  cyber security to ethics, fake news and the spread of
disinformation despite not every country attending, the forum has a wide reach as in 2018 the three-day
Forum, under the title ‘Internet of Trust, brought more than 3,000 participants from 143 countries. This
has largely and positively brought to light this issue and how we can collectively solve it.

On our side, US lawmakers and government agencies have attempted to develop strategies and policies
regarding artificial intelligence and automated systems (AI) with the aim of general regulation of these
systems in order to protect the public whilst still encouraging the development of AI and internal
competition in the USA as the USA is one of the fastest in terms of AI development worldwide and
would like to keep it that way. With examples of proposed legislature being Government Ownership and
Oversight of Data in Artificial Intelligence Act of 2021 (GOOD Act of 2021) and this Bill’s main aim was
the establishment of an Artificial Intelligence Hygiene Working Group which would seek to address the
protection of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties address requirements for securing the training data,
algorithms, and other components of any artificial intelligence system against misuse and a myriad of
other offences. As well as the GOOD AI Act of 2022 which seeks to reach similar achievements. Both
these pieces of Legislature are in the opening stages of development and introduction and it is
suspected that many amendments regarding it are still to be submitted and discussed. Despite it not
being voted on my congress yet these pieces of legislature are sure to spark constructive discussion on
this topic and no matter what the result is the regulation of this new and developing technology is
bound to arrive within the next decade or so.

With the impending added effect with 5G expected to speed up the services on the cloud while AI
analyzes and learns from the same data faster causing a massive speed-up in the potentially-fatal
capabilities of AI I. The delegate believes this issue is best solved by swift and immediate international
cooperation and legislature and this can be achieved by setting up forums like the IGF by the UN, by
creations of organizations that focus on the detection and reporting of misuse of AI worldwide, in
cooperation with the UN and Interpol in order to bring all of these issues to light and deal with them in
front of the world this will show the unfortunately uneducated world regarding this issue on what it is
and how it can be solved to put pressure on their sometimes reluctant governments to enact legislature
on it.

Bibliography
Us Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall
https://www.airforcemag.com/ai-algorithms-deployed-in-kill-chain-target-recognition/

Info on 5G and how it can quicken the development of AI

https://www.deepsig.ai/how-artificial-intelligence-improves-5g-wireless-capabilities
The Internet Governance forum
https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/administration/2018-internet-governance-forum-
closes.html

https://iccwbo.org/global-issues-trends/digital-growth/internet-governance/the-internet-governance-
forum/#:~:text=About%20the%20Internet%20Governance%20Forum&text=Since%20its%20inception
%20in%202006,issues%20relating%20to%20the%20Internet.

Good Act of 2021

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/7296/text
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/this-chinese-police-station-is-staffed-by-artificial-
intelligence

UN Libya incident
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/01/1002196245/a-u-n-report-suggests-libya-saw-the-first-battlefield-
killing-by-an-autonomous-d