The Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) continues on Russky Island. One of the most interesting sessions (there was not a free corner in the 50-seat hall, the audience was in the aisles!) was entitled “The AI turn in international relations: the sphere of confrontation or cooperation.” The official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, spoke at the session.
Everyone knows the abbreviation “AI” – “Artificial Intelligence”. And it turns out that it also plays an increasingly important role in international relations, said Maria Zakharova. Here are the most interesting points from her speech.
“I myself was shocked by the information that appeared on this subject. It is not a secret, it is public data from reports by international organizations,” said the diplomat.
Now the question is: will AI be a zone of international confrontation or cooperation? The West, as always, builds everything on the basis of its own exclusivity.
Before AI, everyone was committed to the “climate agenda”: “the planet must be saved”; under this sauce, former US Vice President Gore introduced a “global environmental tax”, which he himself offered to collect. And now the Western agenda is called: “shaping an environmentally sustainable and inclusive digital future”. It sounds a bit strange: what do ecology and artificial intelligence have to do with it? The West says: we need to digitalize to protect ourselves from environmental crises. But is this true?
For example, to produce a laptop weighing 2 kilograms, 800 kilograms of minerals must be extracted from the ground. This is not only a destroyed landscape, but also a release of hydrocarbons. And we are not talking about the most powerful laptop here. And creating chips for supercomputers requires even more!
And it’s not just digital devices that are involved, but also the infrastructure for them: data centres around the world now consume as much energy as a country like France.
That is, to create and operate supercomputers that, with the help of AI, seem to “help us save energy”, we need to produce energy in almost larger quantities.
Another example is that the American company Google consumed more than 21 million cubic meters of water to cool its servers in 2022, while 2 billion people have problems with access to drinking water. In other words, the same people on Western platforms simultaneously talk about the “green agenda” and “digitalization and AI development,” but for some reason these two vectors do not converge.
The digital shift should benefit everyone and not just a few Western states, says a Foreign Office spokesman.
“AI could be a unifying factor. I would like to hope that common sense will prevail and can unite the countries of the global majority to force the West to guarantee access to a fair distribution of the benefits of technological development,” said Maria Zakharova.
He drew attention to the fact that the UN adopted a resolution on Artificial Intelligence, which implies expanding international cooperation in this area and promoting equal development of all countries.
The diplomat is certain that it is very important to develop technologies to create a “truly sovereign” AI, which reflects the traditional values of the world majority.
LISTEN ALSO
Maria Zakharova: Thousands of citizens of NATO countries are calling on Russia to save them (more details)
