AI And The Future We Choose: Progress, Power And Trust

Carlo Tortora Brayda is Chairman of the Board at Cyber Eagle.

Archimedes is said to have declared: “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth.”

AI is the greatest lever created by humankind, but a lever multiplies force, not wisdom, and it cannot chart the future as a human would or decide what to move with the lever. Within this analogy, and before AI transforms the world, we need to decide where humanity will stand, who positions the fulcrum and what progress means.

How AI Is Human​

AI is a very human thing, and it maintains and amplifies our greatest qualities and our worst attributes. At its best, AI can magnify humanity’s curiosity, creativity and ability to execute at scale. Conversely, it can amplify deceitfulness, egoism and lack of empathy.

These characteristically human deficiencies were exemplified in the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident investigated by METR, when some 1200 agents found a way to communicate without authorization, and about 700 of them breached Hugging Face’s internal infrastructure through appropriation of discovered credentials. Inter-agent chat transcripts revealed agentic swarms thinking as a collective and engaging in stealth and concealment. What emerged was not malicious activity per se, which would anthropomorphize AI too much, but instrumental indifference to what we humans would regard as unethical behavior.

Over seven years of judging innovations through the United Nations AI for Good platform, I have seen extraordinary technical capability directed toward health, climate, education and human development. What has stayed with me is the importance of aligning technology to improve the lot for humanity.

The Real Success Measure​

Next we must consider the question of Power: who gets to decide what AI becomes, and for whose benefit. Today, a tight oligarchy controls frontier models, computing infrastructure and our data.