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When you stand in the shadow of its skeleton, it is hard not to be moved by the silence and serenity uttering Genbaku Dome.
Originally built as an industrial product exhibition hall near the beginning of the last century, it is the only building in Hiroshima to partially survive the world’s first atomic bomb.
The city council of Hiroshima, in the years after the war, debated long and hard whether to demolish the structure that, for many survivors of the attack, a visceral reminder of the horror they suffered both during and after the explosion that led to the nuclear age.
The decision to save, preserve the ruins and add a lush, green memorial park to embrace the site became a powerful anti-war symbol, a strong request for denuclearization.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumeo Kishida wanted his fellow G7 leaders to absorb the message along with the silence last Friday.
And they did.
“Most of us don’t remember a time when the world was under the threat of nuclear war,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “The Cold War is long over and the danger of nuclear war is unfortunately forgotten by many.”
However, there is another, less appreciated lesson that Barack Obama saw in 2016 when he became the first US president to visit Hiroshima. He said there are many memorials around the world that tell stories of bravery and heroism and others, such as Auschwitz, that give “echoes of unspeakable depravity.”
What Genbaku Dome and the big mushroom cloud that rose above on August 6, 1945 represented something quite different from other monuments, Obama said. He spoke of the “core contradiction of humanity” – that creativity, imagination and the ability to bend nature to one’s will can also lead to self-destruction.
Ukraine’s president was the guest of honor on the final day of the G7 summit in Japan, where he secured more Western military aid to Russia. The US pledged another $375 million in aid, but Canada did not offer more weapons, despite promising continued support.
Shortly after the bombing, which was carried out by a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay, the US Army Air Forces were left stunned, as co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis later told the journal: “My God, what? It’s over?”
With Russia’s nuclear threat in Ukraine, a decades-old arms control treaty and China’s refusal to accept nuclear arms limitations, it’s easy to focus your mind on the current scenario.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s arrival at the G7 summit on Saturday only served to underscore fears that the world could spiral out of control into some sort of nuclear confrontation — big or small.
The growth of AI is beyond government
What was not known as journalists, officials and some leaders crowded around television monitors to watch the pool feed – and endless reruns – of Zelenskyy’s plane landing on Saturday were the tentative steps being taken by the world’s leading democracies to address what which some have explained. is a larger existential crisis: the rise of machines over artificial intelligence (AI).
The G7 called for the adoption of technical standards to make artificial intelligence “trustworthy.” The danger that the governance of technology is not keeping pace with its growth is growing, both inside and outside the technology community.
“We want AI systems to be accurate, reliable, safe and non-discriminatory, regardless of their origin,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at the start of the summit.
The focus of attention for leaders is the so-called “generative AI,” which is a subset of the technology popularized by the ChatGPT application, developed by the company OpenAI.
The rapid progress in the technology led 1,000 technology entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, and those who developed the technology to sign an open letter in March asking for a six-month pause in the development of more powerful systems, citing potential risks to society. The letter currently has 27,000 signatures.
In April, EU lawmakers called on world leaders to find ways to control AI technology.
The EU is close to having the world’s most comprehensive legislation to regulate AI, which is being watched closely by other advanced economies.
The United States has so far taken a wait-and-see approach, with President Joe Biden saying it remains to be seen whether AI is dangerous,
Regardless, the G7 leaders, in their statement, said that rules for digital technologies like AI must be “in line with our democratic values.”
While the Group of Seven may be trying to get its members on the same page, other developed countries that don’t necessarily share democratic values, such as China, are rushing to develop similar advanced technologies.
And while there are calls in the G7 for international standards, it seems that there is a lack of urgency decided by the leaders who ordered the creation of a ministerial forum to discuss the issue of generative AI through a narrow window of copyright and disinformation, by the end of this year.
Some experts have warned that AI’s potential for economic and social disruption – through worker displacement and even discriminatory bias – is poorly understood.
Godfather AI warns some chatbots are ‘pretty scary’
The leader also called on international organizations such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development to consider the analysis of the impact of policy development.
Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who regretted developing the atomic bomb, the man considered the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, resigned from Google recently, warning that some of the AI chatbots currently being developed are “pretty scary.”
Hinton’s pioneering research is in neural networks and deep learning.
In AI, the neural network is a system similar to the human brain. They allow intelligence to learn from experience, just as people do. This is called deep learning.
“Now, they’re not smarter than us, as I said. But I think they can be,” Hinton told the BBC on May 2.
In 2016, at the foot of the Genbaku Dome, Barack Obama spoke of a “moral awakening” in a message that can now be considered a broader warning.
“Science allows us to communicate across oceans and fly above the clouds; to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but the same discoveries can be turned into more efficient killing machines,” he said.
“The wars of modern times teach this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without equal progress in human institutions can destroy us.”
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