_20260522080908053_661da8.jpeg?w=1024&resize=1024,1024&ssl=1 "Sindh High Court Stays Coercive Action Against Security Leasing Corporation Until September 29")
Navigate past the live onstage coding sessions, AI refresher courses, an obstacle course of gizmos, round people walking round with glowing green silent-disco-style headphones blaring UN panel discussions into your ears, and you can take a pause for breath. But you might find yourself in the Networking Zone, on a rotating seating contraption called UFOTECH that looks more like the kind of lazy Susan you’d encounter at a Chinese restaurant than the networking bench it is designed to function as.
This gathering is the AI for Good summit, convened by the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union (ITU), bringing together private‑ and public‑sector leaders to explore how AI can serve humanity’s benefit rather than its harm.
While Silicon Valley executives and AI laboratory heads testify before Washington lawmakers about superintelligence risks, and the White House imposes chip export controls, the UN AI for Good Summit—now marking its tenth edition—pursues far more aspirational objectives.
“Responsibly deployed artificial intelligence can tackle humanity’s greatest challenges—hunger, disease, climate change,” said Doreen Bogdan‑Martin, ITU secretary‑general, in a main‑stage keynote. “We are now putting that belief to the test, confronting the very difficulties AI introduces while striving to harness it for good.”
The meaning of “good”—and the tangible benefits it delivers—permeated the conference, which unfolded across a sprawling 106,000‑square‑meter venue on Geneva’s airport periphery. Discussions were underscored by growing concern that unchecked corporate monopolies, deploying AI without oversight, are already entrenching global inequality and undermining human rights.
For many on the front lines, the tech industry’s utopian façade has faded. Speaking on the sidelines, Giulio Coppi, senior humanitarian officer at Access Now, criticized the humanitarian and public sectors’ dependence on big tech. “We must move beyond the age of innocence,” Coppi urged, urging organizations to stop viewing technology firms as “best friends.” He highlighted a decade of opaque, multimillion‑dollar deals financed by public funds, warning, “You can’t even decipher what’s inside your tech stack because it keeps evolving.”
Coppi’s critique was milder than that of others: pro‑Palestine demonstrators stormed the stage during a keynote by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, accusing the company’s technology of enabling Israeli actions against Palestinians before being escorted out.
“When we discuss AI, we get swept up in the hype,” remarked Vijay Janapa Reddi, a Harvard engineering professor, amid the buzz of concurrent sessions. “Yet it rarely translates into real‑ He argued that “good” is an indistinct benchmark for engineers. “As an engineer, ‘good’ conveys nothing. I cannot deliver something merely labeled good. A aircraft that stays aloft for five minutes isn’t sufficient.”
Much of the current AI discourse centers on access—who can deploy the models, who can purchase the chips, and who is left out of the compute economy. This dynamic partly explains why the Trump administration imposed, then lifted, export restrictions on leading frontier AI models, and why China is considering making its open‑weight models more restrictive. Limiting access and sidelining poorer nations can push them into reliance on foreign infrastructure platforms and standards.
In a session addressing AI hardware and the expanding digital divide, panelists contended that compute has evolved beyond a pure technology issue into a development challenge. “If we envision AI for good as universal compute access, we must see it as development infrastructure, not merely a technology,” said Syed Munir Khasru, chair of the Institute for Policy, Advocacy, and Governance. Others noted that most large language models remain English‑centric, so smaller, locally run LLMs on affordable hardware are essential for AI to benefit communities beyond the wealthiest markets.
