As fears surrounding artificial intelligence grow, a critical movement in academia and research is pushing for a clear, positive vision: AI designed to empower humanity, foster inclusion, and sustainably benefit our planet, transforming potential harms into unprecedented opportunities for good.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, a palpable tension exists between its immense potential and the burgeoning concerns about its societal impact. For many in the research community, optimism has waned, overshadowed by the increasingly visible downsides of AI development and deployment.
The Growing Shadow of AI’s Misuse
Recent years have brought a stark realization of AI’s darker side. The rise of authoritarianism globally is intertwined with AI’s capabilities for surveillance and control. We’ve witnessed a deluge of AI-generated content, often termed “slop,” overwhelming legitimate media, while sophisticated deepfakes spread misinformation and amplify extremist narratives. From making warfare more precise and deadly to the exploitation of data labelers in the global South, and the staggering energy demands contributing to climate concerns, AI often appears to exacerbate existing problems.
Public investment, particularly in the United States, has seen a redirection and concentration towards AI, sometimes at the expense of other vital disciplines. This, coupled with the consolidation of control over the AI ecosystem by a few Big Tech companies, has led many to question whether AI is making everything worse. A 2023 survey of scientists found significantly more concern than excitement about generative AI’s use in daily life, by nearly a three-to-one ratio, reflecting a widespread apprehension within the scientific community, as reported by Pew Research.
A Unified Vision for Good: AI for People and Planet
Despite these challenges, a counter-narrative is gaining momentum within leading academic institutions. Universities like UCL and Cornell are spearheading initiatives to develop AI not just as a tool, but as a force for good. UCL’s vision, explicitly named “AI for People and Planet,” encapsulates the belief that the ultimate purpose of AI research and innovation is to benefit people and societies worldwide, making a positive impact on the planet.
Cornell echoes this commitment, envisioning an AI that is “designed to engage with humans, and that sustainably serves humans and humanity.” This shared ethos emphasizes that AI’s trajectory is not predetermined; its future depends on the intentional choices made by scientists, engineers, and policymakers today.
Core Pillars of a Beneficial AI Ecosystem
To realize this positive vision, both UCL and Cornell outline a multifaceted approach, converging on several key principles:
Human Dimension and Engagement
- Considering the Human Dimension: UCL emphasizes identifying how AI advances can enhance humans and their societies, understanding how AI is used (or misused) to positively influence social behaviors.
- Human-AI Engagement: Cornell aims to understand how humans and AI interact at all scales—individual, group, and societal—to inform technology design. This requires deep integration of AI’s technical capabilities with fields like ethics, law, policy, social science, cognition, and design, ensuring systems are sustainably designed for human needs.
Inclusion and Diversity
- Remedying Human Biases: UCL is committed to including marginalized communities in its AI work, using AI to actively remedy human biases rather than replicating them. This extends to fostering inclusion and diversity across all AI research, education, and training.
Interdisciplinarity
- Connecting Fundamentals to Applications: Both institutions highlight the critical need for a strongly interdisciplinary approach. UCL links fundamental AI research to grand challenge application areas, strengthening connections between AI experts and those in application domains to accelerate knowledge and benefits.
- Broad Interdisciplinary Collaborations: Cornell leverages its broad excellence across various disciplines to bring AI to important problems, ensuring impact and driving algorithm development.
Open Science and Responsible Development
- Transparency and Data Governance: UCL promotes making code and data openly available through relevant repositories and licenses, while simultaneously developing governance mechanisms to protect personal data and prevent premature disclosure for commercialization.
- Misuse Prevention: UCL is proactive in identifying potential for misuse in research and education, committing to not engaging with AI whose primary purpose is to cause harm. This proactive stance is crucial for responsible governance.
Sustainability as an Overarching Goal
- Cross-Cutting Values: Cornell explicitly asserts that sustainability—encompassing climate, society, and resource management—is an overarching goal. This informs the AI technology they build, directs the values embodied by the technology, and guides the application problems they tackle. Similarly, UCL’s “People and Planet” vision inherently embeds sustainability at its core.
AI in Action: Real-World Positive Impacts
Despite the challenges, numerous examples demonstrate AI’s capacity to serve the public interest:
- Bridging Communication Gaps: AI is breaking down language barriers, including for marginalized sign languages and indigenous African languages, fostering global understanding and accessibility.
- Enhancing Democratic Processes: Policymakers are utilizing AI-assisted deliberations and legislative engagement to incorporate diverse constituent viewpoints, strengthening democratic participation. Large language models can even address climate-change skepticism by spreading accurate information at scale.
- Accelerating Scientific Discovery: National labs are developing AI foundation models to dramatically speed up scientific research. In a groundbreaking achievement, machine learning’s ability to predict protein structure in aid of drug discovery was recognized with a Nobel Prize in 2024, showcasing AI’s profound impact on medicine and biology.
- Advancing Health and Social Care: AI’s application extends to precision medicine, improved care, and leveraging new data (clinical, multi-omics, behavioral) and perception capabilities (imaging) to support physicians, patients, and caregivers.
A Call to Action for the Scientific Community
Scientists and engineers are uniquely positioned to steer AI towards a beneficial path. As articulated in “Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship,” there are four key actions:
- Reform: Work to reshape the AI industry, making it more ethical, equitable, and trustworthy. This involves collectively developing and adhering to ethical norms for AI research and application.
- Resist: Actively document and cast a light on harmful and inappropriate uses of AI, pushing back against detrimental applications.
- Responsibly Use: Leverage AI’s capabilities to make society better, exploiting its power to solve problems and assist communities.
- Renovate: Advocate for the renovation of institutions—universities, professional societies, and democratic organizations—to prepare them for AI’s disruptive impacts and guide their adaptation.
The sentiment that AI is a destructive force, while understandable, risks disengaging those who have the potential to guide its development. As technology historian Melvin Kranzberg observed, technology is “neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” Whether AI proves detrimental or beneficial to society hinges entirely on the choices we make today. It is imperative for scientists to not only anticipate and mitigate harms but also to champion and expand the ways AI can be harnessed for good, actively building the positive future they envision.
