The war in Ukraine, world food supply and climate change are being discussed as leaders descend of NYC. President Biden on Tuesday said the United Nations General Assembly meets "at an inflection point in history," and called for strengthened alliances while stressing that "no nation can meet the challenges of today alone." Biden, delivering his annual speech to leaders of the UN in New York City on Tuesday, addressed the United States' continued support for Ukraine against Russia's "naked aggression," the importance of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and efforts to block Iran from nuclear proliferation; the competition between the United States and China; the climate crisis and more. Biden, upon taking the podium, stressed the importance of strengthened alliances and "standing together." U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the United Nations headquarters on September 19, 2023 in New York City.

In this one, I want to discuss how there is potential for a new conflict not dissimilar to the Cold War with the development and proliferation of nuclear energy; but this time AI will take centre stage of the theatre. Medical -- Nuclear technology has been harnessed in various medical applications ranging from imaging to killing tumors and sanitizing surgical equipment. "Both military and commercial robots will…incorporate'artificial intelligence' (AI) that could make them capable of undertaking…missions of their own." Professor Lennox writes that many commanders in the American military are voicing concern about relinquishing control over AI systems tasked with identifying, seeking and eliminating human targets. Just like how rewarding nuclear energy has proved to be in other fields, artificial intelligence has its better and worse applications.

The international nuclear arms control regime is approaching a critical juncture. If new nuclear weapons treaties are to be negotiated, ratified and enforced, they will need to be underpinned by strong technical monitoring capabilities. The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration is leveraging its expertise and technology to meet this challenge, understanding that in nuclear nonproliferation, you can't verify what you can't see. The United States is placing renewed urgency on developing the science and technology required to monitor our adversaries' nuclear activity -- specifically by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and the unmatched, high-performance computing capabilities found at DOE's national laboratories. DOE houses four of the world's top 10 fastest supercomputers, including the top two, and we are already at work on developing three next-generation, exascale machines, able to conduct a billion billion calculations per second.

How did you become interested in artificial intelligence (AI)? I am a documentary filmmaker, writer and speaker. I was making a film around 15 years ago about AI and got to speak to some of the major players in the field, including Ray Kurzweil, the Director of Engineering at Google who started the singularity industry, and Rodney Brookes, the premier roboticist of our time who founded iRobot (a company that created the Roomba vaccum cleaner and robots for military use) and then established a company called Rethink Robotics. Both Kurzweil and Brookes were optimistic about the time when we will share the planet with smarter-than-human machines – and I was too. I was, and still am, a gigantic proponent of AI, despite my book's title Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.