"We are already becoming tiny chips inside a giant system that nobody really understands." So wrote Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari about our current experience of urban living, which, increasingly, is mediated by AI. AI is now an important component of sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, public administration and transportation, and is helping to address major challenges such as ageing and climate change. However, there is currently a lack of transparency in algorithmic governance systems, and this is worsened when these algorithms are integrated into already opaque governance structures in our cities. Moreover, over the past decade, the propagation of sensors and data collection machines in so-called'smart cities' by both the public and the private sectors has created democratic challenges around AI, surveillance capitalism, and protecting citizens' digital rights to privacy and ownership.

While these bring tremendous benefits, AI also raises concerns, ranging from security, to human rights abuses. Speaking in Paris last weekend, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres praised AI but cautioned that "technology should empower not overpower us" and that the world needs to set policies that contain unintended consequences or malicious use of frontier technologies. UN News asked Eleonore Pauwels, Research Fellow on Emerging Cybertechnologies at United Nations University (UNU), about AI – what it is, how it works, and what she sees happening in the next few years. In its current form, called "deep learning", AI is a growing set of autonomous and self-learning algorithms she told us, capable of performing tasks it was commonly thought could only be done by the human brain. At its core, AI produces powerful predictive reasoning while minimizing the noise from unpredictable and complex human behaviour.

As Harvard University economist Jason Furman said when he was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, our biggest worry about AI should be that there might not be enough of it. The United States needs to develop this powerful new technology to its fullest to maintain our economic and technological leadership in the face of increasingly sophisticated competition from China, which has made AI-development a strategic priority. Of course, AI is fraught with ethical challenges. In the course on AI and Ethics I teach at Georgetown University, I find the students concerned that AI will be a biased, unaccountable force in their lives and that it will be deployed to create joblessness and exacerbate social and economic inequality. The trade association I work for, the Software & Information Industry Association, addressed these challenges in its recent publication on ethical principles for developers and users of AI.

This episode brings two esteemed experts to discuss these issues and present guidance for both commercial companies and the public sector policymakers. Dr. David A. Bray began work in public service at age 15, later serving in the private sector before returning as IT Chief for the CDC's Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program during 9/11; volunteering to deploy to Afghanistan to "think differently" on military and humanitarian issues; and serving as a Senior Executive advocating for increased information interoperability, cybersecurity, and civil liberty protections. He serves as a Visiting Executive In-Residence at Harvard University, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Visiting Associate at the University of Oxford. He has received both the Arthur S, Flemming Award and Roger W. Jones Award for Executive Leadership. In 2015, he was chosen to be an Eisenhower Fellow to Taiwan and Australia and in 2016, Business Insider named him one of the top "24 Americans Who Are Changing the World".