AI threat to democracy, conflicts, climate change: WEF risk report strikes pessimistic note
The risk to key global elections this year, including in India, from false or misleading content is ‘significant’, said surveyed analysts.
Progress on global development could come to a halt due to surging conflicts, accelerating climate change impacts and increasingly deep divisions over politics, a survey of risk experts, policymakers and business leaders showed on Wednesday.
They also warned that the spread of misinformation and disinformation, driven in part by new artificial intelligence tools, is a key risk to major elections in 2024 that could potentially undermine the legitimacy of new governments.
“(It) is like looking down in a big bowl of spaghetti – everything is interconnected,” said Carolina Klint, of risk strategy group Marsh McLennan, which partnered with the World Economic Forum on its annual risk ranking.
The risk report, released ahead of the World Economic Forum’s annual Davos meeting next week, struck a pessimistic note about the eroding ability of global institutions to tackle escalating problems.
Nearly a third of more than 1,400 analysts surveyed in September 2023 said they saw an “elevated risk” of global catastrophes, such as extreme weather disasters, within the next two years, with two-thirds predicting such events within a decade.
Over the next two years, disinformation and misinformation – a new category of risk in this year’s survey – were seen as the biggest threat, following by extreme weather events, societal polarisation and cyber insecurity.
But over the next decade, climate and...
