A Safe Digital Future?

Globalists are working tirelessly to gain the upper hand in AI design and development. As UN robocops are partnering with big tech and foreign governments to ensure “a safe digital future” for us all, conservatives seem to be lagging behind.

Conservatives continue to underestimate the extent to which the UN is imposing its progressive agenda upon the world. Perhaps rightfully so, social conservatives are generally disinterested in engaging with a system that, on its quest to save the world through progressive globalism, ends up justifying and even encouraging shutting down dissent and labeling conservatives as “anti-rights.”  

Yet such disengagement also leads to a lack of understanding about how the UN apparatus, including the UN agencies and its “human rights experts”, end up achieving their goals of imposing progressive norms upon sovereign nations despite lacking a basis in hard law. The UN system is now turning to technology to help it achieve this goal, perhaps at an unprecedented rate. 

Some concerns over the potential consequences of unchecked rapid technological advancement cut across political divides. Both progressives and conservatives tend to rally behind initiatives addressing issues such as privacy breaches, deep fakes, labor market disruptions, or even threats to national security. But UN globalists insist that we need to go much further than that. For instance, UNFPA, a UN agency promoting abortion access all over the world, called for the redesign of the “underlying norms and assumptions that underpin technological tools.” 

They said that “to reverse the essentially biased technological infrastructure upon which the world is being built today, it is urgent to ensure that, in moving forward, digital technologies reflect the diversity of people around the globe and that no one is left behind.”

Surely UNFPA does not mean that we should get rid of technological bias altogether. Some form of bias seems to be embedded into any AI language model. Chan Park, a PhD researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who studied the different political biases in AI systems, believes “no language model can be entirely free from political biases.” UNFPA seeks to replace the undesirable kind of bias with the “acceptable” kind, consistent with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.  

The UNFPA playbook also asks governments to prevent the unwanted effects of rapid technological advancement by “investing in the transformation of harmful social and gender norms." UNFPA often brags about the relevance of its normative work. For instance, through policy advocacy and dialogue, grassroots programming, and social media outreach, UNFPA encourages widespread social support for access to abortion in communities where many people would normally oppose it on moral grounds. They are also working to frame abortion access as an international human right, despite UN member states never having agreed to it in any UN resolution or treaty.  

Speaking of UN norms that run counter to the social conservative stance, at a recent Human Rights Council meeting on human rights in sport, the UN Special Rapporteur for Cultural Rights referred to those who opposed biological men competing in women’s sports as perpetrators of hate speech. Earlier this year I reported on an AI resolution introduced by the United States and passed in the UN General Assembly and its serious implications for freedom of speech. 

In his policy brief for the UN Global Digital Compact, a UN agreement meant to “outline shared principles for an open, free and secure digital future for all,” the UN Secretary-General referenced the need to “Develop robust accountability criteria and standards for digital platforms and users to address disinformation, hate speech and other harmful online content.” I would argue that ever since the COVID pandemic, conservatives’ psyches have been irreversibly marked by the label of “misinformation.” The very people who proved themselves willing to undermine the freedom of speech of millions of people around the world who dared to question COVID regulations and policies, are now the very same people trusted to design the rules for a “safe digital future.”