Kuala Lampur, Sept. 16 -- When the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, issued his 14 September statement on artificial intelligence, he did not mince words. AI harms, he wrote, "are not hypothetical. They are already occurring, front and centre." Discrimination, algorithmic exclusion, mass surveillance, and AI-driven disinformation are already straining democratic institutions. And with increasingly autonomous "agentic" AI systems now capable of pursuing objectives their own developers did not anticipate, Turk warns we are approaching "a step change towards greater existential risks to every aspect of our lives."

This is not the language of a technophobe. It is the sober assessment of the world's top human rig...