GoKawiil
Tech News
In a speech to the UN General Assembly, President Trump rejected any global effort to regulate artificial intelligence, arguing that the lack of strict climate regulation has worked out fine and using that as reasoning against AI oversight. He also said he wants to rename artificial intelligence as 'super intelligence,' claiming the word 'artificial' makes it sound 'fake.'
At its Goalkeepers event in New York, the Gates Foundation announced a coalition of about 60 organizations—including Anthropic, Google and the OpenAI Foundation—aimed at making AI tools available in more underrepresented languages, targeting over 3 billion people over five years. Bill Gates called for wealthier nations to boost foreign aid and pair it with AI-driven innovation, while the event highlighted the U.N.'s warning that progress on sustainable development goals remains slow.
President Trump used a UN address to declare that the US government will replace the term "artificial intelligence" with "super intelligence" across official documents. He had previewed the change days earlier on Truth Social, arguing the existing term was inaccurate and inelegant, and floated alternatives like "Superior Intelligence" and "Extreme Intelligence" before settling on "super."
A UN scientific panel has released its first major assessment on advanced AI risks, arguing that governments must act to control increasingly capable AI agents before all the risks are fully understood. The report, from the newly formed Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, calls for greater international coordination, resources, and accountability measures even as countries pursue different legal approaches to regulation.
The UN General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution with 164 votes in favor, urging governments, schools and tech firms to adopt the Equal Earth projection or other equal-area maps when accurate size comparisons matter. The US was the sole country to vote against it, calling the measure a 'radical ideological project.' Despite the vote, major navigation apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps are expected to keep using Mercator-based projections, which remain practical for plotting travel routes.
The United Nations passed a resolution, backed by the African Union, urging adoption of map projections that preserve the true relative size of continents instead of the 500-year-old Mercator projection. The vote passed 164 to 1, with the United States the lone dissenting country. Togo's foreign minister argued that maps shape how people understand the world's balance of power.
On September 4, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution to phase out the 16th-century Mercator map projection in favor of the Equal Earth projection, which more accurately represents the relative sizes of continents and countries. The Mercator map, created by Gerardus Mercator in 1569, has long been criticized for exaggerating the size of Northern Hemisphere landmasses like Canada and Russia while shrinking equatorial regions such as Africa.
Two recent reports—the World Inequality Lab's Global Justice Report and a UN High-Level Expert Group's Beyond GDP recommendations—have reignited debate over whether nations should deprioritize economic growth in favor of other measures of well-being. A commentary argues both reports miss the real issue: whether governments are leaving future generations richer or poorer, not simply how fast economies grow or how well-being is measured.
A new UN Environment Programme report titled 'Limiting Overshoot' concludes that surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels is now unavoidable. The paper notes current warming is near 1.4 degrees, but even with all existing climate pledges fulfilled, temperatures would still hit at least 1.8 degrees, while current trends point toward 2.6 degrees by 2100.
A new United Nations Environment Programme report concludes that Earth will soon surpass the 1.5 Celsius warming threshold set by the 2015 Paris agreement, largely due to continued fossil fuel emissions. Rather than treating this as unavoidable defeat, UN officials and scientists propose a strategy to temporarily exceed the limit before working to bring temperatures back down through ending fossil fuel use and deploying carbon removal technology.