They have also experimented with having AI take part in simulations of conflicts alongside human experts, with bots taking turns to play state leaders. Right now, “You lose some of the nuance and the complexity that you may have at the human level,” says Chausovsky. Interestingly, the AI also tends to be more conservative than human players – refraining from taking escalatory action, for example. 

The United Nations Development Programme is already deploying AI to help it assess the impact of major disasters and events. After the 2023 Herat earthquake in Afghanistan, it used its AI-powered Rapid Digital Assessment tool to estimate how much damage and debris might be at any given location, enabling it to deploy rescue efforts more precisely.

The UN has also been investing in AI early warning as part of what it calls “proactive crisis management“. It combines historical and near real-time data on a Crisis Risk Dashboard to identify potential violent hotspots before things escalate. In Sri Lanka, for example, it monitors hate speech and macroeconomic data, while elsewhere it might look at displacement of populations or migration.   

The next financial crash 

Financial regulators are also hoping AI can give them a headstart on potential problems. They have access to “incredibly granular, essentially real time data on who owns what throughout the financial system”, says Antonio Coppola, assistant professor of finance at Stanford University. This, combined with AI techniques like deep learning, could be used to better inform how financial markets can be regulated.

Part of a financial regulator’s role is considering policy interventions to prevent or mitigate financial crises. Rather than predicting crises, Coppola’s current work is focused on “if this big wave of stress comes along, where are the problems going to be? Who exactly is going to get in trouble?”