 Welcome back to the ITU headquarters here in Geneva, which is of course hosting the AI for Good Global Summit. And here on the first day, we're in the afternoon session, I'm very pleased to have Nicholas Davis with me. He's head of society and innovation for the World Economic Forum, who of course have Davos under their umbrella organisation. So tell me Nicholas, what have you come here to achieve or listen to? Why are you here? We live at a really important time in history in terms of the development of a range of emerging technologies and artificial intelligence is probably one of the most obvious and transformative of them. And so the discussions here today represent this moment where we can start to talk about the potential impacts, not just on the people who are lucky enough to live in Geneva or come to a conference in Geneva, but the impacts on the vulnerable populations, people, citizens of developing countries around the world and indeed the environment and future generations, who don't have as much voice or say in the kind of decisions that are being made by the companies, researchers and individuals who are developing artificial intelligence today. How can you legislate big data? I don't think it's about legislation. It's much more around a range of governance ideas here. So governance is ripped broadly. We know that when any technology bursts onto the scene, very quickly how we adopt that technology and how we use that is about social norms as much as it is around any rules or regulation. It's about the design principles of the people that actually code and release the products in different ways, whether that's a mug or a chair or indeed a bot or an app on your phone. So having the discussions about, well, how accessible is this application? What are the second order impacts or unintended consequences of a type of artificial intelligence that perhaps seems to improve efficiency but takes power away from someone in other ways or indeed setting a necessary connectivity standard or education standard even to use it could be problematic further down the line and could increase things like the digital divide. Now we're talking about AI being a fourth generation, a fourth industrial revolution. I don't know if you agree with that or not, but could you take developing countries and say actually a possibility for them to actually finally make the way up and compete with the rest? I think the greatest social injustice of any industrial revolution has been the fact that most people are left out of them and that's been true since the mid-18th century in the first industrial revolution which started in Great Britain. Certainly the hope of discussions that we're having here in Geneva today and in many other AI driven conferences and dialogues are that here we might have the opportunity to leapfrog in a way and finally deliver true benefits in an open sense. Those things do not happen without forethought and investment and institutional kind of planning in different ways. You can't predetermine these things but you can have the right kind of nudges and dialogues and I think it's fantastic that the many various stakeholders that are participating here at the ITU are actually open and willing to say well how do we make sure that AI systems benefit a person in Botswana or in Ghana as much as they do someone in the Bay Area in California? Now of course Nick, I've mentioned Davos. You often have the elite coming to Davos to talk whether it's the business community, political community, they're the ones you have to convince to share this AI with the rest of the world or that digital divide. That's not easy is it? I actually think that the openness for people to say we are at an opportunity at a moment in time where these things can be used in general to close the gap in inequality rather than exacerbate it. That appetite is huge right now and indeed at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos this year like last year Oxfam released their report on inequality showing that just eight people in the world hold the same wealth as the bottom half of the world's population, more than three and a half billion people. And so these things are on the agenda. Celil Shetty from Amnesty International who was on the stage here was also working with us in Davos this year focusing on the human rights of artificial intelligence. I think that it's not about convincing anyone it's much more around finding ideas and ways forward of practical solutions to say okay what's different this time about the way we develop or release technology that can actually practically help the people who traditionally have less voice, less power in the process. And I guess if they have more power than everybody benefits? Well the first thing we know from the digital revolution, the third industrial revolution is that the more people who can participate in open systems providing their ideas and creating value together the better. It is actually more beneficial to have more people on platforms sharing and working together and the great thing about many of the technologies we're talking about here like artificial intelligence is that there's a very small marginal cost in having an additional person on that platform. So small additional energy cost we hope that's recouped by efficiency No I think that it is there is a very very convincing argument here that the more the better the more the merrier but as we do that making sure that we don't create new stratification, new inequalities particularly in people who may not be able to access any content that's relevant to them at all. The last question I've got here is the World Economic Forum doesn't have legislative power what you can only do is lobbying I guess. What can you achieve? I think the most important thing here is to think about the wide range of governance ideas that are open now to companies to individuals like you and me or indeed to governments as well without having to go down the route of saying everything is around either a funded government program or legislation. In fact we know from the history of technology that most things evolve and emerge as social norms, as informal agreements or just as investment decisions and infrastructure that gets built up over time. So I guess the real point of these conversations is to say how do we imagine the city of the future together and what does that look like with AI determining our future transport systems not just in Boston where they're currently running trials for autonomous vehicles but in countries where road infrastructure at the moment is not really conducive to our current relatively narrow AI systems on the road. How do we make sure that Nairobi has as much chance of getting the benefits of lowering congestion and cleaner, more efficient transport than Austin, Texas does? Interesting thought. Nicholas Davis, head of society innovation at the World Economic Forum, just been joining me here on the first day. Thanks very much. Thank you Chris.