 Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen, here in Davos, but also the people who have been meeting in other regions of the world. The World Economic Forum in 2011 created this wonderful group called the Global Shapers, hubs in cities right across the world of young people keen to engage and to make change in their cities. And it's a real pleasure this morning to moderate a session thinking about how the activities of that Global Shapers group, and in particular, the meetings that they have hosted in countries around the world, can help shape the agenda ahead. So thank you all for being here. I'd like to start by actually bringing in some of the participants in the meetings that the Global Shapers have organized. So we're now going to go global and open as we, as the wef, I think is going to be doing over the next few years more and more. And I'm going to go to Bhopal, where we have Tanvi Sundriyal sitting in warmer weather than here. But Tanvi, why don't you tell us? President Xi Jinping said in his speech here at Davos, the fourth industrial revolution is dazzling. But it hasn't yet turned into a driver of economic growth. Now that's a challenge for all of you on screen and in this room. How did your meeting see this issue? How do you think Bhopal could use the fourth industrial revolution to move ahead? So when we look at the fourth industrial revolution, it encompasses a lot of things, cyber, physical, system integrations, and it is far above just using IT platforms. At this point of time, in India, businesses, institutions, and citizens, all are engaged with IT platforms in a very comfortable manner. They are using it every day for service delivery, mechanisms, even small things, but scaling up of artificial technology, artificial intelligence, these things have really come up as driving the change. Especially in India, 26% of the internet penetration, the basic infrastructure and the basic investment in human resources and scaling and placing of people in the value chain is of paramount importance, and it has to come before or parallel. Then only we need to harness the impact brought about by this revolution. Thank you. That's terrific. So you're saying Bhopal is already enjoying the third industrial revolution, the digital revolution, with all its businesses being able to use IT platforms. But the fourth industrial revolution seems too far away at the moment. Is that right? It's not far away, but if you look at the challenges that India faces in terms of its population, in terms of the working population being added per year, the diversity and complexity of the entire country, and of the state that I live in, of which Bhopal is the capital city, it is huge. Right. And I think we'll come back in a moment to our panelists to ask them whether those big human and capital infrastructure issues that India first needs to deal with, whether the fourth industrial revolution can help deal with those. But thank you, Tanvi. Let me move to Cabello Moyo, who's sitting in Habarone, Botswana. Why don't you tell us about how this was seen at your meeting in Botswana? Thank you very much. I think for us, it actually created an opportunity for us as a country to actually participate in something global. We may not be necessarily ready, but I think the nature of the fourth industrial revolution is going into uncharted territory. So I think for us, it gives us an opportunity to be a part of it, to partake. We also do have challenges coming from a developing world. There are issues around human capital. But I think it is an opportunity for us to actually try and bridge the technological gap and also the advancement of services, basically. And also the product, sorry. So can you give us a specific example of how that might work? OK, yeah. So I mean, when you look at how technology usually goes through to the African continent, we tend to be a little bit later on in the race, or if you may put it that way. But then we also, and I think it was one of the panelists actually, said that African solutions developed by African people. So when you look at the advent of mobile banking, whereas in Europe and in the Western world, it's more about online banking. But because of the limitations around infrastructure and the changing of the banking sector and the use of the mobile platform platforms, which I think have also surpassed maybe what they were originally intended to do in the Western hemisphere, basically. So actually, in some of those areas, Africa has leapfrogged other countries in the uptake of technology. And I guess you're posing the question, can countries in Africa do this with the fourth industrial revolution technologies? That's a great question for us. Thank you very much. Let me move to Ashraf Awadi, who's sitting in Tunisia. So Ashraf, what did your meeting come up with? So mainly, we discussed the role of youth in the fight against corruption. And then the basic, I would say, conclusion that we got off the meeting with was the impunity that's somehow raining in the Tunisian system, that this impunity is encouraging more and more the corrupt to keep using the same practices that it somehow might, if not tackled now, that might harm the competitiveness of the Tunisian market. So we also discussed the role of youth in this and why there is somehow a boycott from youth, not only to civil society, but to the public sphere in general, like not seeing them involved with political parties, not seeing them involved with civil society organizations. And the very few who choose the path of entrepreneurship are really starting, struggling actually with an archaic system. You've been mentioning the fourth industrial revolution. I'm not even sure we can speak about the third in Tunisia. We're still a bit away of a digital era in terms of the Tunisian administration. I mean, even in terms of payments and e-banking, I think we're still a bit behind. So if I heard you correctly, that's really surprising what you're saying, because we think of Tunisia as a country whose revolution occurred because of social media and digital means. But you're saying that the youth of today are turning their backs on technology? Unfortunately, it's true that the dexterity of youth when it comes to social media is a way, way better than the one that the official part of the government is using. You still get administrations with no websites. You still get people unable to pay using their online credit cards online. You still find Tunisians not even able to have an international credit card. So even though when we talk about an ecosystem in general for a young entrepreneur, he would definitely struggle to buy a domain for his website. I see this gap between what the youth are using the social media and the internet in general and what potential is the government giving them or providing them with. But there is that huge gap that's somehow pushing a little bit back those who are trying to innovate or trying to invest in Tunisia. So that's why it's true that we use a lot of social media in terms of resistance and mobilizing. But when we want to build or create wealth, that's not really an asset that we have. So your concern is that only the very, very wealthy and those with a lot of power will be able to use the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. I don't want to be pessimistic, but we are almost. That's a concern. It's a big concern going towards pessimism, which is a state capture by the very top economic elite that's killing the competitiveness and also it's killing the creativity for so many young people that you don't. The ecosystem is improving, to be honest, but we need more reforms, institutional instruction to be able to say that this is a fair market for everyone that we can play with. So having an idea, having a small budget, you can start with. But so many institutional challenges. And that has been a theme that has been discussed, both this year at Davos and last year at Davos. If we can do human enhancement and use artificial intelligence in all these ways, who will have access to these technologies? And we'll pick this up with our panelists as well. But I'd like to move now to Alexandra Rusakov, who's sitting in Yaroslav in Russia. Alexander, would you like to tell us about your meeting? We are meeting with the students of our universities in Yaroslav that is actually a city or better to say a region with 1,000,200 population. So we have several universities and we bring the most active part of them together. And we are trying to discuss the most interesting impacts of the implementation of the fourth industrial revolution principle on the education system. That is actually one of the most conservative in the world. And to find out what the headwinds could be for these implementations and what should be improved in our curriculums and even what new words would come to our accessories and how universities should live in these new circumstances and in new digital environment. And what's your biggest concern? What's your biggest... My biggest concern is the conservatism and my biggest concern is the gap between the interests of the and going industrial improvements and those curriculums that couldn't follow them in the right pace. So what we have to do is to reshuffle by, I'd say, to reconform all the educational system in the region, first of all, and in the federal level. And we have some instruments in Russia. We have a special agency for strategic initiatives who can drive all these changes and we are going to be prepared for that. So from many of us, that would be surprising because we think of Russia as a country with very good education and research, whether it's in computing science or technology or science. Yes, of course, we are speaking in general and we are speaking locally. So in most original universities, we are starting to get prepared to that all and we have points of excellence as well in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in Kazan and many other cities, but the case is that we should reshuffle the whole system and make a very flexible system of education with appropriate academic abilities with new educators, with new skills, and that is really a demand from the society and from professional society, from our students as well. And so what's the first thing you're gonna do to shake up that conservatism and to bring about this change? The first thing I'll do, I'll change myself. Right, excellent. Thank you very much. I'd like to come to the panel to get some commentary on these challenges, to get some answers for those who have joined us and I'd like to come to the audience for answers as well or perhaps for the questions, but can I start with, sorry, I'm forgetting her name, with Tanvi's concern, which is, hold on, before we go to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, what about basic human capital, government services, infrastructure, what about the things we need for economic growth and poverty, et cetera, in our country? Can I introduce Beth Novak, who is now a professor at Yale University and previously was advising the US government on technology and the British government. And the British government. And Beth, how do you balance those two things? You're doing governance lab experiments, which are trying to solve some quite practical problems using technology. What would your answer to Tanvi be about whether the Fourth Industrial Revolution can help? Well, I think you're correct to the remarks that to draw the connection between the importance of effective institutions of governing and unlocking the economic and inclusive potential of technological growth. This story, this one of combining the learning that comes from machines, the intelligence that comes from machines and from data and the power and intelligence that comes from people is very much also, I think, the solution for trying to create institutions that are themselves more innovative, that are themselves more experimental, that are able to recognize new and creative ideas and break out of those conservative molds that were talked about and to implement them to how they work. But is there a specific example of a technology that could help for Apollo? Yeah, so I think, let me talk about, if I might, just a couple of examples. I think they fall really into these two categories that are well encapsulated in this phrase of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. One is, of course, technologies of data and the other are the technologies really that have collective intelligence that help us connect with people. So take, and let me give you examples of each. I just came from a session in which somebody extolled the virtues of a machine learning, a data scientist, a scholar who is here and working on using big data techniques for annotating the entire scholarly literature on cancer, looking at all 22,000 journal articles that have been written to the end of, using big data machine learning techniques to help us accelerate the development of cures. Well, you know what, in India, without the benefit several years ago of some of these technologies, what the then head of science did was he created the open source drug discovery scheme for tuberculosis and he got 3,000 students. Not students in big cities, but students in villages, again, annotating the literature and looking at every article that exists about TB, a neglected disease that drug companies have not wanted to work on because it affects mostly the poor. And now, after 40 years of no new advances in tuberculosis thanks to the work of those 3,000 students, we're in clinical trials on the first new tuberculosis drug in 40 years. So I think there are good examples on the one hand of ways in which we're using data and particularly unlocking sources of government data, as in Mexico where they've opened up data about schools and education, same thing in Tanzania, and you're able to spot the fact that 1,512 people on the payroll all have the same birthday and they all happen to be 102 years old and they all make more money than the president of Mexico. When you can use the data to do that, then you can spot the problems and helpfully fix them and make institutions work better. But again, then people is the other side of the equation. So Jean-Philippe Berniceguimana is here at Davos. He is the minister of youth and technology from Rwanda and he is building innovation centers in Rwanda, getting teenagers working on developing new apps and new solutions, both to make government work better, to promote economic growth and to promote social inclusion, tapping into the wisdom and talent that people have because our biggest asset in the end, in any culture and any society is going to be the people that live there. And we can use technology in part to help convene people, to help unlock that wisdom and we can use the combination of data plus people to hopefully create more effective and more innovative institutions. Let me stop with that. Fantastic. Tanvi, how does that sound to you? Plain, I'm a civil servant from government of India working in the state of Madhya Pradesh and currently posted in the city of Gopal. Yeah. Interesting. There are two interesting platforms which actually already do what the speaker talked about. One of them is the CM Helpline Center in which any person, any individual can actually call up the highest political consecutive of the state, get agreements or complaint registered, ask for information, give suggestions and all that just use mobile technology. All of this is packed online. There's a time is given to the matrix and the complaint is considered closed only after confirming the satisfaction of the client. Great, thank you. Now the government is sitting on the suits data. So there's a great example from Uttar Pradesh of how a data platform can be used to get citizens grievances online. It is actually, it does still sound third industrial revolution actually. This sounds more like using digital. So I'm gonna come to President Ilves from the former president of Estonia to take up Cabello's question which is can countries in Africa leapfrog others to use the fourth industrial revolution to help generate growth? Because in Estonia as president you used the third industrial revolution to leapfrog other countries. But what would your answer to our panelists in other countries be on that question? Well, one of the key factors that allowed in my country to leapfrog was an absence of legacy technology. We were so far behind. But this actually led to a potential trap which I always warn against which is that in the rush to assist my poor country people were offering us technology they were discarding and giving it for us to free. And one of my big battle in 1993, 94 was to convince the government, I wasn't present then I was just a bystander in many ways but not to take a 1979 analog telephone exchange from the city of Helsinki for free. Because I mean the capital of my country had a 1938 telephone exchange. So they said well look this is a 40 year improvement and I said no whatever you do it may be free but I mean there's no point in getting an analog system when everyone is going digital. And this is a general rule when it comes to countries that are bootstrapping their way out. Do not take old discarded technology from these benefactors. The other thing I say that what is, I encourage countries always to be brave. That is to say just because others have done something before you one way trust your own people to do things differently and we've had many experience or we had many experiences with that in our own country we're again where I mean another case where we had Swedish run banks or rather we had Swedish banks that bought our banks and they came in and said we'll teach you how to do electronic banking. And then when they saw what our own engineers had designed they said okay you're coming now to work for us. So these are so trust your people and do what you think is right. The last thing I would say is that most of my experience has been the most progress technologically has nothing to do with technology because the technology is like oxygen. It is all over and all around us. Whether we use it or not tends to be or is almost always a function of legislation, policy and regulation. The analog, those are the analog components of digital progress. If you have a government that is forward looking that says let's do it, then you will end up with all kinds of great technology being used. If your government says that's too risky, we don't wanna do that, you won't have it. And that was, there's a book, a big fat book that appeared about, well just a year ago this week which I co-chaired its production along with Kaushik Basu, the chief economist of the World Bank and it's called Digital Dividends. You can download it for free, it's about 400 pages, 500 pages, I don't suggest you print it. But if you just go to the World Bank homepage and look in search, put in Digital Dividends and it's a massive compendium of empirical studies done on what works and what does not work and it starts off with this very same conclusion that progress, be it in the most basic hardware side of connectivity cable to the most sophisticated kinds of programs you can do, that it really comes down just to legislation, regulation, and policy, all analog processes. Thank you President, really powerful message there for our panelists in different regions. The absence of technology could be of legacy technology, could be your great asset. Don't take the offers of discarded technology, get the governance right. Now, by the way, I've failed to tell you to use the Twitter feed, the Twitter link, hashtag shaping Davos to send questions in from wherever you're sitting, those of you in the room, you just wave your arms in the air, nice old fashioned technology. But I think that that where President Ilves left us on this governance issue is really important because it goes to Ashraf's concern about will the fourth industrial revolution technologies only benefit the 1% who can afford human enhancement, who can afford to introduce blockchain into their business model, who can afford to use artificial intelligence for all of its uses. Now Anton Khratchev, you're sitting in a technology park in Russia, in Kazan in Russia. How is that playing out in Russia? Like how would you answer that concern of Ashraf's? So actually Russia is a huge country, everybody knows this, and this huge means a lot of resources, but also it means a lot of challenges. First of all, because of the area, which is quite huge, and this fourth industrial revolution progress means it can happen only if you have a very good infrastructure for that. So basically what has been done in Kazan, in Republic of Tatarstan, in one of the states of Russian Federation, it has been created a very high level infrastructure for implementing services, for penetration of internet, covering of 3G fiber optics, and I think that's one of the most important points why Republic of Tatarstan become one of the most developed region in implementing of IT in different spheres of economy and attracting also a lot of human resources in all these processes. So we think that this high technology park where I'm working for, where we have right now more than 140 companies, but this initiative started only seven years ago and seven years ago, there was no a lot of understanding of why do we need to combine together different companies, different people, but the synergy we created inside made a lot of effects. And can I ask you, who's doing the disseminating? Your argument is compelling that you've got to make sure that people have access to the technology. Is it business in Kazan that's doing this, or is it government, or who's doing it? I think they're both, because it cannot be only initiative of business or initiative of the government. Actually business is more initiative than government in the mostly activities, but it's very important that governments should understand the role of new technologies of the progress. So the same as, for example, in Estonia, president, his understanding, his vision of why do we need to use new technologies either to use the free ones, which are not the new one, but his vision is very important. And that's what we have in our republic and vision of the head of the state, president of Republic of Tatarstan, is absolutely important, because he totally supports every new force which we attract from people, from students who come to our selections, to our business incubator programs with their ideas. Sometimes these ideas are bad, sometimes they're very good, and our aim to connect them together. So that's what we're doing. We find out very nice ideas. It's sort of crowdsourcing of ideas everywhere and attracting and implementing them in different spheres of economy, not only in the government force, but also in businesses, because normally this gap between somebody who has some idea and someone who can just implement it in its process, it's quite hard to cover it. That's why we are working, that's what we are working for for these seven years, and that's why right now in Republic of Tatarstan we have 240 electronic government services. It's quite huge, and the number of services used last year was 83 million during a year, and that's with the 3.8 million population. So a huge integration of society in this process is very and absolutely important. And I think it shows again this leapfrogging point in Uttar Pradesh and Tatarstan, people leapfrogging, question from here. I have a question. First of all, congratulations on this effort and ever shaping that process and using the fourth industrial revolution to try to bridge the gap of all the world. I think it's a great opportunity to your common president. I mean, the policies in the countries that have been pushed adoption really had an impact and it's great. I have sort of a reverse question. We have not even implemented the fourth industrial revolution. We have the third almost all around the world, but it impacts the expectation of people about how the government is gonna react, and policies typically, or changing laws, take a couple of years at least. So how do you think that in our democracies, because still the best system as we know, in our democracies that we're gonna try to use this improvement or speed and adjust in terms of policy makers and government and how this is gonna change the way we govern societies. And can I bring this question and link it again to Shraaf's concern? You know, Beth, you sit in one of the wealthiest countries of the world, the United States of America. It's at the forefront of these new technologies. But if I look at some of the technologies in medicine, what's striking when you look at the United States is how small the percentage of the population that have access to them is. You know, it's fantastic to have state-of-the-art cures, but if they're only reaching 5% of the population, there's a challenge there. So how would you, what's the way forward on that? So I think President Ilvis made it a very important point that those gaps, that lack of inclusion comes fundamentally as not from the technology itself, obviously, but from the policies that we have in place that enable the economic practices that create that. So there's, you know, we, I do work also with the NHS in Britain, which is a much more democratic and distributed healthcare system that attempts to remedy some of those challenges of inclusion, but again, it comes back to the question here, which is how do we reinvent how we govern, how we make policy to take account of more voices? But give us a policy that works to distribute. So let me sort of make this a little bit more concrete, first in terms of the how, and then we can talk about the what. So what we're seeing evolving all over the world, and the US is not in the forefront here by any means, is what I would call the process of crowd law. So in other words, the process of enabling people, not just legislatures who sit in the legislature, but people outside to set the agenda for legislation, to participate in drafting the legislation, to comment on that legislation. We also see that in bureaucracies, the concept now of participatory bureaucratic governance. So it's not the referenda piece of just suggesting ideas or asking people how they feel about a policy, which we can see the consequences that that leads to, and frankly only provides information overload for already beleaguered people who govern. Rather, it's the practices that we're seeing, and you can take Brazil's example, where they have formulated their technology, legislation and regulation, with a wide, and Brazil has been at the forefront of this, with a wide array of input, enabling ordinary people, so to speak, who are not so ordinary. The people who are out here are us. We all have expertise, whether it's expertise that comes in the form of credentials, or whether it's expertise that comes in the form of lived experience, or whether it's situational awareness or just a good idea. I think the challenges is that we lack those structures whereby we are asking people to do more than simply contribute their opinion. Rather, we need to start shifting to asking people what they know and how they can help us. So going beyond, how do I feel, to say, how do we actually do this? So the answer there is getting people involved, and I'm gonna come back to both Cabello and Vashra. Getting involved differently than we've been doing it up till now. Right. President Ilge, you go. Just to answer your question and also to speak to this. Government legislation can go quickly or it can go slowly. You asked about how to make it faster. I don't know. I mean, we adopted a digital signature law and a secure two-factor authenticated identity in 2002. And the ADOS directive in Europe is coming into effect right now, 15 years later, which in many ways forces some countries to do that same thing. In the United States, while the best technology comes out of the United States, there is no legally binding legal digital signature, which in fact, inhibits the development of all kinds of things and keeps banking at a very primitive level, for example, and unsafe. So that, again, and when I talk to people in the United States about, well, why don't you do this? They go, we will never have an identity. And I said, well, you have passports, people travel with passports. I mean, they're the state-guaranteed your identity. And they say, well, that's to go abroad. And I say, well, in fact, in the digital world, the world comes to you. You don't have to cross a physical border. And so there are sort of fundamental objections to things that in fact, I mean, like an identity, like having laws that enable you to do all kinds of things with the technology that exists. But because of whatever sort of innate conservatism, I don't even mean left or right, but just sort of an unwillingness to do certain things. You end up with a paradox where other countries, mine, for example, use to great effect technology that is developed in the United States, but cannot be used there itself. Right, so the conservatism that you've told us about, Alexander, is not just in the university system. It's across government and governance. But how many of you here is that comforting to? Because in Davos this year, there's been a lot of alarm about, for example, artificial intelligence leaping ahead too fast. So how many of you would like to see governments move quickly to regulate it? You're gonna have to vote one way or the other, by the way. So how many of you think that you wanna see governments move more quickly? And how many of you think it's a good thing that governments are slow to get their act together? So moving more quickly? Okay, so that's quite a few of you. Leaving it alone, moving slowly at the moment? Yeah, so there's some of you. And sir, at the back, you'd like to see it move slowly. Can you tell us why? Well, I think that innovation is always best left alone and not being regulated. I think that we have a history of regulating complex technologies. And that ultimately dampens the innovations. It's actually much better to come from behind and regulate if things goes haywire instead of trying to sit and regulate in front. Because we will always, or the regulatory policy makers would always guarantee it'd be behind the seat, And a comment here? So I'm an academic at Imperial College London and I'm a general government. So I think there was a problem with the phrasing of your question. I think that people have to accept that the majority of people don't understand AI. And so I agree with the gentleman here. He's exactly right. However, the government does need to move very fast in other things. So I love Betz points. I think everything has to be about open access, whether that's to journal, academic journals, for example. It has to be open to be in front of that. Open to be in front of anything, including open access to data. Like, you know, people can't innovate very often because the data's not available. People won't give it to you. Even when you have a big institution like me, like, you know, you're still not me, but where I work, yeah, you still can't get access to the data. Government could really reduce the barriers there. So regulators, governments, must be much more about how to reduce the barriers. And the other one then is open source as well. If you want to talk about including people, then, like, open source in terms of software has to be actively supported. So we do have people like Google make intensive flow, for example, available to allow the technologists to develop new stuff and to be participate in the foreign industry revolution. But like government and other people could be supporting that. Thank you. So a strong argument here for open government and less regulation. Can I take this point here and then I'd like to? Dax Lovegroves-Roski. I do agree with the previous two points. I mean, the sharing economy is another example where things are moving rapidly. Uber has now flushed out what needs to be fixed. But clumsy regulation coming in early is probably not a good thing. So I think when you look at the sharing economy and how it's being fixed carefully by smart regulation, that's a good thing. So I wonder if there's a kind of principle-based regulation that can move a bit more flexibly, fluidly, rapidly to guide AI. So each of you has got a comment on this. And there's a paradox here. Does regulation, is regulation needed to facilitate faster, better technology or does it always get in the way? So Beth, you wanted to? Sure, I think each of us want to say something. Let me just try to connect some of these points which is and start with your comment about what you call principled regulations. In other words, the idea of articulating principles rather than setting bright line rules about what not to do. So what we're all afraid of is setting the bright line rule which says you may not do X or you may do Y which leads to the Uber problems as you call it or the fear that the first speaker or the first commenter brought up is that especially people in government who may lack knowledge about technology and for everybody else who doesn't know yet what the standard is around which something is gonna converge in a new market, it's too soon to set those bright line rules. What we do need is the principles and that's where the openness comes in and where openness is very important but also responsible uses of technology and data, set of principles and take the example of precision medicine where Imperial is at the forefront, you have a new center for the precision mathematics of healthcare at Imperial and we have a new precision medicine initiative in the US. What we're trying to do is to get beyond the comparable example in Europe which is the knee jerk love in the same way that we hate identity. Europeans love privacy, something we also have some challenges on but that sort of privacy reaction gets in the way often of open access and responsible uses of data. What's happening in precision healthcare is that we're saying no, we have to start with some principles which is open access which is responsible, which is security which is responsible uses of data which is to make sure that we're gathering data not simply from the usual suspects who are wealthy at one end of the spectrum but we are gathering data particularly in healthcare from people who are underserved by the healthcare system that we are respectful of how we use their data that we use consent, this is essentially the fair information access principles that were developed years ago help to inform how we think about how to do open in the right way. So in the same way that we have to get beyond our traditional kind of bright line approaches to a world of principles in which we're able to experiment and explore while respecting fundamental civil liberties and civil rights as we do these things. So I think that open is very much a piece of that coupled with responsible uses of data that allow us to do that principled regulation setting the principles and later we might get to those bright line rules when we really know what we're doing. You make an important point which is open doesn't just happen. You actually need some governance around making sure that open really is informing and not just distorted slices. There's a question coming in on Twitter from Kapil Jain. What changes need to be made in existing educational system to make the upcoming workforce employable? Anton, you could. Yeah, so I think this is a discussion between implementing soft and digital skills in society. Yesterday I've been on one breakfast here and there was sort of discussion and voting for what is the main lack of, which is the lack of which type of knowledge is today for professional leadership, for personal leadership, for government leadership. And my opinion is that, for example, if we take young people from 50 to 25 years old, they are quite involved in digital skills. So they know what is happening around. They are all in social society. They are all in smartphones. They totally communicate online. But I think that they have lack of soft skills today. And soft skills is something that should be like basis for everyone in the next 10, 20 years because of this new technologies which changing very fast need to be realized by people mind that you should need to learn all your life and you should not stop attracting knowledges. If you have these soft skills, you will survive in this society. I mean, growing digital society with a lot of new technologies. Otherwise, if you don't have these skills, it will be quite hard for you even to learn fast to attract new knowledges. So that's why I think very important to understand this at the period of young people who is from seven years old and to maybe 12 years old, very young children. And even new languages for coding for developing which are right now realized by us also. We made some courses for young boys and girls from seven to 12 years old. They give us some new knowledge and new opportunities which basically are not in schools. Normally, I mean, in Russia and also, I mean, I think in most of the countries, the only exception is maybe Japan who is right now implemented programming as a basic degree in the school. And so our vision is Finland school model. So my opinion is that we need to pay more attention for school education. And that's very important because of the next future and because all the new ideas mostly come from students, from universities, from people who have some new vision for some difficult problems that has been never faced before. Great, so Anton's advice to our panelists is get coding, I guess, get them all coding. But I'd like to, President, could I? Can I answer that question, please? Yes, but can I get your... No, but there's something that we've left hanging and I'm thinking of our panelists here. Beth has told us about this bottom up participatory process but your success in Estonia, It Strikes Me was leadership from the top. So I'm thinking, you know, people around the world listening to this are probably wondering, well, if we're gonna really harness these technologies and use them, which way should we go? You've done it. Do you make sense to? I'll answer the first question. I'm 63. I learned to code 49 years ago. I was taught how to program in basic. And one of the reasons, and later on I've been coding, one of the reasons I can think in these terms is that a group of us in a very bizarre experiment were taught how to code in 1968. I would say that here, I mean, kids should learn to code. And that was the first step that we pushed through in Estonia, Estonia in fact has as part of its curriculum is teaching kids to code. Because otherwise we have a, you know, we have a very good foreign language learning program. And to push it through, I say, look, it's learning a foreign language with no regular verbs. That's what coding is, right? It's a lot. So do that. And that is absolutely necessary, because in fact with technology coming into everything, we are more impinged upon technology than ever before. I would also recommend everyone to read an essay by C.P. Snow called The Two Cultures, which is about the sort of the problem of the British University in 1959, because he was a literary novelist and a physical chemist who basically summing up this essay says, the problem was he was the only person who would walk from the dinner table with the physicists and chemists to the table drinking with the poets and the novelists. But he said that's the problem of the university. Today that is the problem of society. The geeks don't know how to talk to the legislators. The legislators or politicians don't understand what the hell is going on. And I think that, which leads to lapses on both sides, the geeks not quite understanding what is part of the sort of enlightenment tradition of human rights, fairness. Well, privacy is a somewhat later concept. It's only from the 1890s, but anyway. But can I take you to the problem that Tanvi and Ashraf face, right? They want to be able to harness the fourth industrial revolution for growth in their country. And they're getting two different answers from this panel. One is vision from the top, make it happen. And the other is participatory governance. Go and start getting communities to talk. Which way would you advise them to go? Well, I would do both. I mean, you just elect yourself people who are willing, open to ideas. I mean, I get credit for a lot of stuff I didn't do. Enjoy it. But I would encourage people to do that. Listen, you listened. Ashraf, how does that sound to you? I think both options are valid. It's just a matter of timing. If there is a vision from the top, things will definitely go faster. If not, it's gonna take you a lot of time to do more of a community organizing. And then the issue is the most outspoken who are not necessarily the smartest or the ones who understand the situation better will be the ones actually speaking on behalf of the others. And then I think I totally agree with this issue of languages. In Tunisia, I remember when we organized the first hackathon, when we brought geeks, I want them to work on coding a platform helping whistleblowers and helping citizens to whistleblower and to report corruptions. They did not get it because they were somehow, they internalized the idea that they are going to the market. They are going to sell products that they wanna go to startups which create these different languages. And the problem is maybe geeks, they master the coding languages more than master their own languages. That's why if we had maybe some of them joining our initiatives to advocate and lobby for a better ecosystem, for a better use of technology, that would be more efficient because someone like me have been involved with a number of ICT for development initiatives, but I'm not a geek myself. It's just that I understand a little bit what the geeks would say, but my background is coming from civil society and then someone who believes in the role of technology and raising awareness and holding governments accountable, launching websites like Shehid Meter to track the performance of the Shehid who is the Tunisian Prime Minister and I think is there in Tavos still. So these are the type of things we've been trying to do but I think it's time for people not to wait for governments. They need to take the lead and make the change with the tools they have and mobilize and get more and more resources. But for me, I still believe with a clear political vision and the full support from a political leader or institution, things will be faster. And I think things are going so fast but if you miss one second or one decision today, that would cost you a couple of years or decades even in the future. Can I answer that one thing quickly? I mean, I'll give you an example of one thing that came out of Estonia that now is in over 100 countries which is called Let's Do It World. You can look it up, you can Google it. Basically, the guys who developed Skype who are Estonians got together with people concerned about the ecology and they devised a free app for smartphones to locate garbage and then they developed also a logistics program to clean it up. And we had this massive cleanup campaign and it helped that the president came out and did it too so you have a little support but it wasn't my idea. It was purely civil society sort of hanging out with geeks to come up with this thing that is so wildly successful. This is done in I guess the last count 107 countries around so if you can Google it, Let's Do It World but it's purely a civil society initiative combined with technology and combined with technological knowledge and of course it got a boost because it had political support from the top but it doesn't have to be, it's not the political leadership thing now you go do it's just more like well I'm gonna go clean up too you know and so that helps. So Cabello you're getting some advice here on how you can help Botswana leapfrog, get everybody coding, don't accept old technology, think about the leapfrog, get communities involved, make sure some of your leaders are digital literate. Does it sound useful to you? Very much so, I mean I think if I just, you take us back slightly, one of the things that we actually talked about is actually policy should follow, should follow practice and I think that also is true if you talk about regulation and about legislation, so it should be an environment whereby people be it to be it to business, to be it civil society are free to come up with high ideas. I think the point that has just been talked about around leadership, I think it's very, very key. Back to the president's point, Botswana luckily and maybe for us it's been a bit of a curse. We have bought many, many government systems your or across your staff's high end systems at a time where the users or the implementers were not actually ready to actually use it. So we now have a situation where some instances we have almost white elephants, high end technology, which is sitting there waiting to be leveraged, which now then jumps to the point around workforce. And I think it's actually quite key linking all those things. We have multiple issues, multiple challenges, but I think there is no right or wrong answer. I think for me doing something is actually the thing. If you have government, government leadership, that is actually great. And it will definitely make things move faster. So we are seeing governments more so hours actually responding to what civil society is doing. If you look at now, me now, and it might sound like a pretty normal thing, the Western world, but our government is now operating a lot in things like Twitter, Facebook, purely because civil society would be to Twitter and Facebook to talk about government. So that has actually driven a policy because practice has to be that government's play in that space. I think you give us an important warning actually, which is a slightly different point to President Ilves' point, but you don't always want to buy the front-end technology. I'm thinking of public financial management systems. I can think of a small Pacific Island that paid hugely for the state of the art one, and it sat on shelves because they didn't have computers that could run it. And they were paying several million dollars a year for the maintenance charges on software they weren't using. And I would contrast that to what Ashraf Ghani did in Afghanistan when he was finance minister, which is get them all to use Excel because that's the technology they could use and that's the technology that their systems could use. So I guess, you know, highest tech isn't always the solution, but it's also, you know, but I think that's a, it never less stands, President Ilves' point, that don't let somebody else fob you off with the technology that will hold you back. Now other comments from the audience. We started with this, how can countries use this revolution? Yes. Do introduce yourself and here's a microphone. My name is James Moray and I'm from Kenya, an investment company in Kenya. I'm interested in the views of the panel on the extent to which governments can apply the technologies coming from the fourth industrial revolution to improve government processes and also reduce corruption. My twisty, at a time when government registries and customs borders are mined by robots because that reduces the room for human discretion and asking for bribes. I'm just interested in the views of... But tell us, you've got your own answers there, which I think are interesting. Just tell us a little bit what your top two would be. You just mentioned using robots instead of bureaucrats to avoid corruption. Yes, that's one idea. So that's one idea. And extent to which we can use artificial intelligence in processes so that then you can build in the process and avoid the room for human discretion because that's where the real problem is and the challenge we have with a lot of developing countries is because of corruption and those particular issues, social inequality is expanding. Are you sure you can't program a robot to take bribes? I want to hear from you. Excellent. I'm going to take just a couple of comments from the audience and then bring the panellists back in. Yes? Hi, I'm Greg Metcraft, the Chairman of the Trans-Securities Investments Commission. And also, I'm interested in the Chairman of the Availasco of the International Organisation of Securities Commission. It's currently in 120 countries. I do think that policy makers or regulators can create the right... Sorry, can you speak up slightly? Sorry, I think that regulators can actually create the right environment to encourage innovation. And I think that's really important. So, for example, in Australia, at ASIC, we have created an innovation hub that actually allows startup operators to come in and work with them if they're wanting to operate in the financial services sector. We actually say to them, don't come and talk to lawyers, come and say this directly. We can tell you what you can do, what you can't do, because a lot of the time, they just don't understand the system. And secondly, another example is we have a digital advisory committee which is actually made up of startup operators. They actually tell us what their problems and how we can help them. So I think that engagement with the startup operators is another way of just creating the right environment. Another thing we do is actually we now have a regulatory sandbox where we allow people who haven't actually got a financial license to actually deal with a limited number of people, say a hundred for a period, to see whether the business actually works or not. So again, creating that opportunity to actually trial something which is important and a number of jurisdictions actually have that. I think that's a good way of embracing what we're talking about. Another really interesting thing we're doing now is a data lab where we allow startup operators to actually come in and actually use real data to actually perhaps text, you know, RIG tech type for folks and others which can be used. And finally is international cooperation. We have an intelligence hub globally through OISCO where with emerging markets, et cetera, we exchange ideas as to what is happening. And also Australia, we've actually signed cooperation agreements with other similar mining jurisdictions where startup operators in one jurisdiction can actually move into another jurisdiction. So for example, we have Simon with Kenya to allow, you know, because there's some really interesting stuff being developed with Kenya. So I do think you can be proactive and create the right environment to this. You can either do nothing and be reactive or you can actually be proactive and forward-looking and create the right environment. And it's for no reason other than we actually think, we're focused on actually creating the right kind of stuff. And are there any other answers in the room to our friend Kenya's question? How could governments use the Fourth Industrial Revolution technology to solve some problems? I don't think we even need a fourth. I mean, one of the things that, this is also unfortunately a true story, but I've been going around proselytizing for years, telling countries, you know, use open source, develop this stuff. We'll give you the operating system that we developed for ourselves. And I would always say, and one of the great advantages, you can't bribe a computer. And then the, and I would do this with, you know, one of my advisors would be sitting there and then finally one of them said to me, stop saying that. And I said, why? He said that when you say that to certain leaders, they, their reaction or their advice is like, oh. All right. It's like, okay. But it is, I mean, you don't need fourth. You don't need, I mean, sure, you wanna get, put your data on blockchain fine, but the point is having financial records transparently, you know, available to people to observe. That cuts down a lot of corruption. But I think, so I think most people are aware of the steps you can take using digital government. We've had some wonderful examples during today's debate. But what about the fourth industrial revolution technologies? Yeah, Anton. Can I just a little bit getting back to the question of the government and fourth industrial revolution. So sure, government has a lot of opportunities right now to implement different progress of fourth industrial revolution technologies that already exist. Blockchain, it could be, it could change actually all the system of communication between citizen and government. Also inside government, how it happens. Robotics is changing healthcare. So different types of them. But I think for government, this is an opportunity in two different ways. One way is to understand these technologies. And this is a very important point because that's what you just thought about. What is happening around? Because these young geeks who create these technologies who understand and make progress in them, they do it very fast. If you don't understand what is it, you just cannot implement it. This is very basic and simple. But, and this is the first point. And my opinion is that any government officials they just should, they should today take some maybe special courses just like, for example, Singularity University making for giving understanding of what is happening around. But the second one is what is important for the government is to understand that, for example, AI and robotization of industry can create a huge problem of job less, job cuts in the economy. And what's all this stuff, all these people will do if robotization will reduce labor force for 50, 60% next five years especially. And this is a great challenge for governments today. So they should understand it from the both way. One way is to implement these technologies. And the second way, what is the challenge after implementing it not only by government but also by companies because business will make it absolutely. Business wants to make it to be efficient. And all this progress will be realized in the companies. And that is the way of, we discussed a little bit previously about regulations. Should governments just understand these technologies and put some basic level regulations just not to make crash in the economy. And I see Ashraf's got a quick comment on that. Ashraf? Yeah, for me like most of the times we talk about the fourth revolution but at the same time we never ask about the pre-requirements. What we need before shifting to that. And then again, like we need to remember that most of the people living on earth now that are still traumatized by a previous dictatorship or they're still living under dictatorship. And then the digital era is a bit also digital to the people but also I see it in myself like people they don't have trust in online sources and tools because they think that big brother is still watching them. So I think democracy and fostering democracy is really as important as the fourth digital era because I think we take for granted that it's a democracy, it's not. And that's why sometimes maybe a post-colonial approach to it that we need to think from the south about how we need to shift towards this fourth revolution because what I'm seeing is we're still putting the West in the center of it. They take for granted that what they share as values are universally shared which is not really the case. And that's why we need maybe to think again from a purely post-colonial angle to this maybe. Thank you. Alexander, what's your takeaway from this discussion? My understanding is that we are mostly speaking about technologies and I would like to put forward some ideas about the man and the environment. So to my understanding, the fourth industrial revolution is mostly about the new citizens of the new age rather than the technologies that are around us. So we can deal with the technologies but we would like to have the human-like robots rather than the robot-like humankind in the future. So speaking about the universities and about the new curriculum that should be put forward by the fourth industrial revolution, we should be very careful about so to say the low track of science and education and short track. So we should be prepared and with the risks we should generate the new education, the new educators for this era. And well, I'm not sure that everybody is prepared as the university is right now but it is a challenge and we should follow the challenge and we should take these risks because in our country it's quite obvious that we have some governmental regulations and governmental help who is proceeding with the fourth industrial revolution as my colleague said and it's quite a local agenda to have both industries, universities and local governments in one branch say to promote the ideas, to make it realization quite fast and to make the proper changes in the society. So it's a kind of synergy that's really in need and the other thing is that we should go to high school right now and then to universities. Just for those who will leave after us will be prepared properly. Excellent, so look, we started today. Tanvi started us off with a terrific question. Which is, is it a fourth industrial revolution that most countries need or is it a bigger dose of the third industrial revolution, the digital one? And I think one of the answers of today's panel is that it's the third. The examples that bear that President Ilves that Anton have given us are great examples of applying digital technology to help governments be more participatory to do better, to be more efficient. I think that's important. And I think it does reinforce President Xi Jinping's point that we don't yet see the fourth industrial revolution as a driver of growth. The promise is there for Cabello's question about leapfrogging and I think President Ilves gave us some ideas about what makes it so possible to leapfrog. The concerns about access and equity which were raised, I think Beth has given us some really interesting ideas around how you can create participatory governance to anchor technologies and communities and to make sure that they do serve whole communities. I think both Alexandra and Anton highlighted the need to shake up the way we're training people for the workforce and some of the Twitter questions are exactly focused on that. How do we train the workforce to keep up? So let me just finish with 30 seconds from each panelist on when is the last lesson that you, when did you last take a quick lesson on the latest technology? Beth? I'm getting a lesson right now. I'm following the Twitter feed. There we go. And as a result, it's not the technology that I'm learning but I'm getting fascinating insights, opinions, questions from people all over the world whom we've heard from here, whom we're hearing, whom I'm watching also on my phone. And I think the point is, is that whether it's about third or about fourth, what we need is institutions that can help our values to keep up with the technology. Anton? I think my last lesson, sure, this is where, but also I had one meeting about one month ago in the Lyceum locally in Kazan for talented guys. They are about from 12 to 15 years old. And the lesson was my understanding that they know much more than me in different technologies. This is not just something very unique for them. This is normal. They understand it just like, as for me, just taking pen and write down something. They, this is not something that they want to confuse about. So this is the best lesson we should think about right now because this is our future and in 10 years, these guys, they will create it. And President Ilves, you learned to code before the global shapers community was born. Are you learning about quantum computing now? Yeah, well, yes, I'm worried about quantum computing actually because so much of what we do is in terms of encryption, which is key to privacy, could easily be out the window in five or 10 years. And there's no substitute for it. So I follow that. I would say what I've been surprised by is the speed with which the whole blockchain distributed ledger discussion has proceeded because it, I went around for years talking about, basically saying in regards to the privacy discussion, and you guys are worried about privacy. Privacy is someone finding out your blood type, but you should be, and you may not like it, but you should be worried about data integrity because that means someone's changed your blood type in the record. And that's a lot worse. And now it's, and I'm here at Davos, and it seems everyone's talking about blockchain. I'm very happy, but surprised that it went so quickly. Fantastic. Can I ask you all to join me? Not just thanking the panelists, not just thanking our participants from around the world, which has really enlivened this meeting, but thanking the whole global shapers community. And Yemi is the WEF champion who's sitting in this room for a wonderful, and the WEF for a wonderful initiative that's bringing an energy and a set of ideas to the World Economic Forum, which I think is really important for the next generation. So join me in thanking those groups.