 Good afternoon, everyone My name is Gordon LeForge. I am a senior policy analyst with the Planetary Politics Initiative here at New America As that video just suggested our next discussion is going to focus on global digital governance This is a subject that we think in about a lot here at New America and planetary politics and we've been working on a lot As Paul mentioned in his opening remarks We've just published a report entitled governing the digital future that's on our website and encourage you all to check it out This panel is titled adjust an equitable digital future and To introduce our panelists and steer us through this conversation. It is my pleasure to introduce our moderator Candace Rondo Candace is the senior director of both planetary politics and the Future Frontlines program here at New America She's also a professor of practice with the Center on the Future of War at Arizona State University And she is a leading expert on the Wagner group Candace is an award-winning For which she's been getting a lot of attention You may have seen her on TV Candace is an award-winning investigative journalist and Previously before coming into America. She held positions at the International Crisis Group the US Institute for Peace And she was Washington Post bureau chief in Kabul, Afghanistan for a stint She is and always has been a very sharp observer of how digital technologies Shape conflict sovereignty and human rights. So with that I will turn it over to Candace Thank you. Thank you Gordon for that very warm and kind of scary introduction First let me also just say madam president. Thank you again. You've really honored us by being here I hope we get a selfie before we leave. That's the most important part of my day. My mother will kill me if it doesn't happen You don't want that on I'm just so pleased to be here It's it's been a long journey for our team for Gordon for Patricia Gruver the co-author of the report that we released very recently Hila Rasul Ayub our director who works on power reimagined looks at climate change all of our panelists here today The entire team has worked so hard to get to this moment And in fact the conversation about you know global disruption is something that we've been having for a long time But really started for for me for Anne-Marie During the pandemic and when we were stuck at home Not much to do other than panic And this is the idea that we came up with is that we need to have this conversation that they have to be The conversations that we were having about global security today have to be much more inclusive We have to ask very hard questions And challenge the kind of status quo as madam president just did You know the last decade and in the last few days, let's just talk about the last few days We have seen a Major war the beginnings of a major war unfold on our cell phones on tablets on laptops And it's the second time around in the last 18 months that we've seen massive conflict unfold on digital devices 12 years ago we were talking about web 2.0 and We were worried about our kids and family members getting sucked into Facebook now We're worried about the singularity and what will happen with artificial intelligence How how will it reshape? human communities and human society And these are the questions that we've been grappling with over the last little while through our digital futures task force And a gathering of individuals which includes of course Alejandro and several others Who've been really asking hard questions about the way? Digital technology is changing our idea of sovereignty In a world where we used to think about it as you know territory and boundaries and lines on maps You can't do that in the virtual world and it's scrambling the way we think about norms and rights And power most importantly, and so that's what we're going to talk about today. Let me introduce our panelists Alejandro Pesante is not only one of my favorites. Don't get jealous guys He's also one of the shining lights of our digital futures task force He is the director general for academic computing services of the National University of Mexico in Mexico City He served the the community as a member of the ICANN board Of directors. Those are the people that name domains and keep registry information He's educated in in Mexico and Alejandro does not play. Let me tell you He knows a lot about science. He has degrees in chemistry And physical chemistry. He spent time as a research scholar at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Research on On the solid state in Stuttgart, Germany. It's one of my favorite countries and Stuttgart is one of my favorite cities His career has been bound up with computing since 1972. We won't ask your age And with networks and the internet since the late 1980s In other words Alejandro knows what he is talking about The other person on this panel who knows what she's talking about is Nanjira Sambuli She is another kick butt Digital warrior and her accomplices accomplishments are so outsized. I'm not really sure I really should be sitting on this stage Nanjira is a four-global fellow She is also a board member of the new humanitarian development gateway and digital impact alliance She also advises Carnegie Council's AI and equality initiative and the Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms She's a member of the gender advisory board at the UN Commission on science and technology for Development and as if that weren't enough she also Really leads all the advocacy efforts on digital equality at the World Wide Web Foundation used to yeah, well you used to And she's worked at iHUB Nairobi Where she provided strategic guidance for growth on technology and innovation research in the East Africa region? Thank you for coming my god. What a biography, okay? Our third panelist Ro Hinton Madura is no less distinguished and he soon will be my favorite Ro Hinton is a distinguished fellow and former president of the Center for International Governance and Innovation CG if you guys don't know it you should Everyone apparently loves having Ro Hinton on the board because he is the chair of a lot of boards He's a chair of the board on the Institute for new economic thinking vice chair at the McLuhan Foundation Board member of the partnership for economic policy and he is on the advisory boards of the WTO WTO chairs Program UN merit and Global Health Center. He is also a professor of practice at McGill University University's Institute for study and international development Ro Hinton also sits on a commission on global economic transformation He knows the most famous guy in the world on soft power Joseph Stieglitz and many many many other things Welcome all three of you. Thank you for joining us so We were touching on this sort of challenge that we have now with the way digital technologies in particularly AI are really transforming Everything from conflict to sort of crisis management, and there are some good things too. Let's talk about you know MN RA I mean without without artificial intelligence. We would not have had a pandemic I think relief Ultimately, but there's been a lot of inaction on regulating digital technologies Which have let platform companies like Metta, you know and others do a lot of damage In communities that are particularly vulnerable. We can think of the crisis with the Rohingya genocide. We can think of many different instances Given that history in the background, I'm gonna turn to you Alejandro first because you are my favorite Really Where are we gonna go next? I mean we've got inaction a history of inaction, but Any chance of that shifting for AI. Do we see any kind of activism happening? Okay I'm very happy to last to thank Candace and all Gordon affords Patricia gruber Riley Rogers for All for the insane this invitation. I take it especially As a big honor because you already know me So that's you already saw me in action in the same room for the for the task force and that was a fantastic experience Which I thank you for I'm also in awe of the convening power of Of this organization for many years. I visited over here more than a decade ago And I'm very glad to tell you there's someone in this room who really knows this stuff That's Dr. Steve Crocker who's sitting down there. He's former chair of I can he's among what many other merits the person who invented the request for for comments procedure for standardizing the internet in the internet and generic task force and Many many other towering achievements and still very very active in these fields And there's David olive from who's the icon office and idea Puyoza comes from a DFR project I mean, this is for me as an additional sign of convening power and I'm very honored to be sitting on the same days that madam Johnson sir leave was I'm aware of your work in Liberia since it was happening and I mean from the news and In absolute awe of Those achievements and what you're now charged with that may shape the digital world as well in many ways Now that I have that out of my chest of my chest So there is action and inaction it's not only inaction What we have to realize I think I've got straight to this Today's panic will be tomorrow's platform A Few centuries ago Plato was scared Very disgusted that people were resorting to writing and he thought that would damage the use of memory forever We have had the same type of concern when Radio was going to intrude into our kitchens with voices from outside the house whether it was going to be you know good music and the constructive education or Propaganda no one knew at the time and of course both things happened and it's all the way You know every new media the thing is that maybe these disruptions were change happening once every Millennium then once every half millennium and now we have 20 of them a year So we are always chasing the past we're fighting the last war What I think that's happening more important Now is that we are we have to realize that the platforms the panic the changes Web 2.0 artificial intelligence, what have you are? shedding light on What humans actually do to each? Individually or through institutions or through organizations organizations that maybe you know virtues like the Wikipedia or Evil like terrorist groups or criminal gangs the whole criminal ecosystem Cyber criminal ecosystem is an exact map of the classic physical Ecosystem it goes by segmentation need to know basis cells hiding information hiding identity It's very amplified by the internet as we have talked sometime I see six factors to map these things from what we know on offline to what happens online The first of them is of course a hyperscale of the internet the speed with which things can happen You know this flare ups can happen in a few hours that will take a couple of years 50 years ago We have the question of identity which the internet doesn't really give you any identity except your IP address Which is very fickle and people can hide behind the internet for crime or they can hide behind the internet for whistle Blowing and for starting a rebellion against an oppressor team. So these are Two blade two sided knives, then we have the cross the global reach of the internet Which means we are always crossing jurisdictional borders which may can maybe for the rules to take the spread Sexual health education to young women in religious oppressive regimes and there are many religions that are like that at least locally or to organize crime and We have lowering of barriers to start things to start organizations companies NGOs or criminal gangs we have a friction reduction Things happen very fast with a click-off a button and sometimes we have to manage against that speed so that you won't transfer your whole heritage to someone who tells you that he is the here of general Taylor from Liberia who holds, you know tons of gold and For a modicum of $50,000 he'll transfer everything to you And that what that was the first news people have about Taylor Outside the people who read the news is amazing and the final one is a huge Drove of memory. So now what we have for AI is we have to look at it in this same way. What is it doing? Who is doing what and then see how it's changed by the technology dissects and then reassemble But then you know what remedies will have to be for people laws will not work about technology loss the object of the law is behavior People or collectivities or governments, but the law will not fix Still it will fix using twisted steel to open locks outside your house Behavior, it's all I mean, you know policy that focuses on behavior is rare Lately, but Nanjir, I know you have something to say about this But let me add an additional kind of nuance to the question, which is you know We have seen a lot of big names in artificial intelligence come out some of the people you know But the conversation is pretty limited right now in terms of like who's at the table What what's your take on that? Yeah, I agree. It's not that there's been in action So much as the kinds of action we need from power holders are insufficient in the sense that with Technology especially in the last two decades the harms whether it's from the era of Facebook and other social media Sort of the rate of diffusion of technology has become faster The warning signs have almost always come from the developing world So the adverse uses we started to see From Myanmar right off the bat in 2013 when you know these platforms started to sort of proliferate across societies Those were ignored My favorite an example here is usually Cambridge Analytica and how it's spoken about here in the US But before they cut that they got here They cut their teeth in operations in Kenya in Nigeria in South Africa and elsewhere as those warnings were being Sent out they weren't being heard. So there's also a lot about where You know sites that are centered for crisis for these issues to be taken seriously And it's the same thing we're seeing with artificial intelligence now The language around safety the language around the moratorium and other calls for action Center very specific viewpoints and not everybody's so for one, there's an interesting sense of creating fear And this fear is also obfuscating the need for governance and in this sense the need for state actors to set the rules of the road That these powerful players can then heed to so they want to create a panic and then tell us tell us that they're the ones We know how best to govern themselves. You all just don't worry with you. You just stay panicked We're gonna figure this thing out on the back end here and we'll come back to you with more technology Rather than fixing the impulses that are driving whether it's AI being deployed prematurely Without the right requisite, you know measures and continuing adverse practices like relying on Underpaid labor to train the models that then we're all experimenting with so it really is in a sense is Technologies have shown us to build on Alejandra's point It's a they've been a mirror and we're not liking what we are seeing in the mirror And we're running off panicking rather than looking deeply and staring deeply into what is being reflected for us to fix So that remains a challenge whether we're talking about those days of Facebook or now artificial general intelligence as Our friends in San Francisco want us to frame the conversation our friends in San Francisco So powerful Ro Hinton What's your take? So first, thank you for having me as your least-favoured panel And and and I'd make I guess two points on on so if AI concentration and action and enact the first is that I Like to think of AI is having broadly three streams of impact One is on the suff nexus of issues around security human rights privacy surveillance the second is on Economy and jobs and and what it does to labor markets and then the third is the most of science fiction like Singularity what what happens when AI outputs us all and if you think of action and inaction, I'd say there's been some Not enough and I'll come to that in a second action on that first sense. I mean we all understand the security and so on dimensions as you all pointed out But values are different on the second stream Jobs and so on. I think there's been almost no action. I mean we talk about taxing robots So that governments can produce or fund public goods for the citizens or not there And we're there's nothing that I have seen that suggests that we're going to deal with that anytime soon And then on singularity. I mean there's no I mean we have Evidence from biotech and and other kinds of advanced science is that there are ways for societies to grapple With nuclear technology, but we haven't really come anywhere near that There's a debate about whether you can cut off computing power, but it's still at that stage my second point Where there has been action think of the range that we're seeing The draft EU legislation on AI is risk-based my country's Canada's is to China's is kind of based on technologies and what these countries do is they talk about low risk and high risk AI and In the EU legislation for example high-risk AI is something like social scoring or the use of facial recognition technology in public places Is banned. It's just not good In China That is exactly what AI is used for in the public good I mean there's a genuine sense there that some of this like going through airports or Dealing with COVID this technology has worked and we are going to use facial recognition technology in public How do you square those? So I guess I'm saying there has been action at the national and sometimes regional level Globally, and I know you'll come to that Making these different perspectives talk to each other in a way that we have a global chapeau Which I thought your report did quite well given how impossible the situation is Where some ways from it? Yeah So let me I'm really a big fan of going off script and my team knows this very well But I want to unpack something that you just mentioned Ro Hinton It's something that we've been kind of debating and talking about a little bit is that the impacts of artificial intelligence on the workforce Two things happened over the summer right we saw the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild go on strike because really a The technology of streaming right on the internet yet another technological, you know kind of defining moment Has totally reshaped the industry beyond recognition Now people receive pennies sometimes, you know, they get like a check for 20 cents on their residuals, right? This was the big Conundrum for the the Screen Actors Guild and also for the Writers Guild But there's also the additional piece of artificial intelligence, right? You know the use of artificial intelligence for voiceover for creating characters, right? even writing scripts and a parallel here is the UAW Right now on strike biggest, you know union at least one of the most powerful in the country and What are they asking about they're asking about two things one You are stripping down the machine that we've been building for, you know, a couple centuries now Into parts that essentially will take away jobs will eliminate jobs from the from the line But two you're also using artificial intelligence. You're creating potentially barriers for us to Get skilled up and one of my big bugbears when I hear here in Washington on the hill We can just you know artificial intelligence can be fine. We can just reskill everybody It's gonna be good. Let's talk a little bit about the workforce impact of AI Not just in the United States. I really like globally What can we expect to see from that and I'm gonna go to Nanjira and then you were hinted in and Alejandro I think it's it's going to be a mixed bag And if I may focus on how we're seeing it at least with the conversations on the future of work or the present of work in Africa Before we even talk about the artificial intelligence side of it. It is just workforce precarity exists as it were Younger and younger populations that are not easily absorbed into the economies as they are structured What do you do with that workforce? And then they're also the source of cheap labor to power the data labeling and the sort of the concept of data Genitorialism has come up because they're being this work is being outsourced to the Kenyans and other space in Morocco and elsewhere to train Chad you PT and other models on this is an image of a human and this is not And then you know at the end of the day, you can't even see yourself represented in the outcome there's a story just this week about Generative AI refusing to generate an image of a black an African doctor With patience it just could not it could not consider an African doctor It could only consider a doctor to be a white person and then at some point when probed further It decided it preferred to show a giraffe with children rather than an African doctor with children So you've worked on this end to train these models and then they're not even seeing you they're not representative of you There's there's that aspect of just the long chain of injustice there that could is is unfolding There is the question about Creativity and West killing comes in because a lot of what people are starting to consensus is starting to generate is that on Technical jobs just everyday paper punching pushing there could be ways where artificial intelligence does better quoting quote But that's a question of where those people will be Taking those who have those jobs So I think the fact that that's a conversation and a concern around the world Means that for the first time in a long time we'll have to go back to the books on what labor and worker rights have been all these things We've written through ILO international labor organization and other spheres. What will that mean and that will call for planetary Solidarity because the worker who's precariously suffering at UAW and the construction worker Down on the in the continent who's trying to get you know that's to sustain them as a living But you know, I don't know development money brings you a robot to build your infrastructure there There's a cut. There's something there that ties them in that future The fear that we don't know where people are going to have sustainable jobs at least allows us not to see it as old AI Domerism but to start speaking about what will solidarity look like in saying whether it's re-skilling of workers or whether it's Ensuring that the pace at which these technologies are introduced does not upset systems Makes us at least have room for a new conversation I mean Ro Hinton does that scare you because it scares me because I you know when you think about the folks here in charge of regulation Right people that you've dealt with you continue to deal with are they ready for what was just described here You know since the industrial revolution the stuff the path to prosperity and development has been to move from agriculture to low-end manufacturers and Then up that value chain. That's how Britain Germany and France did it. That's how the Tigers in East Asia did it And that's how the current you know, that's how Vietnam sees its future in Burma Now think about that suppose you're Kazakhstan or Ethiopia or Tunisia where you haven't even reached that middle stage and more and more of the Tasks are being automated at the low end Some of us think about 40% of them have so that entry level and that middle level step that you need to become Something else just isn't going to be available. It's already not been available now We're not supposed to bring Slides and and I I'm not a PowerPoint fan But there's there's one I like to show which is the photo of I think it's Nike That reopened its first plant in Europe some years ago after moving all this operations to Asia over the years and It's the photo of the shop floor and all it is is robots. I mean so you can you know, you can Reshore and all of that but it's just not going to be like it used to be So the employment absorption and then the question becomes as you were saying well Are we going to revisit the labor leisure trade-off? Will jobs look different? Will we work less? all of the above in Countries that have the social systems and the humanities to Not just retrain people technically but to actually have people think about digital literacy And and what it means to think in a different era But there's a lot large part of the world one-fifth of the world Does not have meaningful or any? Privacy or data legislation So the soft infrastructure you need to deal with all of this change just isn't there And so I think this worries me a lot And I don't think it's enough to assume a way that I mean I have great sympathy for the strike in Hollywood But that's that's just a microcosm of what others are going to face And I don't think as some of my economist colleagues do one can assume this away by saying all of this wealth Can be created if we can simply redistribute it we will all be doing other funkier things I think we have to have that conversation in a more granular way, and and it will happen But it's not happening quite yet other funkier things thoughts well so I put this I mean I agree we have a huge problem, and I think that Putting a few drops of skepticism on some of the grand statements can help us Reanalyze these things without denying the seriousness of the problem actually may it may even underline how bad it is So are you two very simple guidelines one of them? About 30 years ago Peter Cowhing who was a professor at UCSD and Jonathan Aronson in I think UCLA did a lot of very good work on Trends in technology and its governance and one thing that they remarked many others in in technology actually know this My heart is what happens is there's a huge trying to miniaturization and modularization And that's been a long long term and that's what for Hinton was already mentioned You know is you know first you replace humans with machines and machines became bigger And then at some point machines like and I mean steel mills Broke down and you had smaller steel mills substituting for them And you could now place them in more more countries and so forth so that that's a trend that's It's made by humans humans have decision power over it But so far it has worked more like tectonic plates It's all the humans have been in the position to make a decision. They've made decisions that go in this way We didn't see in Hollywood Camera camera persons strike a camera operators or photographers strike against Apple when they introduced a smartphone Yet it was and it may have taken a lot of camera jobs away, but it also produced a Huge world of short films of films made with a single camera on a small tripod remotely controls from from from a laptop or With with another similar camera These are trends that suddenly are hitting and this I will say this tongue-in-cheek because we are that Hitting the manifesto writing class So our manifestos are now going to be written by artificial intelligence And they are going to be read by an artificial intelligence my favorite take on this whole LLM Revolution chat GPT these guys in in one room saying I have script that I tell them one word and It writes a beautiful Email and the guys in the other room are saying I have a script that gets this huge worthy email And tells me in one word what it means and that's you know again It's illuminating it's throwing light on how we are doing how we're working writing blurbs for for ads It's a huge waste of intelligence in the sense that you can have 99% of the words in the blurb written by a machine So what's the genius there maybe just distilling it into one picture now? so The other guideline for me and it comes together is the cost of not doing and this goes especially for country developing countries developing economies We have legislators feverishly writing laws against or for regulating Artificial intelligence in in the Mexican legislature alone There are already 16 13 initiatives for cybersecurity and this semester. We are seeing already 15 or so for artificial intelligence Why aren't these legislators why weren't where were these legislators when they could have a lot of 5% instead of 0.1% of the national budget for education and research We are paying the cost of not having done The job that we should have done or that our people in government should have done 20 or 50 years ago to level the playing field We have very smart people from every developing country doing fantastic work in artificial intelligence in Google in Meta or In Alibaba Yeah Not in country So that's actually so you bring me to the next question, which is on scripts But related to this of course, you know, we've Ian Bremmer wrote this fantastic piece in foreign affairs. I guess it was last year Talking about sort of our techno polar moment moment And I think we can all sort of acknowledge that you know Meta and Alibaba You know alphabet these these are not countries. There's no corporations These are becoming empires and that own whole parts of the virtual world, but also whole parts of the earth and With that high over concentration of power we see challenges with data access Control, you know bringing value from your own data in Nigeria you were just sort of referring to that We've talked a little bit in in our digital futures task force about How to break through the challenge of the global south in particular? Gaining more control over data access for fending against internet shutdowns any answers one any answers in the form of an institutional or coalition building Response beyond just sort of like oh, I think it would be better if it was a good What can we do? Institutionally or in some sort of coalition format to sort of respond to This inequality of data access and data control I'll let anybody jump in On the inequality of data access and control there's two ways I like to think of it. There's this moment now where These models are learning faster what they can learn based on a very limited archive of which they're being trained So there's a quest to get more data so diversify the data sets So there are to get more languages more contexts more realities that haven't been included is happening But in so doing it's a very extractive model that's starting to emerge That isn't so much trying to work within the context and actually Register those dividends as distributed equally then it's almost like let's extract them You know get them to this center and then maybe some trickle down aspects will happen So for example with trying to get more languages to train charge you PT and others You know in the endangered languages an interesting one because you can have these tools help Redistribute that redistribute them in the archive of maintain an archive of them to be learned But there are communities now pushing back and saying those benefits first have to come to us before they go out of their chat GPT open AI somebody makes all the profits a new script on a storyline That's a lived reality and and and bring it back So there are these interesting conversations about how do you go from the least? Connected to the overly connected. What's the through past there in distributing? equitable gains from These technologies rather than waiting for this increasingly an accountable force that is the private companies that are running this across the board to maybe distribute back through philanthropy or through social enterprises or Corporate social responsibility and even where governments are not the one stepping in which is the case in most places that People power this questioning power is a really interesting impulse that for me is less about the big question has been do we start reforming institutions that are or build new ones and in between that before that happens It's where will people be represented either way because we tend to ossify things through institutions, right? But there's the dynamism of who's needing to be represented there that may not be represented in these institutions Whether we start afresh or whether we reform Quickly, so there's the thinking of how to govern in agile ways that needs to pair up with the conversation about What are these institutions that are representative planks for us to have global tables so to speak? But the world isn't waiting for that, you know people are actually seeking, you know Justice and equity now not in the lifetimes to come in Africa. We used to be told we the young people are the future I've done being young. I'm still not the future, right? So the next generation is watching that there's an urgency I like to say there's too many people living in the age where the cans that were kicked on the road are right here So they're not waiting for us to have the need conversation that is ordered about UN reform It's about right now. We are speaking. We are saying this is how we're organizing This is how we are trying to find ourselves represented How can they be supported is just as important a conversation than as the reform one of these institutions So I mean, here's the irony you mentioned data inequities and so on but Way more people live in developing countries than in developed countries Data is set to be the new oil. It's the raw material and people think of it as a fifth factor of production now It's a raw material for all of these things AI and and digitization that you're talking about So if the assets and the raw materials are where they are There's ways to conceive of that institutional response. I think if Companies are using data that's generated in the global south then a Small step forward a very small but at least it's a step forward is the tax treaty that we've seen the G20 and OECD broker in which Big digital platforms have to pay a minimum tax and cannot finagle legally finagle their accounts to pay taxes in low-tax Jurisdictions, that's a good start At CG where we're which I used to lead as you mentioned We we did a lot of work on what are called data trusts. Okay, just as you Put your savings dollars in mutual fund X and not Y because you like its Portfolio and its rate of return Think about all the data that we generate and that belongs to us as individuals You could think of data trusts as being national or sectoral as Nanjir and I who sat on a Lancet Commission on global health Proposed, but there are ways to deposit data for uses that you want and then the monetized or Non-pecuniary benefits from data trusts go to the shareholders the people who contributed their data So there's ways of thinking of this and the final point I'd make is you know just as after the financial crisis in 2007 and 8 we recognize that the Troika of the World Bank IMF and WTO was not up to the task of dealing with financial sector instability That was just not something that could have been conceived of in 1944 We created the financial stability board, which is a multi-stakeholder Group that hasn't made financial systems perfect, but it's many steps in the right direction and again at CG We've proposed something called the digital stability board as an overarching multi-stakeholder I mean, that's one thing we have to get away from national governments only Inclusivity cannot just mean having more and more small countries. We have to think about science ethicists consumer groups industry indeed coming together in an institution where best practices exchanged where there is adjudication of disputes and some of these iniquity issues can actually be dealt with through that as well So, you know, we're far from it and as Nanjira said it may not happen as fast as some of us would like while we're still young but That's where the future lies Alejandro, I see you writing a novel over here. What's happening? I'm taking careful notes because they give me anchors for What you know to build upon what has been said? It's it's almost as You know, what you have just said is the paragraph I would like to have quoted before what I'm going to say now. So it's fantastic So quoting the the previous speakers We have First I've heard in many foreign among others the global partnership for AI and initiative led by Dr. Paul to me which is called the GID which is a very interesting initiative to look at Legislative and other solutions for data control for individuals regaining data control The the idea of data commons or data trusts has come up I still have a lot of questions about how they could actually be built and governed They would have to form a sort of labor union of our consumer union and then you have all the Questions about how to build that representation keep it away from capture incorporate or governmental Capture and so forth. That's an idea that's floating around at any rate. I think that we have Good precedent to look at in the almost 30 years that internet governance has been a field or a thing What we have been able to build in the internet governance field is Organizations institutions and mechanisms the governance is not always know about written rules That manage these shared resources I can is one example. That's one of the most formalized. It has a dispute resolution procedure that's very Detailed and it has a lot of chances for redress of wrongs and so forth It's fully multi stakeholder. It really brings together Governments actually one of the curious things that bothers some people in in in I can is that the governments sit in an advisory Row, they have an advisory a government advisory committee. It has special powers It can stop things almost totally cold on the tracks But it's an advisory committee Just as an anecdote to tell you how this came to happen at reform that we made in ICANN in 2003 We offered the government representatives to study a change in the structure where the government advisory committee would actually sit five directors by election In the board of directors of the corporation or three It took them about 30 minutes to reject the offer Because they said first we would become liable for any Litigation that this organization goes into and whether government representatives cannot be part of a litigation in private Even if non-profit Organization and the second one was some of them said in very low voice There's no way we could agree get 240 governments to agree on five representatives even if it were regional So this has been a very healthy structure and what we see is other multi stakeholder Organizations working in the Internet governance field ICANN is very formalized. It has a large budget It has formal meetings three times a year in different countries and it has as I said all these teeth for things that go wrong with The central part of the domain name system everything else is decent realize You have something called the anti-fishing working group, which is a very lightweight organization It's mostly meetings and communications led by a guy called Peter Cassidy who's a former FBI accountant kind of person The it brings together police forces law enforcement It brings together the banks where the assets are that and now of course are many other non-financial assets like you know Your Netflix account so everybody that sort of puts together or has to hold a fence against fishing And the platforms where fishing occurs, which is like the large email providers large messaging providers That's where the exchanges take place which actually pull out people's resources It's a very light organization and it's done a lot of work that we don't see you the way We see that we don't see it is the huge decrease in fishing attempts You can get through email for example and the way you can make them decrease now in other messaging platforms We you can see that kind of stuff working in many ways and I would not advise to just copy any of these organizations But to learn the lessons from multi-stakeholder Organizations or mechanisms in the internet field and of course look at the many others like the financial stability board There's a lot of multi-stakeholder Even if it's not called so explicitly in sports governance in finance governance sometimes inside countries sometimes globally And that would be a good feels to bring in the learning into this other question. Yeah, I mean it's interesting Go ahead. Yeah, I was gonna say I mean but on where we are thinking about new global planetary Institutions whether they borrow from the multi-stakeholder model multilateral model Otherwise one big thing that is emerging that is clear is it's something that has to get especially the big powers on The same table so you need the US and China as super producers on the same table What's happening all too often is there are new formations that are emerging that will almost always sideline one or the other So you're finding maybe the Chinese Chinese group is organizing different stakeholders the US group is organizing others There's an interesting divide around digital authoritarianism digital democracies, which are terminologies that don't fit neatly anyway That is not going to help us with where we need to be headed because at the end of the day both powers in the quest to Participate in geopolitical competition including in technology are rushing for that data so if they come to a source that says the continent and We have a saying you know when two bulls fight it is the grass that suffers When your data is still being extracted because they're contending you know Powers and you're trying to get the resources to develop from either side without you know getting caught up You bet I think a policy maker is going to spend a lot more time fighting these you know little Tensions rather than actually pulling resources to work for them So that's a reality we must not lose sight of and especially here in DC that whatever would be proposed as international Absolutely has to get the other powers that are creating these technologies in the same room to find some rules of the road Yeah, I'm so glad you raised this. I mean at the risk of offending most of Washington DC and most of the White House Just down the street over here I will say I am extremely pleased to see the fading away of That initiative whereby You know there was this sort of we are the authoritarian versus the yeah the great democracies because obviously we know We're all in trouble right. I mean democracy is in trouble everywhere authoritarianism is everywhere And it doesn't neatly sort of you know sit within side any particular set of borders as it turns out We're all struggling with these challenges And they're they're difficult I think to grapple with if we do have this kind of very binary approach I think we are at a point where Questions from the audience would be very welcome and I want to invite you to come up here and Make yourself known lots of good questions to I'm sure ask While I do while I wait for somebody to step up to the mic I'm going to just take the prerogative and ask a very quick question. We touch on data sovereignty in our conversations in May and I think that mr. Drucker is going to address some of this I just want to touch on a little bit on the data sovereignty question We've seen China make bids in the ITU Russia make a bid to the ITU I'll let you answer it and then we'll get to these questions Right data sovereignty Do what kind of stakeholder? Format would we need To really address many of the questions that are coming up there. Yeah, I mean I think there are more questions We have to ask on what we mean by data sovereignty and whether we are resorting back to sort of jurisdiction also of renty Where your national government through data protection or privacy laws Necessitates a certain data does not migrate from You know so civil data, for example is not transferred either through servers or extracted by companies Is that the form of data sovereignty? We're speaking of is it individual sovereignty and how does that fit in a world where? Rights are not just about individuals but about communities, which is essentially what the African, you know Human and people's rights chatter talks about it tries to balance the fact that you're an individual within a community And that's a kind of corpus We haven't tapped into in finding other solutions too much of the focus on individual rights The way the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has shown us has limited us from thinking about other other ways to do it So a lot of focus from Europe and elsewhere is about protecting an individual an individual protecting their data But am I going to protect it from China the US my government, you know The companies how much is one individual capable of doing and are we selling ourselves short by still having a legal? Precedent that is being set through that model when we're talking about a concept as tenuous as data sovereignty Some might argue we don't even have the sovereignty of that data anyway It's crossing all over the internet and the cables and all that jazz But I think it's a term that's being thrown around a lot without really contextualizing what that means without also creating what would be a protectionist Dimension and I think in others are also calling for cross-border data flows with trust Which just says there could be a version of it that doesn't have trust Which tells a lot about the fact that we just need to sit more with that question and hear perspectives from different regions On what people are thinking and collectives. So I think there's work there to be done Always with this quick answer. I like it. All right questions from the audience sir Steve Crocker I'm gonna make an old guys comment that'll make Alejandro look like a youngster Fifty years ago and a little bit more. I had a job at DARPA writing the checks to support the artificial intelligence research program And so and and the challenge at the time as a youngster then was how do I write the justification for the work? we're doing because Typically DARPA programs in those days were five-year programs and I knew for sure that we were in for a 50 year Process of trying to build AI so I look at the current controversies about AI today, and I say Yeah, this is great. We got there finally, but As you commented We're gonna go a little bit further We may go a whole lot further and so a lot of the commotion of the moment is really of the moment And you haven't seen anything yet in a way a Particular data point or prospective data point. I was talking to Raj Reddy last year about the Progress in speech understanding. So this relates to both in a positive and negative way about Preservation of languages and so forth and asked what his prediction was about the ability to have real-time translation In language so that we could each speak in our own native languages and be understood in a quality He said he had put himself on record a year earlier So it's two years ago that in the ten years eight years from now 100 languages facile real-time translation Maybe it'll happen in eight years. Maybe it'll take a little longer, but but and it was an informed I can tell you if you don't know who Raj Reddy is a very very well-informed opinion Let me set that aside and bring in a different aspect a lot of attention to the displacement of jobs and Increase in inequity in wealth and control I'm not an economist. So I'm going to make amateur comments here Wealth is roughly in my limited perspective Divided up into what are your skill sets in terms of individual labor? What assets do you control and? Related but slightly different what? Facilities organizations and so forth what your power structure is and we're seeing shifts in all of this and But if you stand back and look at I said well, what's the wealth of a nation and one could imagine now moving into sort of Semi-science fiction territory that if instead of valuing what a person can do to create income for himself or herself what a country or a people can do to create the means of support and Prevention of disease and all sorts of things as a community then You have different ways of approaching how you distribute the benefits of that wealth and that leads to political Issues of do you have capitalism or do you have socialism at such and I don't want to take a position on which of those Needs to be the best. I suspect that there's no perfect answer in any extreme is is wrong so but my putting that together with my other point is that things are changing and And here's the devilish problem things are changing at different rates Westphalian order of things Preserved and created a lot of order in the world in a sense And also hardened the interactions so that it made nation states the primary way of organizing things around the globe now we're in a state where a Situation where problems are be setting the planet that aren't simply Every every country should do for itself. What's best there's common things and our institutions aren't naturally set up to create the kind of Cooperation and common action that's needed and meanwhile we have in the technology We have very rapid changes in computing and AI now and so forth Things are changing at very different rates here. And so that to me is the big challenge and we can have local Focused solutions on how do we can apply AI how we could regulate AI for facial recognition or surveillance disorder? not unimportant but from a slightly broader perspective almost a Passing challenge that will be overtaken by the things pardon for the long. It's okay. And there's a question in there somewhere Okay, I'm sure there's a question in there And I know that there's a question behind you and we've got about three minutes So what we're going to do is take the two questions and we're going to make you do Kind of like quiz show style you get 30 seconds to answer them go All right, so we have a question from the online audience What do the panelists think of the problem of junk data the idea that AI will flood the internet with generated low-value Content which makes it harder to find useful and original information Is there a future where only the relatively rich can afford quality data? Oh, that's a good question junk data. Okay. Hello, I was a sticky from United Nations University And so AI is a tool and it's up to us to decide how to wield it So it leads to benefits, but it also leads to consequences that need to be mitigated So two questions on that firstly when it comes to the development of AI How can we develop effective public-private partnerships to ensure that the development is in alignment with the values of the international system? For instance respecting human rights and the second question which is something that you actually mentioned Andrea Which was talking about the need for agile governance and the question of do we stick to existing institutions or create new institutions? So any ideas on how we can make these institutions more agile given that you know They're 20th century institutions dealing with 21st century challenges. Thank you great question I'm going to summarize as best I can So we can get 30 seconds out of you each So I think what I heard was one For mr. Drucker things are moving fast We're not skating to the puck basically how do we skate to the puck that's number one number two Is it only the rich people out here who are going to be able to open their email and feel okay about it? Or is it good? Is it going to be all the rest of us? You know, are we going to keep getting you know junk data junk email junk junk junk? What's the solution there and last but not least I'm just going to go to the agility part because actually I think that's undervalued and not talked about enough How do we make our response in our institutions more agile? When it comes to looking at the artificial intelligence challenge you have exactly 30 seconds go I Think that I was just one part of this which is the question about whether old or new institutions I think that it will be Solved it will be answered by first answering what problems plural We can try to solve We may be leaving some problems unsolved in the world. That's the history of humankind But define a problem that brings together a group of stakeholders. You asked about private public private partnerships That's exactly what multi-stakeholder means Find the problem find who are the interested parties? And if there are harmed parties find a way to bring the harming parties to the table Just a third the five seconds thanks to the interpreters the sign language interpreters We've made your afternoon Very physical indeed. They are fierce Yeah, I think the junk data point broader speaks to divides and I think we're first approaching a new kind of divide where There'll be those of us majority who are connected and those who are disconnected are either those who were never connected or those who can pay their way out So because the vast majority of us are being shepherded into this space where even opening an app that Previously is to give you information you have to sift through all that the junk I was rightfully mentioned to find one gem of insight but there are people who are able to afford to pay their way out of these systems for some It's important to remember that there's also a form of coercion to use this tools where we rely on them every lands has been generated and then Cory doctor calls it and certification of these apps where you're first it gives you a service It's a valuable service and then it flips it on you and then keeps you locked in and you don't know how to find your way out Easily, so they are these divides and they're going to keep shifting We have to keep an eye out for that and figure out some rules before it's too late for everybody not to name names But I feel that way about Gmail go I Think DARPA and your space program are shining examples of how public investments Generate both public and private wealth and so if we think about technology as being created Not by free markets, but by public action Then the intellectual property that's created by technology should be seen More of a pub as more of a public good than we currently do our currents of IP regimes and trips and so on Take us in the wrong direction and so many of the points you made lead me to think that taxing the profits of The rents that accrue from technology so that governments can provide their citizens the things that they're meant to provide is the future of public policy and On the middle point, you know think of a continuum from data to information to knowledge to wisdom and I don't think there's any algorithm yet that gets us as clean lead to that as the human brain But where the money will be and where the action will be is to sift through the noise and the data and information To knowledge and wisdom and that's what we should be again directing public action at Rohington you are now my favorite. Thank you so much for that Let's give the audit the panelists a hand here