 Good morning. Good afternoon to you all. My name is Joyce O'Connor and I chair the Digital Policy Group here at the Institute of International and European Affairs. And I'm delighted to welcome you to our webinar today on Global Digital Policy, the United Nations International Digital Policy and the Global Digital Compact. It's my great pleasure to welcome our distinguished guest speaker today, Dr Amandep Singh Gill, a thought leader on digital technology and the United Nations Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology. Amandep, you're very welcome and you had an early start this morning, so thank you very much for that, but also for taking time out of your very busy schedule to be with us today, and we appreciate that very much indeed. Amandep will speak to us for around 20-25 minutes and then I will go to your audience for questions and answers, and you will as ever be able to join us using the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. Please feel free to send in any questions or comments during the webinar and I'll come back to them once Amandep has completed his presentation. I'd very much appreciate it if you give your name and designation when you send in a question or comment. A reminder that today's webinar is on the record as well as the Q&A and please feel free to join our discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIEA. We are all aware and particularly now particularly I suppose the topic of the day is artificial intelligence. We are aware though that digital technology is a fundamental force for change reshaping our lives, our economies, our government and indeed civil society. The United Nations Secretary-General has said looking to the future there are two seismic shifts which will shape the 21st century. The climate crisis and digital transformation. In Amandep's address today he will discuss the UN's work in relation to digital transformation and how digital technologies can affect peace, security, human rights and sustain development. As Dr. Gill will set out for us his and the UN's vision for the future of global cooperation and ask the question how can we best secure an open free and secure digital future for all. He will address plans to create a global digital compact at the UN summit of the future that is scheduled for to take place next year in 2024, September 2024, which isn't that far away. This global digital compact will outline shared principles for an open free and secure digital future for all. Dr. Amdap Singh Gill was appointed the UN Secretary-General's envoy on technology in June 22 and he's a member of the senior leadership team. Dr. Gill has a deep knowledge of digital technologies coupled with a solid understanding of how to leverage the digital transformation responsibly and inclusively for progress on the sustainable development goals. Before taking up his position as envoy on technology he was CEO of the International Health and Artificial Intelligence Research Collaboration Project based at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. He was also executive director and co-lead of the UN Secretary-General's high level panel on digital cooperation and between 2016 and 18 he was India's ambassador and permanent representative to the conference on disarmament at that time. An engineer by background with an expertise in languages and I see a keen interest in the humanities. He holds a PhD in neural learning and multilateral forums from the King's College London. We really look forward to your presence. Thank you very much again. Thank you Professor O'Connor. Thank you Joyce. It's a great pleasure to join you all and share some thoughts and I want to begin by commending the Institute for International and European Affairs for its sharp focus on digital issues that are increasingly on everyone's mind these days. 20 years ago the UN organized a World Summit on Information Society 2003 to be more precise in Geneva and this was the moment when the world came together to set an agenda adopted at Tunis called the Tunis agenda for a people centric approach to what was then known as the I cities revolution information and communication technologies revolution. We had only one billion people. I say only with some some hesitation connected to the Internet and today we have five times as many connected to the Internet. We still have 2.7 billion people who remain unconnected to the Internet. This is one aspect of the digital divide. There are other aspects and I'll go into them a little later. There was no social media there. There was big data but it was called something else and very few people knew about artificial intelligence. It was an esoteric subject that students of computer science or electrical engineering electronics as I was once did not usually take up because it was considered a dead end. You want to do something more exciting rather than get into artificial intelligence but today we live in a very different world. Data and AI are transforming businesses. They are now having an impact on our political systems political processes for good or for bad. They are increasingly impacting the pace at which research and innovation happens in cutting edge areas like genomics. So we are in a different situation. The challenges have grown, whether it is misinformation, disinformation, harm online for vulnerable communities like women and children, or it is mass manipulation of public opinion, whether it's through hyper targeting of advertisements just to make us buy things that we don't really need. To shape our opinions in ways that benefit some sections. So the challenge has grown and we face a situation whereby our institutions are not fully geared up to handling the impacts the widespread impacts of digital technologies. So this is a little bit of the context in which the UN is gearing up for as you put it, the summit of the future next year, not very far away. And as part of the 11 tracks for the summit of the future, there is the global digital compact, a once in a generation opportunity to adopt a high level high quality document with some shared principles, but also some shared objectives and a clear action framework for advancing on those objectives. I did have some slides to share with the audience today. And if the team can bring those up, then maybe we can keep moving through the talk, the next slide please. So this is one of my favorite quotes from the Secretary General. And it's essentially about not being a spectator to the march of digital technologies. So, we should not let the digital transformation happen to us. At the end of the day, technology is a social construct. And we need to get together across disciplines across different stakeholders, private sector civil society and governments and across nations and other divides, geographical and other divides to craft shared policies to come up with a global perspective. Digital technologies don't respect boundaries between domains. They don't know the distinction between mathematics, hard sciences and social sciences. And in our responses also, we should take a similar approach. Likewise, digital technologies don't respect borders, either in their positive effects, or in their negative consequences, and our responses are policy responses also have to be seamless across borders. Next slide please. Now this is a little bit the background to the summit of the future. It's not coming out of thin air. There is four to five year, at least five years of preparation behind this, starting with the report of the high level panel on digital cooperation, co-chaired by Melinda Gates and Jack Ma. And the Secretary General's roadmap on digital cooperation. Digital cooperation is this term which captures this collaboration across domains and across borders to address shared challenges and sees the tremendous opportunities that these technologies present across the three pillars of the United Nations, peace and security, human rights and sustainable development. Next slide please. So in our approach to these technologies, we have adopted a mission statement and that's essentially about building human agency over technology and accelerating digital cooperation. This vision is comprehensive across governance and impact and is based on the idea of three ms. Essentially, there is something missing in terms of people not being able to participate in the digital transformation, whether that is because of lack of connectivity lack of appropriate and meaningful content lack of participation in the data economy today. And then there is also the aspect of misuse, you may be connected, but you're not able to harness the digital transformation because of lack of capacity, inadequate infrastructure, or simply lack of operability interoperability across public and private sector, for instance, when it comes to data. Obviously, a very important aspect is the misuse dimension, whether this is related to cybersecurity, other online harms, or the issue of internet fragmentation where because of a lack of cooperation across nations. We have some cracks in the top layer of the internet, which risks creating deeper divides on governing the internet. And then essentially for us in the United Nations, the UN Charter and the human rights framework is an important pillar, it's a unique attribute of the UN when it comes to these issues, and the sustainable development goals agenda and the 17 important goals that the international community agreed on 2015 so this is a little bit of the conceptual philosophical underpinning of our work. Next slide please. At the outset that the digital divide is not only about the 2.7 billion who are not connected to the internet. It's about what kind of devices you have during the COVID-19 lockdown. In many parts of the world, children could not attend school even though there was connectivity because you know that there was perhaps a single device a semi smartphone in the family and that's not meaningful connectivity. And then often the content is largely in one language English, largely from a certain cultural context and you have thousands of other languages other cultural contexts in the world that are kind of increasingly occulted. So, the data in those languages is not reflected in even basic websites, but think of large language models, AI models, if they are not reflecting that data then they are only a partial reflection of the reality of today's world and they are leaving out some people. And then when it comes to data and AI, there are looming issues in terms of who controls the data, who decides what data goes into models, what kind of value is created from that and where you are in that data value chain. And we've seen this over the past 1000 years, technology always creates winners and losers, but the pace at which this shift in power is happening is unprecedented in some ways. Next slide please. And I don't want to belabor this point, but the misuse aspect, the sources of misuse are both coming from governments as well as the private sector. So we have to have an eye on both of those. Next one please. This I mentioned briefly the prospect of internet fragmentation so which is frightening because the internet as a single global public good interconnected interoperable based on these protocols that are governed by without political interference. So if that were to fragment, then the global consciousness in terms of the reach of social media, in terms of the spread of ideas, collaboration around science that gets impacted and also the digital economy, which is an increasingly important part of the overall economy. Today, perhaps 16 to 17% of the global GDP is coming from the digital economy. It's growing fast and very soon 50% of global GDP will come will be mediated by digital technologies and in some parts of the world for for instance in India. The economy is growing 2.5 times faster than the rest of the economy so there are consequences beyond just the ability to share social media posts across borders. Next one please. And then of course this aspect where you know it's like water water everywhere not a drop to drink. Data may be ubiquitous, but if it is sitting in silos it is not enough trust around its use. Then you know we have misuse we are simply not being able to use the tremendous opportunities that digital offers in particular around data massive global effort is required to utilize data to curate gold standard data sets for instance around climate and alien agriculture, etc. And we've not paid enough attention to these international collaboration issues. And from the UN's perspective, this is important for achieving the sustainable development goals. Next slide please. So these are just some examples of how digital technologies can help us advance the sustainable development goals from protecting our oceans to addressing the aspect of plastics pollution to enhancing agricultural productivity and the list is literally endless. In effect what we need to do is shift our mind, minds from it's a change of mindsets from an ice cities for development paradigm where you craft specific solution like drones delivering blood bags to inaccessible areas to more of a horizontal view of digital technologies as transformative sustainable development goals tools to give you one example financial inclusion in some parts of the world. We've literally seen in a few years as much development on financial inclusion as was done in over two to three decades previously, thanks to digital technologies. And today, you know that there is been a shift, for instance, 40% of real time transactions financial transactions are coming from countries such as India that are using low cost digital public goods to get more of their citizens into the financial mainstream. Next slide please. Now, all these challenges these opportunities, we will not be able to rise to the occasion if we don't pursue a collective collaborative approach. And here I want to recall the idea of commons, which is very familiar to, to us from the experience with pastures river waters and in recent times regulating the high seas the maritime domain and the environment. And I suggest that the digital world is also a global commons, the global character of the Internet, the one public consciousness. Sometimes we call it virtual, the virtual space. I mean, certainly in, in terms of defense and national security, people look at the cyber domain as an additional domain in addition to the air, land and maritime domains, and we have the similar tragedy of the commons, ungoverned spaces, the dark web, for instance, where drugs are sold or explicit sexual abuse material is shared so these are spaces that are that need to be governed that need to be brought under the light and the harm aspect. And last point I would say here is that these are commons and not clubs. So these cannot be for a few individuals a few geographies we have to make sure that they are used for everyone's benefit. So, based on this vision and we can go to the next slide. We are moving towards the summit of the future. And again, next slide. This summit of the future has an explicit goal, which is adopting a global digital compact and that would lay out some of these shared principles and approaches for an inclusive human centered digital future. And some of the issues that this might cover include the connectivity digital divide piece, the preserving the internet as global public good, data protection, data empowerment, ensuring that human rights off lines are protected and applied online. Accountability sharpening the accountability of the private sector includes including for discrimination against certain communities and misleading content, the misinformation disinformation problem. The manipulation of artificial intelligence and using the digital opportunity to advance on the sustainable development goals as a part of this commons approach. The global digital compact discussions are being co-chaired co led by Sweden and Rwanda. They started a few months ago we are already well into the heart of the matter. In fact, next Monday we'll be diving into the artificial intelligence and digital trust and security issues. And these deep dives, these consultations which are not negotiations yet are inclusive are transparent anyone can dial in can participate can send inputs. My office has received more than 1000 inputs, very thoughtful high quality inputs and the numbers are perhaps less important than the content. And these inputs have come from member states from the European Union from the countries that form part of the Francophonie, the group of 77 in China, many others United States. And also from civil society from individuals to institutions to academia, the private sector, big debt companies, smaller companies, and they've all shared their ideas their vision for our digital common digital future. We are going to be these inputs are available online so anyone can consult them, but we are also going to be analyzing them up to the summer so that we can present some common themes, some common concerns, some shared action priorities to the international community. And when we meet at the UN General Assembly in September, the ministers of the UN member states will come together to prepare the agenda for the summit of the future. They look at the results of our consultations they look at an issues paper that Sweden and Rwanda are putting together, and then they'll guide us they'll encourage us to go on to the next phase which is negotiating the global digital compact. I'm aware that there are difficulties in the international environment today there are geopolitical rivalries, tech has become part of the contestation globally, but there is also a shared concern that we need to regulate this in the interest of humanity, overall going beyond our political divides, and I'm very optimistic that we will be able to come together. We will rise to the occasion just as we did 20 years ago with the World Summit on information society and set out the first shared vision for how an inclusive information society, people centered information society that respects human rights that is based on the values and the UN Charter could look like similarly today since the technology landscape has evolved considerably with these new challenges and opportunities right in front of us. And I think today our challenges much less connectivity per se, but governance connectivity, because if you all take a siloed approach, then obviously the outcome is not going to be as impactful as is needed. So I will close here and I look forward to the interaction with the audience. Thank you.