 Thanks for joining us in Geneva for the AI for good global summit 2019 and my guest is Robert Kirk Patrick He's director of United Nations global pulse Robert. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me So Robert global pulse is an innovation initiative by the United Nations And it's all about harnessing the power of big data and analytics for the greater good basically in a nutshell indeed. No, that's it Basically, we are a special initiative of the secretary general We operate a network of data science and AI labs in New York, Uganda and Indonesia with more on the way We partner with companies all over the world to get access to anonymized big data something we call data philanthropy It's now become a global movement companies looking to create public goods out of their data and safe and privacy protecting ways And we use that data in a variety of ways Much of what we do could be considered R&D in terms of exploring the potential of the data to yield real-time and predictive insights That could be helpful for achieving the SDGs improving humanitarian action and supporting peace We build software Lots and lots of Python code So we're building applications for national governments for UN agencies that they can use in their work And we also do a lot of work in the space of ethics and policy Around trying to accelerate the emergence of policy frame works to make sure that this is done in a safe and responsible way That's a very interesting point isn't it because when it comes to AI or even big data and analytics You get the feeling at times that people don't really know how and where to start so that's where you can help them Yeah, we see a lot of opportunities and sometimes, you know We get a data set we see an opportunity and we can actually go out to ministries of health and say, you know we could use data from mobile phone networks to See how a population flows and that could be used to understand migration That could be used to understand the risk of a disease outbreak as people's movements spreads it from one district to another But increasingly there's awareness out there I mean we're getting lots of demand now from government ministries and UN agencies coming to us and saying we've read about this We'd like to try something like that. Can we partner on a pilot project? Can we take something that we've already done together and figure out how to take it to scale the demand is real and the interest is growing and Hence the importance of multi stakeholder platform like the AI for good for good global summit because you can meet people here from government from the tech world the business world and you can all work together to Deploy artificial intelligence for good. Yeah, I think this is our most important event of the year within the UN System. This is this is an extremely curated filtered crowd of people who care about exactly the issue that we're focused on operationally and It's incredibly exciting and we've watched the AI for good summit of all from the first first event two years ago now It's gone from sort of what is this space and what does it mean for us to a community of practice? It's really getting down to business sharing successes and failures And a lot of partnerships are forming all around us. It's incredibly exciting to be here Exciting and they are great hopes But there are also concerns that AI because it's such a powerful tool could be used to actually Enhance if you wish inequality or could contribute to it. So how do you make sure that this doesn't happen? Yeah, I fully agree with this I think we're thinking a lot about AI if you look at the average policymaker out there and saying This is a thing that's coming and we need to get ready for it and have a plan This is not a thing that's coming. This has been here for ten years the current generation of AI Which has been used for targeted advertising has proven itself the most powerful technology for? Accelerating income inequality the world's ever seen. I think this is a lot more like climate change We're on the wrong track. We've been on the wrong track. How do we make the right course correction to get to the future? We want I think that's very important But at the same time what we're seeing around privacy and the world of sort of ubiquitous data and algorithms is a great deal of Justifiable concern that this data can be used to re-identify people that it's very hard to anonymize It can be misused in a variety of ways and that's true and if we can't prevent misuse We're not going to be able to achieve the SDGs on the other hand We have to be able to use these technologies to achieve the SDGs They're also mission-critical in that way So I think what we have to do here is sort of rethink the space and say well How do we balance the risk of misuse? Against the risk of misuse of not using this data For public good for all these years. It's been used for surveillance. It's been used for Making a lot of companies a tidy profit and it hasn't been used to transform Public services and access to justice and education and health care early warning and disaster response That's as big an ethical problem as the misuse of the data We need to look at the opportunities here and make sure that we have Regulatory frameworks around data and AI that create a healthy generous space for rapid innovation While protecting privacy while addressing bias and protecting rights So do you expect data wastage to dominate discussions in the years ahead at summits like the AI for good summit But not just you know other other places where we would discuss the importance of a of ethical use of data I think I mean we're already seeing within private sector the data produced by the old business model has become the basis of the new business model This stuff is the new paper. This is what policies and programs and business opportunities are going to be made of and It's going to become the central issue. I think you know everything we do Produces data these days in a digital world and the opportunities to use that for public good are incredible If we figure this out and looking at this from a global pulse perspective We're going to be able to create the socioeconomic equivalent of meteorology To understand what's happening in real time and to be able to predict and manage risks in ways that make many of the ills that face society today Inconceivable to our children and grandchildren and I think that's that's incredibly exciting, but we need to get this right We've seen what the alternatives are and I think that there are many many dystopian futures that we know we don't want So that's for us. I think we were expecting to see this conversation be everywhere. It better be Indeed Robert Kirkpatrick. Thank you so much. Thank you