 Welcome to ITU Telecom 2017 here in Busan in the Republic of Korea. I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today by Stephen Ibaraki, who is founder of the AI for Good Summit. Stephen, thanks so much for joining us today. It's a real honour and pleasure to be here. It's so exciting, you know, it's a great, great conference and exhibition as well. Now it's brilliant. Now the theme of this year's Telecom is smart digital transformation. I really wanted to find out what does that mean to you? Digital transformation is about things like smart cities, the proliferation of artificial intelligence everywhere around us. It's about, you know, infusing banking services. Really, it's found everywhere, right? Everything's digital. It's every part of our lives and you really have to have a good understanding of digital to really be able to survive more than that to prosper in this economy today. Now I know that you have several title, job titles. You wear several hats, but we've got here as a founder of the AI for Good Summit. Perhaps you could tell us very briefly what that is because not everybody will be familiar with it. Of course, people who attended this year will be very much so. But perhaps we could just talk a little bit about that and also how you would define AI or is it not so necessary to define? You know, it's quite remarkable that the ITU created a platform for the coming together to facilitate a global discussion on artificial intelligence. It's an implication on government, society, and industry and so forth. Really, it's historically was the most successful event ever with over 500 experts coming together in plenary sessions and then, you know, break through private discussions and so forth. It also had a situation where we had 47 media from around the world, would you believe that? Like BBC was there, China Central Television, you know, whether it's America or from Asia for a year, but represent the resume of the television crew. The reason I bring that up is usually in typical Summit, you may have, you're lucky if you get one major media group covering it, but there's 47 that was the interest. 21 UN agencies coming together. And I keep in mind the UN is almost like a federation of different UN agencies and for them to come together to work together to look at some of the issues, the opportunities that are available through artificial intelligence and how it can be applied to the 17 sustainable development goals to make the world a better place. So it's just an amazing event, a lot was discussed, there's a lot of ideas created and in fact it's going to continue in some fashion. Let's talk about artificial intelligence, how would you define artificial intelligence? You know, I'll give you an acronym, the one that I use to sort of describe artificial intelligence, I call it CAAA. So artificial intelligence is about human cognition or cognitive abilities being enabled or perhaps even replaced by algorithms, by assistive capabilities and augmented capabilities, automation. So that's really what it's about, right? So really humans working with Intel AI in some fashion to make things easier and better. So cognition, algorithms, automation, augmentation, assistance, maybe it's C444 or C4AA rather than AAA. And what about in terms of visible impacts, what do you think will be the biggest visible impacts of AI in our daily lives within the next five years or so let's say? Probably the biggest impact will be how seamless it will be and integrated and in fact the impact would be invisible but it will enhance every part of our lives. So a scenario would be something like this, you're going to wake up, some kind of AI will be involved in you getting up, planning your day, scheduling your calendar, making appointments, ordering food, going to the bank, doing any kind of financial transactions involved in you doing your work, working with your children, with your spouse, really infiltrating in some way or being seamlessly part of every part of your lives. And we're already seeing that now, right? So if you want to do investments in the banking area or in your portfolio, there's AI to do that. Everybody has a smartphone and you've got some kind of AI in there that you talk to or can use to do translations or book appointments, things like that. You're doing email and spam filters is really kind of a machine learning system with people with it and sort of fill it with AI that's sort of managing that for you. I'm traveling and I'm in Busan and I log on to my system, one of my systems and it says, oh no, I get a message back. Somebody's just poofing you trying to illegally get into your account so it's because there's some kind of foreign login happening so it's warning me. That's all some kind of machine learning or AI is involved in that. Autonomous vehicles, right? And all of the assistive kind of capabilities that you're seeing in your cars today. And increasingly so and in fact in Singapore there are taxis that are autonomous and you're going to see that in different part of the world. We call it cabbie, we call it Uber. There's a human there. That's going to happen. So that won't be impacted, right? So everything that's a bit clunky today will be much smoother and it'll be much more sophisticated and it'll be a much smoother ride for everybody. Yeah and in fact I'll give you an acronym, I've got another acronym I call it CASEL. So actually all four walls of the CASEL are already here today represented in entities in some fashion. In fact on October 11th I've been asked to speak with a few others as a small panel at the United Nations in New York. It's the United Nations meeting of the second committee of the General Assembly together with the ECOSAU, the Economic Social Council. And they're the two chartered agencies or portions of the United Nations. Anyways they've got a special three hour meeting in front of all the General Assembly and they said Steve, because you did this work with the AI, would you be a speaker, a panel member for three hours? I said sure and they said Steve, do you know Dave Hansen and Sophia? And I said yeah, he's a good friend. So I sent them a copy of a video where Sophia was speaking Mandarin with me. Here is the robot. Yeah, the robot is sort of like the, or as Hansen calls it, it's this child, right? And so anyways these conversations continued and in fact what happened was I did arrange Sophia to be at this special meeting and in my response to the director, because there was sort of finalizing thing, I said, you realize that this is an historical inflection point. What's happening? That's going to happen on October 11th. And I explained why and I said castle is going to happen. In fact the four walls of the castle are going to be established there through real entities. Three of them are actually physically present there. So now you're thinking what does this castle mean, right? So the C for castle for classic human beings like you and I and the members of the General Assembly that will be there. So that's the C in castle, the A in castle stands for augmented or hybrid human beings. I have an embedded device that allows me to hear better. So augmented human beings will be there and the S is for synthetic. So a lot of people know that actually they're creating synthetic genomes now. In fact by the end of the year some really simple life forms will be completely created synthetically in the lab and in about 10 years they'll be to do with human beings. And then in the last A, so C-A-S-A, so a classic augmented synthetic, the last A is artificial. And in fact Hanson's child, Sophia, this sort of artificial robot which is really in its early stages will be there. And so that's what I'm saying. The four stages, the four legs of castle, classic augmented synthetic artificial life exists in America at the time when we're there on October 11th. So three will be in person and Sophia is going to open the event. Definitely a first thing. And Sophia is going to close the event. And we're thinking maybe Sophia will also be on the panel answering questions as well and interact with that. And there's another surprise I believe coming up but I can't release that yet. Okay, so the drawbridge will be... First time in history. The drawbridge will be firmly down then. That's brilliant. That's extremely exciting. In terms of this particular event, you've seen obviously there's lots of SMEs here. I believe that you've been chatting to them as well. What key advice for our bigger audience, for our wider audience out there, would you give to early stage startups as something which we were focusing very much on? Yeah, I mean that's a very good question. So let me expand that acronym of SMEs to M SMEs which stands for micro, small and medium enterprises. And the M is really startups because small and medium enterprises are really beyond being startups. So a big part of this IT, this telecom world here by ITU is sort of supporting M SMEs. And in fact I was involved in the judging of these M SMEs. And I chaired a moderated panel with founders who by the way, some of them are winners of the global innovation wars that are healthier. So what are some of the key factors to make them survive or allow them to survive? I think some of them are areas like having great relationships. Ultimately a success of a startup is going to be based on relationships. In fact I would say 90% perhaps. There's this idea I call grit. So I'm going to give you a definition of grit, right? And there's sort of a formal definition of grit and comes from one of the, I think it's forms of fortune but I've extended it a bit. So everybody has some kind of talent, right? So you work really hard, you combine that with talent, you get some skill, okay? Now you got some skill, you work really, really hard and you're going to get some achievements, right? Now if you combine achievements and you work really hard and you persevere, you'll get grit. If you've got grit it'll vastly increase the probability you'll succeed in your startup and it'll reduce the risk. And I think as a venture capitalist, there's another sort of roller hat I wear, if I see that one element I will bet on that versus even the idea. Grit, hard work, perseverance. Okay, well that's a brilliant advice and I'm sure that there will be lots of people out there following it. In terms of attending this event obviously we've all made a big trek out here to Busan and Korea apart from obviously people who are based here but I just wanted to find out from you what's the value of attending events such as ITU Telecom World? Well first of all, let's just position ITU. ITU really is the number one facilitation platform for discussions of technology. But not just telecommunications, I'm talking cybersecurity, biometrics, blockchain technologies, internet of things, artificial intelligence, standardization, policies and things like that. There really are the number one platform for those kind of discussions and bringing the right parties together to get some progression in those areas. And then they have their seminal flagship conferences like Telecom World and where all of these different experts from around the world come together and they share ideas, they collaborate and they evolve the discussion. They launched a new journal officially at this event, an academic journal called the ICT Discovery Journal. Again, bringing collaboration, all the different stakeholders together to further science and further innovation in some way. No other entity can do that in the same fashion worldwide. And I can tell you that because I chair academic like these global science organizations I'm a venture capitalist, I sit on industry councils and things like that and I've created them, help found or founded this AFRICAT summit. ITU, if you look at it, there's ITUs in all of those threads in some fashion. And finally, what's the most exciting thing that you've seen or heard here this week? You know, ITU has had me so busy. I actually haven't had a chance to look at the exhibition yet. What about in the conversations that you've been hearing? Is there anything struck you? Is there anything that sparked your imagination? There is something that's happening in the world today that I think people should... I think you'll find fascinating. It's this idea of massive simulation platforms that are being put out. So, you know, you have these supercomputers and they can model the galaxy, you know, let's say 300 billion galaxies out of, let's say trillions of particles and they can sort of model what's going to have some kind of dark matter and how it evolves on gravity and what's going to happen to the universe. Put this in a supercomputer. That capability now is being commercialized. So, there's a company called Improbable. In fact, this came out of a CB Insights report, so I want to give them credit, but it's really quite fascinating. They've got a VR gaming platform. They just raised, I think, over 500 million, and the governments are using it. Telecommunications companies are using it and other enterprises to simulate solutions to big problems and things like that to help in decision-making. So, I think that's a really interesting thing that's happening. And maybe one other idea. You know, people think that quantum computing is sort of like 50 years old, but I belong to some called the ACM Association for Computing Machinery, which is sort of the number one comp science organization in the world like we have the Turing Award. Anyways, I just arranged the head of quantum computing for IBM to do a webinar. And it's not 50 years away. I mean, there's quantum computers being used right now. They're solving real problems. And when they're applied to some like artificial intelligence, we don't know what's going on. You know, the capabilities are going to be unlimited, right? So, I think that's going to be pretty magical what's going to happen. So, in a few years time, who knows what the future holds for us? Well, you actually won't be interviewing me. It'll be some kind of an artificial assistance, you know, right? Sophia's daughter, probably. Yeah, yeah, exactly. With gravitas and an English accent. Exactly. And I'll be able to go to the beach and relax. Just every now and again, approve, approve, approve. Yeah, exactly. Maybe you'll miss me. But anyway, I will certainly miss you if you weren't here and replaced by an artificial intelligence here. But thank you very much, Stephen. That was brilliant. Thanks for your insights. And we look forward to catching up with you again soon. It was a real pleasure. Thank you again. Thank you. Cheers.