In recent years, the rapid progress of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and other frontier technologies, has been met with a mixture of hope for development and fears of massive unemployment and of crossing dangerous ethical boundaries. This prompted some observers to announce the new industrial revolution.
But unlike the previous tech upheavals, the current one will have much broader consequences for humankind and therefore needs to be carefully managed by the international community, the speakers in Boao agreed, noting that national policies and regulations may not be enough.
“We need international cooperation, because the new industrial revolution is different from previous ones,” said Liu Zhenmin, head of UN DESA and convener of the session. “It will affect every aspect of human development and climate action. We cannot wait until the technology is available. We need to start cooperating now – still in the process of innovation.”This call to urgent action was echoed by other speakers who all agreed that the international community needs to get ahead of the dizzying technological progress. “This revolution is completely different from the previous ones. The previous revolutions came at a very slow pace, like long waves in the ocean and this revolution happens as a tsunami,” said Marie Chatardová, Permanent Representative of the Czech Republic to the United Nations and Co-chair of the UN Science, Technology and Innovation Forum.
Ms. Chatardová added that the only way to manage such drastic change is by involving all stakeholders from politics to academia to businesses. She joined the other speakers in pointing to the United Nations as the ideal platform for bringing these different partners together.
The experts speaking at the session admitted that the world is not ready to negotiate globally binding rules for technology development, but that discussion on fundamental issues and shared underlying values should already be taking place to help shape the policies of tomorrow. “We have to start to define where to start,” said Bernard Charles, Chief Executive of a leading 3D printing company Dassault Systemes.
Former Minister of Environment of Brazil and member of UN DESA’s High-level Advisory Board on Social and Economic Affairs, Izabella Teixeira, urged to include scientists and young people in these discussions. “We like to discuss the future without the generation that will bring the future,” she said.
The experts also scanned the horizon for scientific breakthroughs that may bring the next technological revolution. For Ni Guangnan, Professor of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and cofounder of Lenovo, artificial intelligence, life sciences and new sources of energy are the areas we should look at.
Bernard Charles, on the other hand, considers biotechnology to be the area that will most dramatically change our lives. According to him, compared to the power of changing the human cell, artificial intelligence will just be an “anecdote in the history of ICT.”
Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash