This issue focuses on new technologies and their potential benefits for humanity as well as their expanding use in advancing the 2030 Agenda. It explores the promise of our digital age, while posing important questions about where these technologies are leading us, and how their misuse could also lead to increased inequality and conflict.
AI could open up tremendous opportunities for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Its applications enable innovative solutions, improved risk assessment, better planning and faster knowledge sharing.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is converging with an extraordinary array of other technologies, from biotech and genomics, to neurotechnology, robotics, cybertechnology and manufacturing systems. Increasingly, these technologies are decentralized, beyond State control, and available to a wide range of actors around the world.
Since the very beginning of space activities in the late 1950s, the United Nations, through the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), has served as the venue for debating ventures in outer space, national endeavours, international space law and challenges to the way we conduct space activities.
The digital future is already here. As nearly every aspect of our lives becomes digitized, we must ensure that laws and policies are based on fundamental rights.
Data is everywhere, constantly being created by humans and machines across the globe. But as half of the world seems to be drowning in data, too many people and places are still invisible in the numbers that drive decisions.
Tremendous technological leaps are being made, but the economic and social benefits remain geographically concentrated, primarily in developed countries.
Innovation and the rise of digital technology have forever changed how we work, interact with one another, and create and share information. Innovative technologies are also changing how we, at the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), are supporting children and young people around the world.
Standards connect us with reliable modes of communication, codes of practice and frameworks for cooperation.
In response to changes in the publishing industry, the UN Chronicle, like many journals and periodicals, will now become a fully digital magazine following the publication of this issue. A fully redesigned UN Chronicle website will be launched by mid-2019. Like its earliest predecessors, it will offer original content that is varied, concise and updated regularly, and continue to highlight the SDGs and the work being done to achieve them.
Humanity is at a crossroads: we face both the opportunities and challenges of a range of powerful and emerging technologies that will drive radical shifts in the way we live.
