Author: Digital World

According to the new ITU Broadband Commission report, “State of Broadband 2016,” billions of people are still not connected to the internet and a half a billion homes that are connected do not have adequate broadband.  Many of these people live in developing countries in high cost areas that are currently unprofitable to serve.

To solve this problem, policymakers should consider imposing an upfront universal service obligation, or USO, in their countries’ upcoming 700 MHz auctions. Bidders will reflect the USO’s added costs of deployment in their proposed bids.  In this way, governments will efficiently fund broadband deployment costs to high cost areas and private companies will determine how best to meet the deployment obligation the regulator defines.

But even if affordable broadband is available, people need the skills to use digital tools to navigate the web.  Digital literacy programs and the use of ICT and broadband in schools can help close the adoption gap.

The ITU Broadband Commission Demand Creation Report provides several examples of public private partnerships that have made a difference. For example, a program implemented by the government of Senegal and the World Bank enables many university students to obtain computers and Costa Rica’s “connected homes program” benefits vulnerable socioeconomic groups via subsidies for computers and internet access.

Also helpful is the “Smart Africa” initiative, a regional program that brought together several heads of African countries, to improve adoption of ICT and broadband across Africa.

However, despite these efforts, more can be done. The value is clear: deploying more broadband and getting millions more people online will generate myriad social and economic benefits.

I look forward to discussing how we can best make further progress on broadband deployment globally – both on supply and demand sides – in the “Reaching another billion: Understanding what works to stimulate ICT adoption” session in the Forum at ITU Telecom World 2016 in the coming days.

Building an Inclusive ICT Innovation Ecosystem: A Success Story from Belarus Hi-Tech Park

Established 10 years ago as a start-up initiative, Belarus Hi-Tech Park (HTP) has provided software and IT services production growth at 30-40% annually and is expected to reach $1b this year. 10 years ago, we could not have imagined such results since the whole country exported software worth about $14m.

HTP has turned out to be one of the leading innovative IT clusters in Europe, with 164 resident companies and over 25,000 software engineers employed there. More than 3,000 new jobs are created in HTP companies annually.

Belarus has become a prominent player on the international IT market, with the professionalism and expertise of Belarusian software engineers being recognized globally. Thus, Gartner names Belarus among the Top 10 most attractive locations for service delivery centers in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa).

HTP companies provide IT services on the B2B market to customers from 61 countries. EPAM, IBA Group, Itransition, Intetics, Exadel, ScienceSoft, System Technologies, and many other HTP residents are well-known internationally. Five out of ten of the world’s largest companies (according to Forbes Lists) are among HTP customers. Over 900 million people in more than 190 countries use applications developed in HTP.

Due to the unique innovation ecosystem created in HTP, a number of IT projects have already gained worldwide success: World of Tanks, Viber, Apalon, maps.me, MSQRD.

We are witnessing the emergence of a new economy – the information economy, with the individual at its core. So our task is to develop an ecosystem encouraging smart, talented people to work on their ideas in Belarus, and think globally when implementing them.

The major pillar of the HTP innovation ecosystem is a comprehensive cooperation between the IT industry and the country’s education system based on three models.

The Stanford model appeared to be the most favorable to bridge the gap between academic and real life and became the earliest we adopted. HTP companies have opened about 80 joint research labs in Belarusian universities as a channel for practical knowledge transfer. Initially, these labs were focused exclusively on software engineering; now they also teach business analytics, computer science, etc.

Over 30 university research departments of computer science and related subjects operate within HTP companies to bring together educational process and production, improve the quality of training, and enable students to gain their first professional experience.

Another example we followed is the John Bryce model. To solve a challenge Israel faced when about a million former Soviet Union immigrants, mostly engineers, failed to find jobs, they invited Motorola, HP and some other global high-tech corporations to open R&D centers, and created a special educational center to re-train adults in the hi-tech field. That gave an unprecedented boost to the Israeli IT industry.

In 2010, the Educational Center of the Hi-Tech Park was established with the participation of HTP residents to provide re-education for adults with a technical background. Over 5,000 people were retrained there. Today, the HTP Educational Center also works with students and children. For its efforts in promoting and fostering information society development, HTP Educational Center was highly appreciated by the WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) expert group and honoured as a Champion of WSIS Prize 2016 during the WSIS Forum in Geneva.

One more model was prompted by our own experience. As HTP companies gained expertise in different areas, sometimes highly specialized, they started to establish their own competence centers. These centers allow companies’ employees to access best international and Belarusian practices and improve their skills in solving unusual and complex tasks. The competence centers also provide free courses to re-train adults who successfully pass special entrance tests (in mathematical logic, English, etc.).

Today, we are witnessing a boom in the start-up movement worldwide: in the USA, China, India, Brazil, and in European countries. Young people in Belarus are also eager to develop their own projects as they are witnessing an increasing number of global success stories in Belarus.

The HTP business incubator serves to encourage entrepreneurship and sustain the spirit of innovation. This is a place where innovators can meet engineers, and ideas for new business ventures can be born. Start-up companies developing their own products can get assistance and mentorship there.

Knowledge is important but motivation and inspiration mean even more. So we invite developers and founders of successful Belarusian projects to share their experience with startups and drive them.

Since our local market is small, we do not support projects intended for Belarus only. Instead, we encourage entrepreneurs to consider international prospects when working on their projects, and attract investments from abroad. If you can get funding in Singapore, Tokyo, Silicon Valley, or London, you are on the right road and develop a truly global product.

I look forward to sharing our experiences and learning from other participants in the B2G Dialogue “Top-down vs Bottom-up Innovation: Fostering Future Tech Entrepreneurship” at ITU Telecom World 2016 in the coming days.

Artificial intelligence announcements are happening daily and a catalyst for hyper time compression of innovation, driving extreme convergence of multiple domains, producing exponential acceleration automation and universal connectivity.

To illustrate there are these proof points:

• There is a prediction that the next AI breakthrough through a Master AI Algorithm would produce a company worth 10 Microsofts or more than 4 trillion dollars in market capitalization.
• From mobile and cloud first, we now have AI first as the current enterprise strategy.
• China has a startup investment fund of $337B, an amount greater than the GDP of over 80% of countries with a key focus on robotics and AI.
• A Hong Kong VC fund, Deep Knowledge Ventures, assigning an AI to its board for decision making.
• Baidu, China’s dominant search company, announcing an AI-based StockMaster App that analyses news, markets predicting sectors, stocks or markets changes.
• Telefonica and BigML using AI to select start-ups for funding.
• Accelerating this year, we see growing use of AI-based robo advisors in wealth management and the proliferation of intelligence agents and chat bots. Robo-advisors removing the need for brokers, generating higher returns with little cost/lower fees, reducing minimums, and growing alignment/anticipation with consumer needs/wants/behaviors.
• There is AI’s increasing implementation in consumer financial and healthcare apps pre-emptively guiding our daily financial and health lifestyle choices.
• McKinsey indicating that 58 per cent of US jobs can be automated with AI-based natural language processing working at average human levels.
• The financial services roundtable or FSR, a trade organization consisting of the 100 top CEOs in financial services, who manage more assets at 91.7 trillion USD than the annual global economy, is holding their Fintech Ideas Festival in January 2017 where AI is a major theme and its implications to financial inclusion and the future workforce.

How about predicting major global changes which impact the Sustainable Development Goals?

There is NELL, the Never-Ending Language Learner which is consuming the web with more than 50 million items learned.

Ultimately, this becomes an uber prediction tool much like Bing Predicts from Microsoft and Google prediction technology and with machine learning tools easily usable for supporting the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

When I keynoted on Megatrends in Korea, another speaker hosted by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning talked about a hybrid delphi system Korea is using to predict and then act upon future trends with over 80 per cent accuracy. It’s a combination of human/machine collaboration and a catalyst where they are trying to change to an algorithm based economy from component manufacturing and with over 4.5 per cent of their GDP going to R&D, the highest in the world.

What of the future?

The impact of AI is so profound and so widespread that Bill Gates in June provided a recommended must-read of The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos. Pedro’s book describes the five tribes of machine learning as:

• Symbolists–Fill in gaps in existing knowledge
• Connectionists–Emulate the brain; this is Deep Learning
• Evolutionists–Simulate evolution
• Bayesians–Systematically reduce uncertainty
• Analogizers–Notice similarities between old and new

This year, I keynoted at ICSE, the world’s largest software engineering conference funded by the National Science Foundation, the research arms of the major technology companies and the four top science organizations in software engineering. Earlier from Pedro, I received his five top AI megatrends which I outlined at ICSE. I am reproducing them here due to their impact on SDGs and due to the pronounced impact on the international audience of top researchers:

1.The transition from computers that are programmed by us to computers that learn on their own. This is enabled by big data, and in turn enables the personalization of everything, from medicine to shopping, and the increasing automation of every function in an organization.

2.The automation of scientific discovery. Increasingly, each step of the scientific method, from gathering data to formulating hypotheses, is carried out by computers. This enables, for example, new drugs to be discovered at a much faster rate than before.

3.The replacement of white-collar workers by machines, not just blue-collar ones. Routine intellectual work can increasingly be done by AI; what’s hard to replace is physical dexterity, common sense, and integrative intelligence.

4.The transition from deterministic to probabilistic computing. From hardware to software, rigidly deterministic computations are giving way to probabilistic ones, enabling faster, cheaper, lower-power, larger-scale, more ubiquitous, more flexible, data-driven information systems.

5.The rise of evidence-based X, where X includes medicine, policy-making, development aid, and ultimately all important societal decisions. Instead of guesswork and mixed results, we have controlled trials that quickly weed out what doesn’t work from what does.

The future will see large parts of our lives influenced by AI of Everything (AoE)–the global AI mesh spawning a Digital Quake driving the Knowledge Synthesis of Everything (KSE), an inflection point for humankind and the SDGs.

ITU has responded with plans to hold a series of talks on AI that I will have the privilege of moderating at ITU Telecom World 2016 and the ITU Kaleidoscope academic conference in Bangkok, Thailand, this November.

ITU has also created a new LinkedIn group for debate on cutting-edge AI technologies and related ICT applications and services, with the aim of promoting discussion on the future course of AI innovation and its implications for technical standardization and governance. I encourage you to join the discussion to share your views on how you would like to see the international community approaching the biggest questions surrounding the future of AI and, by extension, the future of humanity.

 

Imagine a factory floor with no operators in sight, machines receiving orders, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) moving products from one machine to the next, machines performing self-diagnosis and predicting failures and finally delivering a unique, customized product based on the customer’s specifications.  This is the future of manufacturing!

The world of manufacturing is making a quantum leap with robots, self-organizing production, augmented reality and 3D printing. At the heart of this change is data – data from all these machines to drive outcomes – mass customization, predictive maintenance, products-to-services.

In smart factories where processes are fully digitized and connected, manufacturers can build and deliver orders more quickly. Customers are also able to personalize their purchases from a manufacturer with smart factory capabilities. This type of connected manufacturer, often referred to as Industry 4.0 or the fourth industrial revolution, is underway – and will be central to the debate at the plenary Forum session “The digital economy: driving industry 4.0” at ITU Telecom World 2016 in Bangkok this November.

The Connected Smart Factory

Audi, Harley Davidson, and Siemens are among the smart factory leaders that are changing the business of manufacturing. A smart factory is defined by its level of connectedness.

Five levels of Connectedness

The first level is intra-company vertical integration where a company’s business systems connect to the shop floor systems. A large number of automobile makers have been producing cars with this level of connectedness for years. Instead of having separated systems for manufacturing planning, execution, tracking, and tracing, these processes are connected and integrated with corporate business systems to improve key metrics such as customer delivery, quality and costs.

The second level is machine-to-machine connectedness where intelligent machines self-diagnose and self-correct. In these smart factories, machines have built-in sensors or RFID chips that allow them to ‘talk’ to each other and adjust workflows.

eCommerce integration, or direct integration of online configurations, is the third level of connectedness. This type of smart factory caters to the consumer, providing personalized, highly configurable products that are managed from order entry to the shop floor.

The fourth level of connectedness is manufacturing collaboration, which supports collaboration with suppliers, contract manufacturing, design partners, OEMs and customers. Design partners can work on prototypes and test designs with real time integration to shop floor systems. With the advent of 3D printing, this gives design partners the ability to do rapid prototyping.

The final level of connectedness is when machines on the factory floor are connected to a machine cloud that enables remote monitoring, predictive maintenance and quality management. Operators and manufacturers of machines can manage their assets at remote sites, while having visibility into performance and usage. Predictive maintenance and service solutions allow equipment manufacturers and operators of machinery to monitor machine health remotely, predict failures and proactively maintain assets.

Harley Davidson Regroups with Digitized Operations

A Smart Factory is not limited to automation of a single production facility. It incorporates integration across core functions – from production, materials sourcing, supply chain and warehousing to sale of the final product.

Visionary companies like Harley-Davidson Inc. are at the forefront of Industry 4.0 innovation with its use of end-to-end digital engineering. In Harley-Davidson’s new manufacturing facility, every machine is a connected device and every variable is continuously measured and analyzed. Equipment provides performance data that the manufacturing system uses to anticipate maintenance issues before machines break, minimizing workflow interruptions.

eCommerce integration lets customers personalize their bikes by choosing paint colors, frame designs and gas tank sizes. Dealers connect online to the Harley-Davidson manufacturing process and customers place their customized orders immediately at purchase.

Harley-Davidson has experienced incredible improvements since moving to a smart factory. The company reduced its operating costs by $200 million at one plant alone and saw an efficiency in its production line.

The single biggest change is the speed of order fulfillment. Harley-Davidson moved from a fixed 21-day production schedule for new orders down to only six hours.

Make Way for Industry 4.0

The number of companies that have adopted Smart Factory technology is growing but manufacturers are still hesitant. Some claim they have invested too much in existing machinery that will still work for many years. They have also raised fears of security breaches and are pushing for more standardization.

For manufacturers who are dragging their feet, they are only delaying the inevitable. Smart factories are coming and will be prevalent in the future. A Mckinsey Report reveals that companies expect Industry 4.0 to increase revenues by 23% and productivity by 26% and many are preparing for changes to their business model. Those who don’t believe in the force of Smart Factories, will be left behind as new, smarter, more agile competitors enter the marketplace.

 

In today’s world, everyone talks about how to bridge the digital divide and connect the unconnected to vital ICT resources. The objective, especially in the international community, is to connect people to the adequate infrastructure to ensure that they have access to important services. However, gaining access to infrastructure is not enough. People also need to be taught how to access infrastructure and use these services. Capacity building and training programs are key to empowering people to harness the benefits that ICTs can offer.

At ITSO, our Capacity Building Initiative, which is implemented through partnerships with other international organizations like the ITU, is structured to do just that. In addition to teaching people how to best use important resources such as communications satellites, we also ensure that our member states are equipped with information about the technical and regulatory aspects of satellite communications.

The ITSO Executive Organ has developed a training programme for three separate courses on satellite communications:  firstly, a combined technical and regulatory course; secondly, one intended for policy makers and regulators; and, thirdly, a course for earth station operators and engineers.  This programme can also be carried out in cooperation or back-to-back with other events through short duration events like seminars or workshops. ITSO has also been arranging tailored courses that respond to specific concerns from Member States. Over the implementation period 2010 to 2016, a total of approximately 1500 participants have been trained at the various locations in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

In addition to this training programme, ITSO has also collaborated with American University’s Washington College of Law (AUWCL) to create a Program on International Communications Regulation and Policy, headed by ITSO’s Director of Legal Affairs and AUWCL adjunct professor Renata Brazil David. The programme includes an online course on “Basic Principles of International Communications Regulation and Policy”; a summer course on “International Communications Law: A Comparative Perspective”; and a semester course on “International Communications Regulation and Policy”.

Programs like ITSO’s Capacity Building Initiative are an important reminder that bridging the digital divide does not just mean giving people access to infrastructure, but also training them to use these resources to get the services they need.

And the emphasis on regulation and policy in communications underlines the importance of getting the regulatory environment right for the digital economy to flourish worldwide.  The ICT sector will be crucial to achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)  – but success will require greater collaboration between the ICT sector and other vertical sectors, in particular in the field of regulation. I look forward to exploring these themes and more in the session on “Collaborative Regulation: the key to smart infrastructure in the digital economy” at ITU Telecom World 2016 in Bangkok later this month.

Start-ups along with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are a key force in the innovation ecosystem worldwide, and in emerging markets in particular. They understand local customers’ needs and can develop solutions to their problems in very agile ways, sometimes bringing disruption to century-old businesses. Some have made incredible breakthroughs in the past few years and changed the lives of many. Like M-KOPA Solar who have equipped hundreds of thousands of African homes with pay-as-you-go solar systems, or ride-sharing platform Ola providing extra livelihood to hundreds of thousands of drivers in India. However, such success stories should not conceal the fact that for the majority of them, reaching scale is a real struggle.

Mobile operators on the other hand have touched the lives of billions in low- and middle-income countries in the past couple decades. Mobile phones are ubiquitous and the main way to access the internet and other important services. They are a vital lifeline in the case of disasters. They provide communication channels – like voice, SMS, or USSD – that are easy to use and accessible to anyone who owns a mobile. With mobile money services, they have offered a payment solution with over 400 million accounts worldwide, that addresses the shortcomings of many local banking systems. On the ground, they have deployed powerful distribution networks that employ millions. Nevertheless, they face challenges that make it hard for them to keep up with the accelerating pace of innovation.

On paper, this is a perfect match: mobile operators can help start-ups and SMEs unlock scale, and in return stay on top of the game when it comes to innovation. Unfortunately, the reality is that this type of collaboration does not always happen naturally. That being said, there are some very encouraging signs that mobile operators are taking significant steps. Here are a few examples:

• Access to finance is still limited for local tech start-ups. In 2015 in Africa they raised a mere USD185m. Mobile operators are using Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) activities to help bridge this funding gap. Safaricom for instance set up its spark venture fund to support local start-ups in Kenya, while some groups have adopted a more global approach, like Orange with their Orange Digital Ventures fund.
• Mobile operators hold the key to channels they should open through APIs: voice, SMS, USSD, career billing, mobile money etc. Enabling technical integration is a vital first step, and it needs to be coupled with outreach and support to the local developer community, like Dialog is undertaking in Sri Lanka with Ideamart or Orange with their Entrepreneur Club. Mobile operators as a community can also work together to standardise their APIs and facilitate interoperability, which they are currently doing on mobile money with the support of GSMA.
• There are many types of synergies to be explored. As stated above, mobile operators in emerging markets usually have one of the strongest local distribution networks, payment solutions, brand, marketing power etc.,that a start-up can leverage to build its reach and credibility. The collaboration between MTN and Jumia in Nigeria for example spans most of these dimensions and has been mutually beneficial to both parties.
• Mobile operators are also being inclusive of the broader ecosystem. For instance, we found that 13% of tech hubs across Africa and Asia have formed a partnership with a mobile operator, such as Vodafone with MEST in Ghana. Some operators might also chose to launch their own structure (e.g. Telenor Velocity in Pakistan) or team up to run challenges (e.g. Singtel/Airtel Accelerator Challenge) to support new talent. In other cases they work with local governments on ambitious projects such as the Connecting Start-ups Bangladesh initiative in which banglalink is actively involved.

Even though more still needs to be done to realise the full potential of collaboration, the examples above are very positive indications that mobile operators are taking concrete actions to address the challenges local start-ups and SMEs face, and to create mutual trust. The GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator is committed to working with all stakeholders in the ecosystem to ensure more partnerships are built, and as a result more products and services are able to bring positive socio-economic impact to local citizens at scale. And we’re looking forward to discussing some of the ways in which we can make that happen with a whole range of stakeholders in the B2B Dialogue on Harnessing Disruptive Innovation at ITU Telecom World 2016 in Bangkok this November.

I am delighted to have been asked to moderate the session on “Making money from meeting the SDGs?” at ITU Telecom World in Bangkok on Monday 14^th November (4:45 PM – 6:00 PM, Jupiter 10), although I wonder a little why I have been chosen for this task given my past criticisms of the SDGs!  Perhaps the “?” in the session title will give me a little freedom to explore some of the many challenges and complexities in this theme.  Following in the footsteps of the Millennium Development Goals (2000), the globally agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) still generally focus on the idea that economic growth will eliminate poverty; indeed, they assert that poverty can truly be ended.  This is a myth, and a dangerous one. For those who define poverty in a relative sense, poverty will always be with us.  It can certainly be reduced, but never ended.   It is therefore good to see the SDGs also focusing on social inclusion, with SDG 10 explicitly addressing inequality.  We need to pay much more attention to ways through which ICTs can thus reduce inequality, rather than primarily focusing on their contribution to economic growth, which has often actually led to increasing inequality.

This session will explore the implications of such tensions specifically for the role of ICT businesses in delivering the SDGs.  Key questions to be examined include:

• How can the ICT sector contribute to accelerating the achievement of the SDGs by providing ICT-enabled solutions and building feasible business models?
• Is the SDG agenda relevant for the ICT industry?
• What roles should the ICT industry, and its corporate social responsibility (CSR) departments in particular, play in working towards the SDGs?
• Can the SDG framework provide an opportunity to accelerate transformative ICT-enabled solutions around new solutions like big data or IoT?

Underlying these are difficult issues about the ethics of making money from development, and the extent to which the ICT sector is indeed sustainable.  All too often, the private sector, governments and even civil society are now using the idea of “development” to build their ICT interests, rather than actually using ICTs to contribute to development understood as reducing inequalities; we increasingly have “development for ICTs” (D4ICT) rather than “ICTs for development” (ICT4D).  To be sure, businesses have a fundamentally important role in contributing to economic growth, but there is still little agreement, for example, on how best to deliver connectivity to the poorest and most marginalized, so that inequality can be reduced. As my forthcoming book argues, we need to reclaim ICTs truly for development in the interests of the poorest and most marginalized.

We have a great panel with whom to explore these difficult questions.  Following opening remarks by Chaesub Lee (Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, ITU), we will dive straight into addressing the above questions with the following panelists (listed in alphabetical order of first names):

• Astrid Tuminez (Senior Director, Government Affairs. Microsoft)
• Lawrence Yanovitch (President of GSMA Foundation)
• Luis Neves (Chairman Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), and Climate Change and Sustainability Officer, Executive Vice President, at Deutsche Telekom Group)
• Mai Oldgard (Head of Sustainability, Telenor)
• Tomas Lamanauskas (Group Director Public Policy, VimpelCom).

Magic happens when people from different backgrounds are brought together to discuss challenging issues.  This session will therefore not have any formal presentations, but will instead seek to engage the panelists in discussion amongst themselves and with the audience.  We will generate new ideas that participants will be able to take away and apply in their everyday practices.  Looking forward to seeing you on the Monday afternoon of Telecom World in Bangkok!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help us in many ways: it can perform hard, dangerous or boring work for us, can help us to save lives and cope with disasters, can entertain us and make our daily life more comfortable.

Advances in AI are occurring at high speed. The potential risks and problems of AI technology are filling newspapers (e.g. Observer, 2015, the Guardian, 2015) with discussions ranging from killer robots to privacy concerns, the consequences of AI for labour and social equality (Daily Express, 2016), or superintelligence (CNN, 2014). However, rather than being a threat to our existence or plotting to take over the rule of the world, AI is already changing our daily lives, almost entirely in ways that improve human health, safety, and productivity.

In the coming years we can expect AI systems to be used increasingly in domains such as transportation, service robots, healthcare, education, low-resource communities, public safety and security, employment and workplace, and entertainment (100 Year AI report). But these systems must be introduced in ways that build trust and understanding, and respect human and civil rights.

There is, in fact, a lot to be positive about. Currently, over a million persons die annually in traffic accidents, more than half of which are caused by human error. Even if intelligent self-driving cars do cause accidents and deaths, forecasts show a sharp decrease in road casualties associated with the increase in self-driving cars. Similarly, jobs will be lost – but maybe repetitive, monotonous, demeaning jobs should be lost, freeing up people for more meaningful and joyful occupations.

AI developments will contribute to a much-needed redefinition of fundamental human values, including our current understanding of work, wealth and responsibility – all of which will be part of the debate in the panel session AI: is the future finally here? at ITU Telecom World 2016 in Bangkok this November.

Work: As AI systems replace people in many traditional jobs, we must rethink the meaning of work. Jobs change, but more importantly, the character of jobs will change. Meaningful occupations are those that contribute to the welfare of society, self-fulfilment and the advancement of mankind. These do not necessarily equate with current ‘paid jobs’. AI systems can free us up for these occupations, allow us to be rewarded for them, to care for each other, engage in arts, hobbies and sports,  enjoy nature, meditate –  all those things that give us energy and make us happy.

Wealth: Technological developments in the last century led to mass production and mass consumption. Until very recently, having has been the main goal, and competition the main drive: “I am what I have”. Digital developments, including AI, favour openness over competition: open data, open source, open access, and so on. The drive is now quickly shifting to sharing: “I am what I share”. Combined with the changing role of work, this novel view on wealth requires a new view on economics and finance.

Responsibility: As AI moves from a tool to a teammate, perhaps the most important result of AI advances is the need to rethink responsibility. Developments in autonomy and machine learning are rapidly enabling AI systems to decide and act without direct human control. Greater autonomy must come with greater responsibility, even when the notions of machine autonomy and responsibility are necessarily different from those that apply to people. Machines are already making decisions. We need to deal with longer chains of responsibility, and with responsibility being extended to refer to machines and corporations.

Responsibility contributes to trust and includes accountability, i.e. being able to explain and justify decisions. Our trust in other people is partly based on our ability to understand their ways of doing (by putting ourselves in their place), but this does not hold true for machines. Trust in machines must then be based on transparency. Algorithm development has so far been led by the goal of improving performance, leading to opaque black boxes. Putting human values at the core of AI systems calls for a mind-shift of researchers and developers towards the goal of improving transparency rather than performance, which will lead to novel and exciting algorithms, turning deep learning into valuable learning.

Several initiatives are currently focusing on the ethical and societal aspects of AI development, including the IEEE Initiative on the Ethics of Autonomous Systems and the Partnership on AI.

I foresee an exciting future coming forth from AI developments. We are ultimately responsible. As researchers and developers, to take fundamental human values as the basis of our design and implementation decisions. And as users and owners of AI systems, to ensure a continuous chain of responsibility and trust encompassing the acts and decisions of the systems as these learn and adapt to our society.

The World Economic Forum has identified Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of the top 6 trends shaping our society. Gartner’s 2016 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies has the perceptual smart machine age as a top 3 trend. And Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said that “we should be very careful about artificial intelligence … it is perhaps our biggest existential threat.”

But what is AI, and is our wariness of unintended consequences obstructing our view of the great benefits it could bring humanity? What are the implications to society, economic development, and our paths to prosperity?

The ‘AI of Everything’ era

The near future will see large parts of our lives influenced by the AI of Everything (AoE) – an inflection point for humankind.

It’s an unprecedented era of:

1. Hyper time compression in the emergence of new disruptive innovations — measured in days and weeks rather than years.
2. Extreme convergence of multiple domains: physical, digital, biological – where there is overlapping amplification of value.
3. Exponential acceleration of automation – triggered by smart sensors and the IoT
4. Connectivity linked by a digital AI mesh – through the rapid deployment of machine learning.

Indeed, AI is creating a digital quake where 80 percent of companies and jobs may need to change or fail. Machines can execute repetitive tasks with complete precision, and with recent advances in AI, machines are gaining the ability to learn, improve and make calculated decisions in ways that will enable them to perform tasks previously thought to rely on human experience, creativity, and ingenuity.

AI will also come to support emerging applications in the IoT space, with billions of devices, things and objects gaining the ability to learn from patterns observed in their environment and communicate these learnings to a larger ecosystem of intelligent devices.

AI: central to achieving the SDGs

AI innovation will be central to the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by capitalizing on the unprecedented quantities of data now being generated on sentiment behavior, human health, commerce, communications, migration and more.

For instance, machine learning and reasoning can extend medical care to remote regions through automated diagnosis and effective exploitation of limited medical expertise and transportation resources (SDG 3). Methods developed within the AI community may even help to unearth causal influences within large-scale development programs, helping us to build a better understanding of how we might design more effective education systems (SDG 4). Ideas and tools created at the intersection of AI and electronic commerce may uncover new ways to enhance novel economic concepts, such as micro-finance and micro-work (SDG 8). AI will also serve as a key resource in curbing greenhouse gas emissions in urban environments and supporting the development of smart cities (SDGs 11 & 13).

ITU and AI standards and regulation

Global partnerships (SDG 17) will offer crucial support to our pursuit of all of these goals and a draft report by the European Parliament strongly encourages international cooperation in establishing regulations and standards for the governance of AI technologies under the auspices of the United Nations.

ITU has responded with plans to hold a series of talks on AI that I will have the privilege of moderating at the upcoming ITU World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly in Hammamet, Tunisia; as well as at ITU Telecom World and the ITU Kaleidoscope academic conference in Bangkok, Thailand.

ITU also recently signed a partnership with the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE. The 5 million USD prize aims to accelerate the adoption of AI technologies from diverse and open sources, and spark creative, innovative, bold demonstrations of technologies with the potential to become truly scalable and capable of solving some of the most pressing challenges to our societies and economies.

The development and adoption of relevant international standards can help us to realize the benefits of AI advances on a global scale, assisting us in the pursuit of the UN sustainable development goals. However, despite widespread understanding of the benefits we could draw from a set of internationally accepted standards, we have yet to make any significant progress in our attempts to agree such standards. We are in need of a better understanding of where AI innovation is leading us and what this means for international cooperation, in the domains of both regulation and standardization.

ITU has created a new LinkedIn group for debate on cutting-edge AI technologies and related ICT applications and services, with the aim of promoting discussion on the future course of AI innovation and its implications for technical standardization and governance. I encourage you to join the discussion to share your views on how you would like to see the international community approaching the biggest questions surrounding the future of AI and, by extension, the future of humanity.

Our world is a connected one. A world where we increasingly have the power to reach anyone else, any time, wherever they may be, through voice, text, photos or videos. A whole new world of communication opening up new potential for working together to overcome problems and find solutions, facilitating innovation and collaboration.

That collaboration is at the very heart of ITU Telecom World. For over four decades, it has been bringing together the global ICT community to share ideas, exhibit new technologies and solutions, debate key trends and network across governments, industry and nations. As the ITU’s flagship event, its unique selling point has always been its ability to put ministers, regulators, evenheads of state and government, into direct contact with CEOs and industry leaders from across the ICT ecosystem and around the world. ITU’s status as the leading UN agency for ICT issues, and the event’s focus on structured and unstructured networking events, spaces and tools, has ensured its success.

Where else, after all, could you join in a debate in one single location with the Director of Global Innovation at UNICEF, the Head of Startup Europe in the European Commission, the COO of RwandaOnline Platorm, the Russian ICT Minister and the head of a Singaporean investment firm?

Or have morning coffee with a Korean startup, lunch with ministers from three Smart Africa countries and dinner with a major Chinese operator?

As John Davies, former World Ahead VP for Intel and long-standing ITU Telecom World participant, puts it: “If you look at the number of people here, if I were to get on a plane to try and meet the people I meet here this week, it would take me a year of flying.  They are all here, the decision-makers, sharing best practices.”

ITU Telecom World 2016, taking place in Bangkok, Thailand, this November, will continue to facilitate important connections across public and private sectors, nations, individuals and ideas. But it will also focus concretely on developing those connections into meaningful collaboration – on how we can work together to make positive change happen faster, to make the world better, sooner.

The Forum debates will explore collaboration in new technological developments, such as 5G and the Internet of Things, which are powering solutions from the connected car to smart cities, ehealth or digital financial services. All of these solutions have the potential to change our lives dramatically for the better; to drive industry growth and socio- economic development. But none of them can happen without collaboration. Regulators, businesses and government ministries need to work together across vertical sectors – it’s not just about ICT or finance, for example, but a combination of the two very different cultures.

Standardization, interoperability, and security call for new partnerships, new approaches and new ways of thinking to develop and take to scale new solutions. In a digital ecosystem made up of ever more stakeholders, from governments driving policy and regulation to established, major ICT companies, disruptive new OTT players and innovative SMEs, working together is the only way to meet these challenges.

Who might work with whom in which sector, why and to what end? Will it be possible to move beyond long-established mindsets and industry cultures, to embrace disruptive technologies and unorthodox new partners? The stakes are high, the outcomes uncertain. Whether collaboration will trump competition, or work in parallel with it, will be the subject of much debate.

What is sure is that coming together at ITU Telecom World, making connections, communicating, sharing opinions, experiences and ideas, is an important first step to working to find solutions together – to making that connected world a collaborative one.