The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Good morning, everyone, can I please ask you to take your seats? We are about to start another exciting session in today's schedule. Robert Opp,.
Perfect. Good morning, everyone. Good morning to the distinguished guests, panelists and participants in very important debate we are going to have this morning on fostering inclusive digital innovation and transformation. We have touched upon some of those topics in the previous session. And now we are going to continue this debate in that.
So, it's a privilege to welcome you and to begin this event today here at the Internet Governance Forum in Saudi Arabia. It is a good reminder, those discussions, the Internet is not just a tool for us, but it's a space where societies can can come together, can foster innovation, promote equality and actually make sure that inclusion is part of our priorities.
Of course, digital transformation is a powerful tool to reshape our world, brings unprecedented opportunities for innovation, growth and connectivity.
However, this progress does present significant challenges, most notably the risk of deepening inequalities. So, on one hand, digital technologies are reshaping industry and unlocking economic growth, driving global connectivity and ensuring competitiveness of our economies.
But, on the other hand, we can see how they can drive a lot of inequalities among societies.
So, entire communities even know as we speak today, they do lack access to Internet, the digital literacy is at a low letter, or the necessary resources to participate actively and meaningfully in this transformation are not existing.
So, if we don't address these gaps, we risk to create a world that's even more divided. And I'm just going to refer to the key message that was all supposed by the Ministry of Communication and information of Saudi Arabia, His Excellency Abdullah as va ha at his opening remarks at the ceremony yesterday where he put a strong emphasis on the division when we see, when we speak about the digital economy as we see it now.
So, one of our key goals going forward should be to start working towards diminishing those gaps, if we can, of course, completely remove them, that's going to be a great success.
It's a great pleasure to introduce the distinguished speakers we have here for this panel today. Starting from my left, with Mr. Robert Opp, the Chief Digital Officer of UNDP. He's going to provide us some insights on the global development priorities and digital innovations.
On the other side of the table, we have Mario Nobile, the director of the agency for digital Italy. I'm sure he's going to bring a lot of expertise on how the public administration digitalization in Italy is working, what are the challenges we face there.
And next to me, we have Mr. Ke Gong, the president of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations. So he's going to offer the perspective and the intersection of the engineering and artificial intelligence for global benefit.
In the previous panel we have also heard how exciting it is to have the experts' views when we are discussing some of the policies on the digital matters.
So, without further ado, I will start with my first question, which also gives you the opportunity to have some opening remarks. But let's make it a bit more dynamic. My first question is going to be to Robert.
In UNDP, you strongly promote inclusive digital development, which is, of course, a topic of our debate, you are speaking about that inclusion at both local and more global level.
So, could you actually give us an example of how you are actually trying to assist countries in the specific needs when we are speaking about digital transformation, digital inclusions and all support can be provided by the members of parliaments in the various parts of the world and what do you expect from us? It's too many questions in one, but I am sure you have a lot of insights to share with us.
>> ROBERT OPP: Thank you very much, and it's a pleasure to be here. And, yeah, that's a lot of questions but there are a lot of complex issues out there that as parliamentarians you all face right now. And, in fact, I would just say in globally speaking and United Nations development programme, who I represent here, is actively working in 170 countries worldwide. We have digital programmes, digitalization programmes in over 125 of those countries. And we are also working with one in three parliaments in the world. What we see globally is a very strong pattern emerging around digitalization. And the pattern includes things in terms of where we hear expressions of or requests for support from countries are in a few different areas.
One of those areas is how do we put in place the policies and the strategies for digitalization. And in 53 countries around the world we have worked on national digital ecosystems evaluation and action planning. So, looking ahead at where countries want to go, what are the steps to get there, what are the policies and strategies you need to guide that digitalization movement.
The second area is in the space of technology. What are the layers of technology I need to put in place. And we sometimes talk about digital public infrastructure, which I know some of our the other panelists are going to mention. But digital public infrastructure is that sort of digital roads and bridges that need to be put in place, usually put in place at the instigation of government, but often implemented itself by private sector and operated by private sector.
And what we see is that that it have a very strong impact in terms of accelerating digital public services and accelerating digital economies as well.
And then the third area that we hear from countries is around capacity. What are the capacities, digital capacities or capacities to work on digitalization that are necessary to really allow us to take advantage of the powers of technology and mitigate the risks of technology.
So, we work across all of these areas in many different countries. And I would say that what we hear also from the parliamentarian side is that there are similar challenges. So, we hear from government there's capacity challenges, uncertainty around policies and strategies, et cetera. But from parliaments, we also know that there is a challenge in parliamentary capacity because parliamentarians need to also understand the shifts of digitalization, stay ahead of those shifts.
So, we have begun to work in areas like promoting information integrity around, whether it be in general or around electoral processes, preventing online violence, which is a big challenge in many countries, and also looking at the capacity to legislate and oversee the digitalization changes that are happening.
So, we have been very pleased. We have been working with the enter parliamentary union for a number of years on many different initiatives, but we have also recently created an experts group that will look specifically at these capacity challenges for parliamentarians and start to work to build capacity of parliaments around the world to really be able to support the acceleration of digitalization, which we feel has tremendous potential for building human development over time.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Thank you, thank you, Robert. You are actually going one step back in the analysis, which is very key, because we cannot be promoting or regulating matters if there is a lack of capacity in terms of the regulators.
I'm going to have a few follow up questions to you. But let me first go back to Mario so he can give us a bit more perspective from the agency side. And how do you see all those matters, like I'm not going to repeat the problems. The question is very clear. How does it work within the agency, what are the challenges you are facing, and what's the speed we can actually expect for a proper digital inclusion and transformation in Italy, especially taking into account that you have some quite outer most regions in Italy as well. So, how are you dealing with that challenge which everyone?
>> MARIO NOBILE: We have 23,000 public administrations in Italy. Local, central, health services. So, it's very difficult.
Thank you. As Director General of the agency, our mission is to drive digital transformation across the nation. And this mission is executed through very strategic tools and initiatives. One of them is the three year plan. Now, talking about three years, it's a long term. Now we are talking of months, artificial intelligence, new services. But we have this kind of strategic plan.
And in 2023, with this plan, the ICT spend in Italy was worth 7 billion euros, 3.3 for central public administration, revenue agency, national welfare institute and so on. 1.6 for local administrations. So, regions, municipalities and so on. And the 1.6 for digital health services. Remaining 0.5, last but not least, for education services.
This is about 0.64% of the Italian GDP, our ICT spending is worth it. And the agency, I got the answer to your question, the agency oversees and ensures the quality of various building blocks of the Italian digital public infrastructures. Laid down by the government to accelerate development and used by different services providers, we have the private sector, but also the single citizen. Some members in Italy we have 59 million citizens. But we have 40 million users of digital identity services.
We have 18 million users of certified email, an email to send and receive with legal validity. We have 45 million qualified certificates of signature, the digital signatures.
On the payment layer, we have Pago PR for payments towards the public administration, and in November 2024, Pago PR had 34 million transactions with a total value of 7 million euros.
We have a platform for interoperability from municipality to region to central administration, and at November 2024, we have 7500 public organizations on board.
Last, but not least. We have an e invoicing platform, our Italian revenue agency smiles because every invoice business to business, business to government, business to citizen is in electronic format.
These building blocks are the enablers for every digital services, artificial intelligence and other services.
So, these services are mainly delivered through a public private partnership model, where the agency role is to monitor and guarantee the quality of services provided by service provider. And we issue guidelines to administrations and companies to steer development of innovative and inclusive services.
Examples include the guidelines on accessibility for public administrations and companies.
And in conclusion, I would like to highlight the citizen inclusion project. It's a best practice demonstrating the agency's commitment to digital inclusion and technological literacy. This project provides various tools to public administrations and private entities to improve the quality and accessibility of digital products, services and content. It aims to enhance the accessibility of public digital services, in line with the European directive. This project is part of the national recovery and resilience plan with a budget of 80 million euros. Thank you. 80 million, yeah.
>> KE GONG: One 8?
>> MARIO NOBILE: Yeah.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Thank you, Mario, I forgot to say a few words about myself A I'm a member of the European parliament and the vice chair of the committee on industry research and energy but I am also coming from Bulgaria and listening to Mario he did remind me about something. We also have a digital administration, which is trying to work, unfortunately a lot of people are discovering that it works well only when it comes to collecting taxes or fees, not when it comes about providing services. So, I will come back to you after with the follow up question, probably on the digital literacy and how you are ensuring that.
But all the numbers that you have told us, they seem quite reassuring. It's just we want to make sure that really it reaches for everyone and is for the benefit of our citizens, not only for the governments and administrations.
And now, so I want to have all the points, all the viewpoints to our debate. So, we have heard from UNDP. We have heard from the agency and an example from our country like Italy, which is very good. And now let's go to one of the very key aspects. And how does it work with the industry? Like how do you ensure that what we have in terms of technological development, innovation is ensuring to address some of the global challenges like poverty, inequality, economic growth? And I'm turning to you, Mr. Gong, because I know that you are an expert in this and you can give us some real example if that works and where can probably be a bit more support from my side, from the public side as well.
>> KE GONG: Thank you so much. I think this year's IGF is one of the important international events after the United Nations adopted the Pact for the Future and Global Digital Compact.
So, it's my great honour to be part of this very important event and to address very important theme that's promoting inclusiveness in the digital transition.
So, based on our observation, our (?), the Chinese Institute of artificial intelligence development strategy, based on our observation to the development of digitalization in China, we find there are two strategies are very, very crucial.
First, from the supply side, it is a clean measure to providing open, accessible platforms to ease the adaptation of digital technologies, including artificial intelligence.
And this platform, in the form of public cloud services, in the form of open source communities. So, this platform linking developers, users, investors and managers to support collaboration across government, private sector, academia and the civil society and the individual users by providing pretrained fundamental models, providing standard datasets, providing computer powers and technical training in an open and scalable way. And very crucially that platforms should be tailored to local contexts, even in China. This is such a big country. We have different part with different economic development level. So we should tailor to this, to different parts. The local needs. And we have different languages also in China. We have official Chinese. But also different dialect.
So, to (?) different languages, cultural norms and digital capacities. So, that is very important to ease adaptation.
The second, from the demand side, we need to build in capacity for all with emphasis on developing regions. So, when we talk about inclusiveness, that requires proactive investment to human resources, particularly in the Global South and in those less developed regions.
So, because they do have a lot of barriers, so digital literacy, the lack of investment, lack of financial tools and so on, so forth.
So, I think that is the way that United Nations Pact for the Future focus on development and the digital inclusion. And I think the United Nations resolution adopted in July titled "Enhancing the international collaboration for building capacity of artificial intelligence" offered a guideline for this capacity building activity.
So, I think the engineering capacity is a very important content in the capacity building. Because it is engineers to use the technical method, scientific theory in the specific social, environmental, financial conditions to solve the problem. So, we have to increase the engineering capacity for especially for the less developed regions to enhance the capability of problem solving.
So, because of the limitation of time, I just stop here. Thank you.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Gong. Very insightful comments in terms of all the topics discussed so far.
And now we are going to come in a bit more details in a second round on the engineering capacity because I'm sure the audience would be interested.
A few more short questions from my side. And then we are going to ask for yeses from the people listening to us today.
So, Robert, everyone is shifting. So, you started the topic on capacity challenge in the parliamentarians. It seems that we acknowledge that and we are going to work on that to try to resolve it.
But I'm having a question, again, on the literacy, on the inclusion. How are you assessing the challenge of addressing and reaching with your digital initiative, particularly to the people in the low income or some of the conflicted regions? Do you have some specific examples? And what is the response, because it's a very particular situation sometimes when we are speaking about that.
>> ROBERT OPP: Absolutely. And the capacity question is probably the number one request that we get from our country partners. And it's not just a single thing.
So, as we just heard, one issue is around engineering capacity and software engineers, developers, programmers. But, of course, there's capacity needs across the board from private sector to civil servants to looking at higher education policy, to the parliamentarians to et cetera, et cetera, general digital literacy among people.
So, addressing capacity has to be it's a very complex situation so it needs a number of different kinds of interventions.
One of the things that I briefly mentioned before is when we work with countries on digitalization, we often start with an assessment of the local digital ecosystem. And so in 53 of the countries we worked with, that means sitting down with government, private sector, civil society to understand the state of where we are with business ecosystem, regulatory ecosystem, government capacity and general digital literacy. And based on that, we can design kind of an action plan on where to actually go to support different kinds of capacities that are needed.
In terms of specific examples, just one example is together with the government of Kenya, we have recently launched a centre of competence on AI and digital skills for civil servants that is done in partnership with Microsoft and Huawei. So, it's UNDP, Microsoft, Huawei, government of Kenya looking at how we can bring civil servants into better capacities.
So, there are a number of different kinds of angles that we can use, often involving the private sector because private sector is also where cutting edge skill sets are. But more on the policy side, we also need to look at how do we actually ensure that people understand not just the technology itself, but, as I mentioned before, how to govern those technologies. That's where in some cases we have started engaging with parliamentarians on specific programmes that we run in country for parliamentarians, often with partners like IPU to look at how we can actually build capacities of people to understand the shift. Because it is a different set of skills you need to understand how to govern technologies and actually build them.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Moving with the specific examples, actually, it's going to be interesting to follow up how those are developing, especially the example with Kenya.
But I'm going to go back to Mr. Gong now. As the president of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations, you must have a very, very good overview of how things are developing. And you have pointed out on the first priority was open and accessible platforms to assess the human resources in each part of the world and to make sure that we are promoting also the engineering capacity (access).
Do you have any specific example from your experience as well of, like, specific engineering solutions that actually help or impact significantly marginalized populations or, like, so inequality problems?
>> KE GONG: That's a very important question, but hard to answer. Now as the World Federation of engineering organization WFU, we are carrying out a big initiative, we call engineering capacity building for Africa programme. It spends 10 years long in the framework of United Nations international decades of science for sustainable development.
In this initiative, we take we focus on the artificial intelligence because that is revolutionary general purpose technology that penetrating all engineering professions.
However, the risk of AI coming from two aspects. First is from the technical incompletement. So there's technically the contents generated by AI model is based on the probability, we call it so called (?) probability. Because on the one side is the prompt, and the generative content has the highest giant probability with your prompt. So, we have to know that and to increase the capability of AI users to make factual check, logical check, ethical check to the contents. So, that's one side.
And another side is that misuse of those models to use this model make dis and misinformation. That's very bad.
Another kind of misuse, you, perhaps, hundred sorry, 99% answers are correct. So, people may simply rely on the model and give the rights to the model to believe all model said to him or her. That's not good.
We have to keep the human oversight to know the mistakes is possible produced by those models. So that is also very important. Now we carry out trainings to engineers to help them to understand the fundamental mechanism, how AI models work and why they can produce mistakes and how to make so called ethical, factual, logical and scientific check to those generated contents.
And we do hope that we can join hands with all of you to carry out the initiative, I mean the engineering capacity building for Africa. That is a very ambitious. We hope in the following 10 years we can train more than hundred thousand engineers in workplace to grasp the AI tools, digital tools, that increase the quality of their life and their work.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Very important, very important topic, actually, that we should be using the technologies as a tool and to help us to be more efficient but not to substitute human capacity. This is a key topic everywhere we are discussing those matters.
And now we are at the stage of implementing the AI technology, this is going to be reoccurring. So I would encourage you to keep on repeating that message. Because there is a fear among many societies that some of the technologies are here to take our jobs, which is absolutely not the case. But we have to provide a regulatory framework and the incentives and the campaigns to teach people how to use them to our best benefit.
And this brings me back to Mario before I am going to turn to the audience for questions. So, circulating around, we are going back to the digital literacy, to the knowledge of people, they can access and use the services you are providing. The numbers you have given us in the introductions were very, very impressive, like I didn't remember them all, but you just said like 40 million users, digital ID, which is quite impressive already, if people are if people are trusting the digital platforms to use it for their identity. This is something as a key message from your opening remarks.
But how do you ensure that people are actually aware of the systems that they are using? And do you think that everyone has access to those services or just a specific group of people who are, like, young and more open to those platforms, like just a bit provocative question, I know, but it's important to hear some answers.
>> AUDIENCE: I have how far? 20 minutes? No. One minute. So, I am joking.
I think that the colleague, the literacy programme is one of the cornerstones of digital services. We in the triannual plan we have three cornerstones. The first is data quality. The second one is literacy, for engineers, for deployers, for users. If you use an artificial intelligence, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot and you are a citizen, you want to start a company, you want to interact with the national public registry of companies. You must know limits opportunities of that kind of instrument.
So, the second cornerstone of literacy is very important, and we try on digital identity, on digital signatures, on e invoicing to make several kind of literacy. For engineers, for ICT engineers, for domain experts, the revenue officer, for citizens. And it's strictly to find the way to tell people, you are an engineer, you are end user, you are a citizen.
The third one, last but not least, is the dataset control, which is your dataset control in the European parliament, in the engineering organization, data are in and out, the patterns are in or out. So, you know, technology evolves faster than most of public administrations and companies can innovate.
And I was talking before, three years, a long term. Now we are trying to build a strategic planning in a way, in a process to leverage the predictive path of these emerging technologies in a faster way. This is a mandate for us. A short term programme, a short term strategy which involves literacy, data quality, and connection with citizens and companies. It's a short answer. I
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Unfortunately, we are limited on time. But it's very, very key messages.
So, it's good to acknowledge some of those problems and to start finding solutions together.
So, in the sign of being together, I am turning to you now for some questions or comments. I see the first one here. Then there are two more here. Let's start moving this way.
>> PARTICIPANT: I will speak in Arabic My position is Shura Council in (?). As a director of technology of information and communication, we made in addition increases for different initiatives through five points or tracks. The first one, the one who leads the digital change, the Shura Council should be a believer of the importance of revision.
And secondly, the infrastructure should be very new and ready and capable of doing the job and also able to the next one is those who are doing that should be efficient enough to carry out the job.
Also to mention those who have these initiatives as if to show that so to encourage them really to do even more.
Next point is training, continuous training, specialized training for different people and usage of these initiates for all levels, from smallest employee to the highest level and the General Secretariat.
So, we can say that about 30% of those initiatives, successful initiatives, were from innovations, from people who are employed in our Secretariat.
So, we feel even proud of that because we have reached a good level according to the electronic parliament. We were the first in (?) and 13 internationally. Thank you so much.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Can you pass the mic?
>> PARTICIPANT: Thank you very much. I really want to ask, you said there's a need to issue a declaration to protect communities, values and ethics and community based on the use of AI, something like Declaration of Human Rights or maybe to amend the Human Rights Declaration to protect the community of the misuse of AI, something on the base of the same basis of the EU Act that have been issued recently, because really, I think, I think the change is happening and AI world so quick and require really a global collaboration and cooperation, especially those who don't have full access or don't have the knowledge or the technology or the understanding of the use of AI. Thank you.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Thank you. And now I'm moving to the central sector. And then I will give you the floor.
>> PARTICIPANT: Thank you very much. My name is Mahamad dosey from the Egyptian parliament and I am engineer. The first question for Mr. Ke Gong, we already have around 1 million engineers in Egypt. So can we work in this capacity building for engineers with Egypt? That would be wonderful.
Another quick question for both Robert and Mario. Do you have any running or planned programmes with Egypt for any of the projects you have been talking to or not? Thank you.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Very specific questions.
Let's move there and then back and then one last question from this sector I will take after you.
>> PARTICIPANT: Hello. My question is for Robert. I am con Don from India, I work with a nonprofit called CT net (?). I am concerned around the DPI, digital public infrastructure. We know that, you know, it's hard thing. We talk a lot about these things. And we also know that it's key thing to go ahead in terms of the growth of communities. But then you work with different countries. How do you kind of map out different DPIs within a framework, within a simple framework, which also upholds human rights, equality and, you know, the values we are trying to helpful as a community, you know, who are trying to build for a multistakeholder future. Thank you.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: To the front floor, please.
>> PARTICIPANT: Okay. Thank you. Just interesting talks. Only one point, please. I like what all what you said. Isn't is a good idea for the UN to have common platforms to unify efforts to build such literacy programmes, training for literacy or digital inclusion, increase and needing capacity and so on? Instead of, like, every country is working, like China, U.S., Europe, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, you know, all countries? Isn't it better for the UN to have unified for to work on such important parts? All the countries, they can have one place and other people from Africa, from Asia, everywhere, they can benefit from it? It's great work. Thank you.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Thank you. And we are going to have one last question there and then I'm going to go back to our speakers, a lot of very specific questions were posed.
>> PARTICIPANT: I'm from the parliament and president of social organization that groups all the professionals in the technological sector in Cuba. We are not members of the world organization, but we will be. It's our objective. And I want to thank the institutions because they have created a lot of projects that have benefited us. And I don't want to miss a chance to thank you.
The capacity building is very important and interesting, but sometimes it's (?) speaking and then they finish. And then in technological topics, this capacity building is, I think, important that they are more permanent and incremental and interactive because technology moves very fast. And sometimes we begin these projects, we close them down and then they go to nothing.
So, I think we should think of platforms like the ones that were mentioned already, that this capacity building centres have a follow up and they remain over time so that they can evolve. And our objective is to design projects and present them to the UNIP capacity building centre for the Cuban engineers and the civil servants, in Cuba those parliamentarians in my country so that's correct really benefit from them.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Thank you. Very good example on inclusion actually.
And now I'm turning back to the panel here, a lot of questions, a lot of specific ones. First to Robert.
>> PARTICIPANT: Can I speak?
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Okay on. Fine. In French. I speak in French. (No English translation).
>> MARIO NOBILE: We don't have translation in English. Sorry. No. My French is very poor. I have been told.
>> PARTICIPANT: My English, too,.
>> MARIO NOBILE: If you can repeat the question, please, yeah. Thank you.
>> PARTICIPANT: Thank you. (No English translation) I rely on parliamentarians and I would like to thank you, Linda has done a great work in Senegal within parliaments and UN.
For my side, I work on that is connectivity and the (?) that are subject to ca tross fees, we have (?) two, two other projects, public institutions, (?) and secondary schools. We hold sessions to solve these problems and we have a lot of challenges with the government and parliamentaries play a role that is great because those who belong to the gray regions, if you can call them (parliamentaries). They are interested in advice of the impact of Internet in their regions. This is not only in the benefit of youngsters, leaders also can benefit from this kind of step. Sometimes even all the people or leaders can provide programmes that really encourage to go further. And then we have to we would like to encourage cooperation in order to get everybody connected to such problems and avoid those dis qualities in the numerous fields.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Unfortunately we were pressed by the time so this is the last question, comment is welcoming from the audience.
>> PARTICIPANT: (No English translation).
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Okay. So now you want to take the floor or perfect. Okay. So, this is going to be now the last one indeed. I am happy that we have such an engaged audience.
>> PARTICIPANT: (No English translation) I would like to thank you together and to get expertise on benefit not in that the Algerian state (?) the organization of Algeria within the 2030 programme, wanted to give feedback of (?) provided about infrastructure, provided by Algeria and the legislative infrastructure and (?) of the national assembly. We are working with the (?) body, the government has provided infrastructure believing that if you want to develop the digitalization in our country, we will have to provide two major issues and then comes such other total interactive many categories to develop our service. I have started with infrastructure where Algeria has provided all the funding required to access village and city and (?) provided to (?) without coverage. Now the Algerian government is working to provide the conducive environment for the digitalization and technology (?) have started with the law bill, with a bill. It is about the (?) construction started at the beginning and have the mechanism to work with different institutions, meaning that they are facing challenges in dealing with through mechanisms (?) Algeria, and many youth became more creative and can provide their products to all students and we have successful experiences in this respect.
In addition to that, today lawmakers in Algeria (muffled audio) with AI, the AI considering that now (?) in Algeria does not handle the AI issues from the from the benefit of (?) (muffled audio) a good idea to us and also today about the electronic crimes, (?), we have a couple of that so we (?) Algeria has led the legislative infrastructure and digital infrastructure to move forward towards economic and again I would like to convey the greatest of the parliament (?). Thank you so much.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Thank you, thank you so much. How to prevent harms. I know we have run out of time but there were a lot of specific questions to our panelists and I will turn back to you in whichever way you wish to take the floor. We are going to take another five or six minutes of your time. The audience was very engaged. So, thank you. Robert, thank you.
>> ROBERT OPP: I want to say thank you for the questions, because the quality of questions and comments, I think, indicates the level of interest, but also just the importance of this topic. And it makes me really happy to hear these kinds of questions coming out of parliamentarians and others.
There were a couple of questions on the role of the UN in a declaration around AI and the common capacity platform. And I want to address those a bit jointly.
Professor Gong mentioned that there was, at this past September, the UN approved the Pact for the Future, which had as one of the parts the Global Digital Compact. And if you have not seen the Global Digital Compact yet, I would really encourage you to look for it on the UN website, because it sets out the direction agreed by 193 member states on issues related to capacity building, to artificial intelligence, and so on.
At the moment, in terms of a declaration on AI and AI governance and human rights, to my understanding, most of the discussion so far has been that there's no need to open up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But, rather, we need to think through the implication of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the digital space, which is being done inside the UN by the office of High Commissioner for Human Rights and a number of other agencies, as well as with the engagement of permanent missions in New York as well.
And so I think there is not that the Global Digital Compact has a number of statements around digital rights and the human rights in the digital space that represents the commitments of collective countries.
In terms of the AI portion of that, there is a very active discussion right now on the potential for international or global governance of AI. But that depends on member states more than the UN, because member states will need to instruct the United Nations agencies on how to proceed.
So, there is an agreement in the Global Digital Compact on the creation of an international scientific panel for AI. The creation of a fund for AI, including around capacity, and an annual dialogue on artificial intelligence that would happen every year to look at these issues.
So, it does kind of to get us to the point of saying, you know, could we do something like the EU AI Act will require the member states to come around that.
And in a similar way, the issue around capacity. In the Global Digital Compact there are commitments around capacity. But the commitments will only become real if there's resources put behind that, which, again, is an issue around for member states to discuss.
We already as agencies, we work together. So, another example of capacity building is UNDP and the International Telecommunication Union, ITU, have a joint project that has received funds from the European Union to support the capacity building of policymakers around the world by developing 17 different courses in different aspects of digital governance and things, and that will be available to as many as 5000 policymakers in the current budget that we have, and ideally we would expand that.
So, there is a lot of discussion around how do we bring those efforts together and make them more available to more people. So, I very much appreciate the signal.
And then Egypt, we work UNDP works extensively with the Ministry of ICT, and minister at that Lebanon, I think we have more than $170 million in projects that are going on including the applied innovation centre and many other things that are going on in the country and that is supported from the resources of the government of Egypt as well so we bring the technical assistance and we are very grateful.
We were also grateful to host in Egypt this year, or the government hosted the first Global Digital Public Infrastructure summit. And that was held in October and brought together people from around the world to focus on this issue.
And speaking on DPI, the question on DPI and I'm sorry, I'm trying to work my way through the questions. Our view as the United Nations is we should not be implementing technology that does not have the corresponding policies and governance mechanisms around it.
In digital public infrastructure, we have, in the last General Assembly this year, announced, or launched, rather, the universal digital public infrastructure safeguards framework. That was done together with the UN Technology Envoy's office. And it represents more or less exactly what you were saying. It is literally a framework, as countries introduce digital public infrastructure, the framework has the principles, policies and best practices around the kinds of governance, laws, policies that should be in place, policies for data protection and privacy, policies when implementing digital identity platforms, policies around data exchange and data governance, and all of those kinds of things.
And so we are now working to implement that. And for us, we will not work with a country that when we don't have the technology joined together with the governance.
So, that's the way we approach it. I better leave it there.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Thank you so much, very specific, comprehensive. Most of the questions were to you anyways so you had to take the time.
And now for, like, some
(Off microphone).
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: Professor Gong, you are not taking? Perfect.
>> MARIO NOBILE: Robert answered all the questions. But three points. The first one, Italy, our agency, the Ministry of Foreign affairs is carrying on the (No English translation), call on Egypt and Senegal, we will get in touch about this cooperation between Italy and African countries.
And the second one, the Italian presidency of the G7 posed a point about the global governance of artificial intelligence. So, we were talking about human rights, but also objectives like the UN sustainable imperative of no one must be left behind. So, this is a point. The Italian point of the G7 presidency is, we need a global governance about artificial intelligence.
The third point, some of your questions, we took time to change our mind from horses to cars. Okay. Many years. Now this relentless piece of artificial intelligence, we are facing months.
In Italy, it is my 2 cents for discussion, in Italy, actually, now we are talking about tax imposition to artificial intelligence tools, okay? My colleague, the director of the National Institute for welfare, in a public debate, she says, persons must pay taxes. I am happy to pay taxes to help others. If we are ready to use artificial intelligence tools, why cannot impose taxation? This is a question, not an answer.
>> KE GONG: Let me add a very short answer. From the questions, you raised a very important concept, this human rights. Overarch goal for all of us, and let me remind that early this year, there's a very important document released by United Nations, by the high level consultancy body for AI, that is governance AI for humanity. So this is very important document.
And also I would like to mention that two years ago, UNESCO has released a recommendation on the ethics of AI, that is a very important standard setting document.
And then I think it is also important dealing with the interoperability of the DPI, the national norms. It is very important law for the AI to play. And the good news is that UN to play, the UN is going to set an AI office in headquarters in the near future. So, we do hope that we can see a more coordinated international operation on AI ethics and adoptions. So I stop here.
>> ROBERT OPP: You are better at representing the UN than I am. Thank you.
>> TSVETELINA PENKOVA: So, that's the end of our panel. I just want to say thank you to the panelists and to the very engaged audience with the insightful and spot on questions.
A lot of topics were touched upon. A lot of them were very important. And I want to also thank the hosting country, Saudi Arabia, for having the opportunity to discuss all of those key matters.
As a concluding sentence, I will just say, let us commit to use insights from today's discussions to actually craft and create policies and incentives that are truly inclusive and leave no one behind. Thank you so much. And enjoy the rest of the programme today.