To support the launching of the UN SG Guterres’ Report on Digital Cooperationon 10 June 2019,ICT4peace submitted the following four questions addressed to the UN SG, Melinda Gates and Jack Ma:
1. In countries with poor media literacy, social media is a vector for spread of rumours that often result in kinetic reactions. How to harness the potential of social media to inform, and at the same time, reduce its impact as a driver of hate and violence through misinformation?
2. Persons of colour aren’t part of many machine learning architectures, from design to dataset, leading to unsurprising racial bias in execution and selection. What can the UN do to ensure new forms of racism aren’t embedded into AI systems that will undergird politics, commerce, industry and travel?
3. The converging nature of emerging technologies allow combinations of different weapons areas (AI/LAWS, cyber, bio-chemical, nuclear), areas that are currently dealt with in an isolated manner in GGEs and treaties. How can we break-up/connect those classical weapons-specific approaches to reflect this convergence?
4. Major tech companies have taken on a pseudo-political role through ‘ethical’ principles that might protect certain basic/human rights. How to go about this shift of political tasks and the resulting incapacity to guarantee that regulations affecting HRs have political legitimacy?
ICT4Peace had submitted its formal input to the High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation in October 2018, which you can find as follows:
Download our reflections and recommendations as a PDF here.
Download summary of recommendations here.
ICT4Peace has been supporting the UN System-Wide Digital Cooperation since 2007, carrying out the first ever stocktaking of UN Crisis Information Management Capabilities in 2008, which lead to the adoption of the UN Secretary General’s Crisis Information Management Strategy (CIMS) in 2009 . The documents pertaining to this process since 2008 can be found here.