Visionary Statement - G-STIC

Visionary Statement - Global Science, Technology and Innovation Conference (G-STIC)

23 October 2017, Brussels, Belgium

Good morning !

Let me take this opportunity to congratulate the G-STIC organisers. It is always a challenge to start something new and to make it a success the first time. I am particularly pleased that the conference will have an output, something that does not often happened, and I was happy to have the opportunity to contribute to the text.

I have been asked to give a visionary statement. As the saying goes, making a prediction of the future is easy, getting it right is the difficult bit !

And I speak from experience: when I was working in the European Commission’s DGXIII in the late 1980s, we produced the famous mobile green paper and a study predicting the market growth for mobile phones by the year 2000, to support our proposed frequency directive for GSM. We were ridiculed for grossly exaggerating 100’s of thousands of phones. But of course as it turned out, we greatly underestimated the millions of phones ! So I am sure todays seemingly incredible prediction on the number of Internet of Things devices – 50 billion by 2020 – will prove equally wrong.

History is filled with wrong predictions about the future of technology.

Stevie Chen, one of the co-founders of YouTube, expressed concern in 2005 about his company’s long-term viability saying, “There’s just not that many videos I want to watch”. Well, today, YouTube users watch more than 1 billion hours of videos every day. Video is the main consumer of bandwidth. It accounts for 75% of Internet traffic. Almost all video view today, over any medium including TV, is using the ITU H.264 standard.

I was quite a surprise back in August 2008 when I was invited to Hollywood to receive a Primetime Emmy Award for the standard. And I am pleased to say that our updated standard has just been awarded another Emmy ! So I have learnt never to make any predictions.

Rather, let me outline three principles that will help build a digital future where no one is left behind -- where information and communication technologies can and will help us achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

The first principle is collaboration. Only by working together will we move the SDGs from vision to action and transform the digital revolution into a development revolution. Since ICT is cross cutting so many sectors collaboration is a big challenge especially for ITU which is the lead UN agency for ICTs. We need to ensure we keep to our own competencies and avoid duplication of effort, since we all have limited resources.Take the example of 5G.
5G will make massive connectivity possible so that the billions of devices can be connected together simultaneously and almost instantaneously.The applications for smart cities and other areas related to the SDGs are limitless.
ITU has already developed a set of 5G performance targets, preparing the ground for new applications such as automated driving, remote medical diagnosis and surgery, collaborative robotics and advanced virtual reality.

But the scale of the infrastructure that must be built or upgraded is huge and expensive. We will need public-private partnerships that cut across industries and sectors, in particular to bring connectivity to those hard-to-reach rural areas where topography and demography too often defeat market viability. We will need to create an ecosystem meeting different legal and commercial requirements sometimes conflicting -- like open access, privacy, security and trust. And that will necessitate close cross-sectoral collaboration in the areas of policy, regulation, legislation and standardization at the global, regional and national level.

The second principle is inclusivity. To achieve the SDGs, we will need to bring the power of ICTs to all nations, all people and all segments of society. Right now, 3.9 billion people are still not connected to the Internet. Bridging the digital divide in all its forms must be our top priority. It is an ITU’s priority. Connectivity is essential. That’s why we need to stimulate investment in ICT infrastructure, help policymakers strengthen their digital development strategies and create incentives for innovation, investment and entrepreneurship.
But we must also recognize that connectivity alone won’t be enough. 

Improvements in ICT connectivity rates do not automatically translate into improvements in development. Less than 50% of the world’s population is online, but more than 80% of the world’s population is covered by at least 3G services. Either these 2.4 billion people cannot afford a smart phone and connection cost, or they do not consider the cost worthwhile. These costs must come down.

The global harmonization of spectrum and adoption of international standards in ITU helps bring down costs through the resulting economies of scale. We also need to increase the value of connection by encouraging local content in local languages. Building ICT skills in local communities will be key.  Digital inclusion can only be effective and meaningful if and when everyone feels empowered to use the technology -- and when the technology is affordable, attractive and safe. 

The final principle is dialogue. The scope and uncertainty associated with new technologies calls for exchange and interaction between an increasingly wide-range of stakeholders involved. New technologies are disruptive, cause anxiety and raising legitimate questions such as the future of jobs in the age of Artificial Intelligence. At the same time, the potential of ICTs for the public good is enormous.
AI, big data, cloud computing, IoT and 5G will all shape our future. They will all help accelerate the achievement of the SDGs.
ITU with its wide membership of governments, private sector, academia and civil society, has an important role to play in bringing key players together to create consensus on how these emerging technologies can shape our future for the better.

Last June, ITU convened an event in Geneva with representatives of government, industry, other UN agencies, civil society and the AI research community to explore the latest developments in artificial intelligence and its implications for regulation, ethics, security and privacy.
We called the event “AI for Good”.
We have started a conversation whose objective is to develop concrete proposals and ideas to leverage the power of AI to help solve some of the greatest challenges, starting with the SDGs.
It’s clear there are some serious concerns, and as one of the conference participants noted, “many questions do not yet have answers, and we are not even sure what questions we need to be asking”.

So there is a lot that needs to be discussed and the future is as unpredictable as ever in these turbulent time, but let me conclude by making a fairly safe prediction, and that is that the implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda is going to depend on future developments in science, technology and innovation.

Which is why ITU is happy to support this and future editions of G-STIC, and especially its role in helping achieve collaboration, inclusivity and dialogue.

Thank you.