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Doreen Bogdan-Martin

I'm happy to have here today, Amandeep Gill, the UN Secretary General's Envoy on Technology. Welcome, Amandeep!

Amandeep Gill

Thank you very much, Doreen, for having me join you on this podcast.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Amandeep has been a close friend of mine and a close friend of the ITU for many years, including when he served as the Executive Director of the High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, the outcome of which led to the UN Secretary General’s (SG) Roadmap for Digital Cooperation.

The Roadmap and the UN SG’s report on “Our Common Agenda” both underscore the need for enhanced and improved digital cooperation.

ITU and the UN Tech Envoy's office have already been working very closely to align efforts and achieve these goals, including through our Partner2Connect digital coalition, a multi-stakeholder pledging platform for all players in the digital sphere to come forward with commitments to close the digital divide. Together, we also launched aspirational targets to achieve universal and meaningful digital connectivity in this ‘Decade of Action’ to achieve the SDGs.

We're very excited to take our work forward with Amandeep, who took up his post just a couple of months ago in July 2022. Amandeep, really so happy to have you here. I want to perhaps jump right into my first question:

For any listeners who may not know you — if you could share a little bit more about yourself, about your background and also how you see this new role. What's your vision as the UN Envoy on Technology for the world?

Amandeep Gill

Thank you so much Doreen. Perhaps it might interest your listeners to know that I started professional life as a telecommunications engineer. I studied electronics, and my first job was building digital radios for rural connectivity and building [transmitters] that made the old analog exchanges interface with the new digital exchanges that were coming up in the 1980s.

And during my very first posting in Geneva, I attended an event that the ITU organized. It was called “a weekend in the 21st century” and that's where I first kind of learned about the potential of the internet and got myself an ITU TIES email account. So that's been the starting point for me, and then many years in diplomacy dealing with strategic technologies: national security, international security, science diplomacy, negotiations at the junction of politics, security and science.

And then when I was in Geneva as Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament, I kind of connected back with my tech roots through work on the Indian Artificial Intelligence Task Force, and also chairing negotiations on lethal autonomous weapons systems and the biological and toxin weapons convention.

So one thing led to another and coming full circle, I joined the UN to help the Secretary General with this High-Level Panel on Digital Corporation.

And one of the recommendations of that High-Level Panel was the UN should have a focal point on digital cooperation – on reinforcing collaboration across different sectors as they are understood in the ITU, [as] multistakeholders, but also across borders. And tech knows no borders. Digital technologies know no borders.

And therefore in the UN, it is important for us— just as we incentivize, nurture and support collaboration on climate change — again, something which knows no borders — we must also do the same on digital technologies.

Within this broad description, I think there are clear focus areas. One is the governance side: preventing the misuse, addressing the risks around these technologies, bringing different countries together so that the internet does not fragment, and we maintain this unique global infrastructure for global good.

And the other aspect is the opportunity: there are leapfrogging opportunities. You know very well how mobile internet helped so many developing countries leapfrog the age of fixed modems, copper wires in which we were trying to shove in more and more bandwidth at that time.

So likewise digital technologies today are a great opportunity to accelerate progress on the SDGs — if we harness them wisely.

So in a sense, my mandate tries to balance those two aspects out and also in a kind of quieter way, promote coherence and collaboration across the UN System. And there I want to give a shout out to our close and strategic partnership with the ITU on the critical connectivity agenda but much more cybersecurity, content and training overall and supporting member states in their aspirations to harness the digital transformation.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Well thank you, thank you so much. And thank you for that recognition of the great collaboration that the ITU has had with you and with your office. So you’ve been in your position over 100 days, I think,  since you were appointed. What are you looking to accomplish specifically in your first year?

Amandeep Gill

I think the most critical task is to support the Member States, embodied by the Office of the President of the General Assembly, on the consultations and discussions for the Global Digital Compact, which is a proposal, which is a document that will be adopted at the Summit of the Future to try and capture political will from around the world on what kind of digital future do we want. What kind of principles should underpin it? What kind of shared approaches beyond the principles? And what should be our priorities?

So those are the key tasks for the Global Digital Compact. And our Office has been asked to support the Member States on this process. So that's priority number one. Within that of course, making sure that it's a multistakeholder process, that private sector, civil society, academia and the TechNet community and philanthropies and other groups can come together and make their contribution.

And that it is not just a report or a document to be adopted, but it is something that triggers a regular conversation, enabled by the neutral convening power of the UN around digital cooperation. So that's priority number one — the Global Digital Compact.

We had the opportunity to start consultations with the ITU community at the Bucharest Plenipotentiary. And there are many other things that we are planning. Equally keeping in mind that we have the midterm review of Agenda 2030 next year.

We’re trying to bring a few areas, few important, let’s say, missing pieces in the current discussions on harnessing digital technologies for development. And these include what we have with colleagues from across the UN System.

So this is not something that is specific to this Office. [It is] what we call a common blueprint on digital transformation. So the UN System puts together its best minds from the ITU, UNDP and other agencies who are engaged in in the various dimensions, various aspects of digital, into a kind of comprehensive end-to-end guidance that can support Member States in their own planning, in preparing costed plans, roadmaps, etc.

Equally, we want to focus on the issue of digital public infrastructure which post COVID has become an issue of urgent necessity. Those with good digital public infrastructure were more resilient, and there will be more shocks to resilience, unfortunately — climate change, disasters, geopolitical issues.

So how do we build those digital public infrastructures? We are developing some design principles, some guidance on how we can have safe and inclusive DPIs to some of these enablers on the SDGs side.

So those are two kind of sets of priorities for my office and obviously we continue to liaise closely with Member States, with the UN System at large, to see how we can further refine those priorities and look for more partners in pursuing them.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Well thank you, thank you for that. And you've mentioned Bucharest. So the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference that took place in Bucharest and of course it was our great pleasure and honour to have you with us at that conference for the first week.

As you saw, many countries were emphasizing, in the different discussions, the important role that ICTs can play in terms of our mission to achieve the SDGs. And of course you noted next year we have the midterm review on the Agenda 2030.

Would you have any specific feedback to ITU and its membership, in terms of addressing the digital challenges that we face or any other examples? Of course, you mentioned the digital public infrastructure and how countries fare better when they have robust resilient infrastructure. But any thoughts you want to share on that front?

Amandeep Gill

In fact, I learned a lot at the Plenipotentiary Conference. The ITU meetings are gatherings of a great knowledge community. So it’s not for me to suggest ideas to this community, but there is a lot to learn. And I learned a lot.

The discussions on the Global Digital Compact were very helpful in clarifying some of our own thinking. They would be good inputs into the process led by Sweden and Rwanda as co-facilitators of the digital track of the Summit of the Future.

However, if there is one thing that I can say, I think we need to gear up differently for universal connectivity.

And Doreen, you and your team have showed us one way, through the Partner2Connect Coalition, the initiative, and there will be an annual meeting pretty soon. So I think we need, one, new types of partnerships, such as the one you are putting together. Two, we need new and innovative finance, again, you know, something that you are working diligently on. And in this, I think we need to not only look at the supply side but we also need to look at the demand side. So there should be a top down push and bottom up pull.

Giga connect, for instance, is harnessing the demand from the education sector, but also there is health. And so if through the DPIs we can create the demand that, you know, this is seen as something essential—it's increasingly, even when we see refugees in the UN System, you know.  One of the first things of course, there is food, there's shelter, but they do want to connect with their loved ones. So they want to have connectivity.

So it's become an essential good, an essential service in a sense. So working on the demand and the supply side to generate more in a way to financing, and finally I think the right mix of technologies.

So the other day, there were some civil society actors and we were debating this. And in some parts of the world, you know you have these hackers who actually—I mean there is no connectivity in the village—but they managed to hack a kind of local mesh.

Now if these kind of semi-legal do-gooders are getting around to connectivity in some ways, I think we can do better. You know, there's copper, there's fibre, there's satellite, there's radio, you know, so how can we be more innovative and creative in pushing the universal connectivity paradigm? So that's one thought for the IT Community.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Thank you, thank you for that. And perhaps picking up on your last point, your reference to that hacking incident. And of course we've heard the UN SG himself speak about the good that technology can bring, but also the bad. And as we look in terms of the Global Digital Compact and with the lead up to the Summit of the Future, just to get a perspective from you: how do you think we can do better to make sure that technologies actually bring good and that the good outweighs the bad? And if you could also just enlighten us a little bit on this notion of the global commons and the global digital commons, if you could share that for our listeners.

Amandeep Gill

Right, I think the commons analogy is a good one. You know, we've had these commons in the past: pastures, drinking water supplies, maritime domain and then outer space in modern times. And in the commons, there is the tragedy of the commons.

Since it belongs to everyone, no one really feels responsible for it. And you have those who try and misuse the commons. They want to extract as much benefit or maybe even create problems for others so that they can benefit from that. You know, we see that in the digital space: cybercrime, ransomware, hacking and other kinds of misuse.

This turns away people from that commons. And the elderly and those with limited means, you know, if they are subject to scams, you know, they'll become very cautious about the digital economy. So these spoilers then spoil the commons for everyone.

So that's why we need rules of the road, just as we had to get a grip on the pirates and the buccaneers of the past through some rulemaking and enforcement. I think the same is true for the digital space.

And obviously, in this space, there can't be a single treaty to rule it all because it's a distributed phenomenon. There are regional, national prerogatives.

So we need to work in a more agile way, and the Global Digital Compact is an ideal type of an instrument.

It's not a treaty—it's not a legally binding instrument. And following the example of what we've done with migration and with refugees, it is just trying to — it's an attempt to — refresh our thinking on the normative approaches, bring soft and hard law together, and also align the international principles, of international governance, where you already have some principles and some guidance and existing law, whether it's the UN Charter or international humanitarian law, or international human rights law.

So how do we kind of land that guidance into national practice, into the practice of industry at the third tier? So I think that's the raison d'etre of the Global Digital Compact.

And this will be crucial. As I said, if we don't get misuse and the risks right, if you don't address them, there will be no trust in the digital economy. And this dynamic side of today's economic situation — there is a lot of doom and gloom.

But this side is at least, you know, in Europe there are some countries where the digital economy is growing at three times the rate of the regular GDP. I mean, the emerging economies, same if not faster.

So I think we need to get a grip on the misuse by aligning regulatory approaches. When it comes to regulation, but overall I think data and AI, it is more of facilitation, not so much regulation; governance, not so much, you know, do this and don’t do that.

So that requires international collaboration and there’s a natural role for the UN. Also because the UN is a custodian of the human rights framework and the SDGs framework. It doesn’t have an axe to grind in some of the geopolitical tussles around tech. It doesn’t have commercial interests of its own.

So it can offer that facilitation and particularly for the 120+ smaller countries who don’t have those big data sets — those, who don’t have big tech companies. I think they naturally look to UN Forums to facilitate this international collaboration on addressing misuse and the risk across all the three pillars of the UN.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Thank you so much for that. And indeed as you mentioned there’s lots of doom and gloom out there, but there are also tremendous opportunities that digital can bring and so we have to tackle, as you noted, those spoilers, and certainly it’s time for us to ‘get a grip’ because these issues are crucial and we don't want to further erode trust.

Thank you for that. And finally my last question that I pose to all interviewees: what was your first mobile device and how did it change your life?

Amandeep Gill

My first mobile device was a Nokia feature phone. And I think it changed my life in the sense that the work aspect of my daily life kind of expanded. So not in such a good way [laughter] and that continues from Nokia to the Blackberry I had — and now I use an iPhone. So no advertisement for anyone, but that's been the progression for me. And work life has expanded 24/7.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Thank you for that [laughter]. Thank you so much, Amandeep,for spending this time with us.

We look forward to working with you to ensure that everyone can benefit from the transformative potential of digital technologies. Leaving no one behind, of course, means leaving no one offline.

That concludes this episode of the UNconnected podcast. Until next time, let's stay connected.