Ethical AI_ Keeping Humanity in the Loop While Innovating

This afternoon to this UNESCO sponsored event, my name is Tim Curtis, I’m the Regional Director for UNESCO for South Asia and very happy to have you all for the event today, Humanity in the Loop, Balancing Innovation and Ethics in the Age of AI. Of course we’re grateful to the Government of India for its collaboration on this session because we at UNESCO believe, which we at UNESCO believe goes to the heart of our engagement with the ethics of artificial intelligence and namely how to ensure an ethical and human AI centred deployment whilst also encouraging the development of artificial intelligence and innovation in a technology that can offer so many benefits to humanity. and including and in particular to the global south.

So it gives me great pleasure to just present today’s panellists and moderator. We’ve had Dr. Tawfiq Jilasi, who’s Assistant Director General for Communication and Information and who’s really been a pivotal figure in UNESCO’s work on AI ethics. Professor Virginia Dignam, who is a Director of the AI Policy Lab at Umeå University and she’s also a member of UNESCO’s AI Ethics Experts Without Borders and has been supporting UNESCO’s readiness assessment methodology in multiple countries. Also privileged to have Paula Goldman, Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer at Salesforce, who are a member of UNESCO’s Business Council and she has really been leading by example in the private sector’s responsible AI ethics. Debjani Ghosh, a distinguished fellow Niti Aiyog who needs no introduction here in India, a household name in India for her role in building and leading India’s AI ecosystem.

Thank you for coming. And finally, a great pleasure to welcome Brado Benefai, a member of the European Parliament who will share his insights on the EU AI Act and how they have been able to navigate balancing innovation and ethics. And finally, of course, I’m a moderator Dr Maria Grazia from the Chief of the Executive Office of UNESCO’s Social and Human Sciences sector. Please, Maria Grazia, over to you.

Hello, good afternoon. So we’ll try to have this session very dynamic because it’s after lunch, it’s Friday, over five days, very interesting, a long week. So let me start by challenging the very title of this meeting, that is Balancing Innovation and Ethics in the Age of AI. Now, nobody’s first. effect. So I’m a microeconomician, which is a very complicated word, which looks like a rude word, but it’s not. It’s mathematics applied to economics and especially applied to understanding the dynamics of innovation and new technologies. Why I’m saying that, because of course the question of innovation, what drives innovation, how can we get more innovation, is something that we always ask by the time you study what drives productivity growth, what drives welfare and well -being.

And then at times we also hear this, that having constraints or having frameworks will actually hinder these dynamics. And the position of UNESCO has been very clear. The position is, this is not true. So what UNESCO has, actually the member states that have adopted UNESCO recommendation on the ethics of artificial intelligence already in 2021, which means that you all countries, including India, were discussing these issues already since 2019 to get to an agreement. is actually what it means and how can we put technologies at the service of humanities and not let anything that is technologically feasible go if that technological feasibility actually hurts people, hurts humanity. And so for us at UNESCO, ethics of AI means something very concrete.

It means AI, technologies, and here I would like to invite you to think that it’s technologies, it’s not one single element, it’s a lot of things, that actually abide by three simple things that too often we give for granted, whereas perhaps we want to think about it more, and these are human rights, human dignities, and fundamental freedoms. And if we are able to develop, deploy, and use technologies in a way that we abide to these three components, then for sure we do have technologies that serve humanity. And why? I’m challenging the very topic because too often we see… innovation, or actually the narrative that we use out there, that is used out there, puts innovation and ethics, or ethical AI, which actually means an AI that also throughout the life cycle is ethical, as trade -offs.

So if we innovate, it cannot be ethical because by the time it’s gone out, we don’t have the time to check on these things. Well, think of a parallel, and then we take it from there on the concrete dynamics of AI. But think, if you were to think about one sector that is very much regulated, perhaps what comes to mind is pharma, pharmaceutical. Now, to my knowledge, but that can be my ignorance, I have never seen one single study being able to prove that the regulation in that sector has actually hindered the innovativeness or actually the productivity or even the remuneration of the sector. So by the same token, and actually the pervasiveness of AI to some extent leads us to think to the pervasiveness of of the paracetamol, for instance, we use every day by the time we have an ad, like I think some of you this afternoon might have, and after listening to me, perhaps even more.

But, you know, it’s really the pervasiveness of technology that touches our life, each and every day in many ways. And this is what I think is important to discuss from different perspectives. And allow me to start with my ADG, ADG jealousy. And as I mentioned, from UNESCO, we give this global perspective, because the recommendation was adopted by 193 member states. Now, very often, what is very challenging is to go from principles to practice. That is, sometimes we know what we need to do, but then the question becomes, how do we translate it into practice? So, ADG jealousy, when do you see what are the biggest gaps that exist between going from principles and what instead is happening on the ground?

Thank you, Maria Grazia. maybe before I briefly answer your question let me say that you used the word of innovation and ethics I don’t see personally an issue, a contradiction between the two, I see it more between innovation and regulation because say to be creative, innovative you should free up the mind of the people, you should not constrain them, you should not tie their hands I used to be chair of a telecom operator board and there of course telecom and mobile phones and access to private data of consumers, the issue of regulation is paramount but we don’t want regulation that hinders innovation, I think here so I don’t see ethics and innovation being in contradiction to the contrary, I think they reinforce each other how is that?

Because clearly if you integrate ethical reflection in the design of AI systems of course if you do that AI systems will be more respected more trustworthy, more used and therefore more broadly deployed across society so I see ethics and innovation really reinforcing each other and quite often at UNESCO we say AI systems have to be ethical by design it should be done ex ante not ex post not when we see mistakes and hazards and risks and harmful impact of AI we say wait a minute let’s go back to see what went wrong in those models in the data sets, are there some biases etc so I think it has to be done from the very early stage and therefore innovation has to be human centric and has to be contextualized, there is no one size fits all, we know that what you can provide is an overarching framework so it’s a broad set of guidelines and principles as you said Maria Grazia and this is what the UNESCO recommendation on the ethics of AI is about You know that this recommendation has been so far the only global recommendation of its kind.

It was adopted back in 2021 by 193 member states of UNESCO, and it calls for human oversight, non -discrimination, respect for cultural diversity, respect for environmental sustainability. These are the principles that need to be translated into action and that need to be operationalized within a certain context.

Thank you very much, Elie Dji. Let’s actually go to Debjani, because I would like to go further into this operationalization question. So, from your work at NITI IOC, and also your experience with NASCOM, so what are the mechanisms that can really help embed the ethical reflection into what is the everyday life of both companies and sectors?

Thank you. Thank you, Deb. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for having me here. So, first of all, I’ll just go back to the topic, if I may, for a second, right? because I don’t think the choice is between innovation and ethics. I really don’t. I think the choice is between do we use technology to ensure that everyone in the world is cancer -free, everyone in the world lives with dignity, everyone in the world has enough to eat, or do we use the technology to make the world a much bigger conflict zone, develop the next atom bomb, and worse. So I think the choice is that. And therefore, the biggest challenge we have, and I hate applying the word, the label of ethics to technology, because I think the biggest challenge we have is can we, all the wisdom in this room, can we say that we will be successful in aligning every single human on this planet to the same ethical values?

The answer is no. No. we’re not going to be able to do that. And we know we’re not going to be able to do that. So as long as we humans don’t align to the same ethical values, you will always have good actors and you will always have bad actors, you know that technology is going to be used in ways that are non -ethical. So the accountability, you’ve talked about humanity in the loop, the accountability comes back to us. So I think it’s very important to sort of understand that because in all our dialogues on technology, we somehow delegate the accountability to technology. I don’t think we can as yet. Maybe in another 10 years when cognitive reasoning becomes a thing, maybe then, but not as yet because for somebody who actually builds codes and builds agents, I know they’re not that intelligent as yet.

So I think the accountability on humans is what we have to focus on. And going back to your question, if you’re talking about how does industry ensure? I mean, one of the things I’m very clear about that regulation is usually an afterthought. You develop the technology and then you say, okay, how do we now regulate it to ensure that it’s used right? And I think that has to fundamentally change. Oversight has to be built into the entire development process from design to commercialization. And it has to be built with the right flag -offs at every part of the design and development process. If you do that and you’re able to, you know, red tape the product that you are developing at every single stage to certain standards that have been developed, you are going to develop something that, and then hopefully after the entire development phase, there’s also a sandbox where you test out the impact.

You will get to a stage where ethics becomes by design versus an afterthought. And I think that’s what we have to move towards.

Thank you. I’d like to a bit change the order of the speakers because you brought in the argument of the regulators and you have one next to you that I’m going to refer to. And how do you see this relationship? Because we know fundamentally the regulation that has been pushed in Europe is a risk base. So what was the logic and how this relates to what she was discussing as the human oversight or even the redress of mechanisms that we might want to put in place in order to have AI that is ethical?

Well, first of all, excuse me for the voice, but that’s it. Exactly, but thanks to technology, you can hear me anyway. So I think that I… I can also adhere to the point that innovation and ethics are not one against the other. in fact this summit that is concentrating on impact on action, on diffusion, is not separate from keeping the track on on reflection, on safety on how to protect human rights how to make AI human centric, the things are interwined, the point is how do we regulate effectively and how we find a good balance, but I want to bring maybe a controversial point to the table because I have my strong conviction on this we have chosen globally, including in Europe, that has been often the forefront of regulating in one of those rooms now, I was with her in another panel there was Anu Bradford professor of Columbia University that has written the book The Brussels Effect so in fact EU has often opened the way for many regulatory pathways I mean even Europe has chosen when looking at the social media to actually not regulate we have let the social media diffuse without regulation and today we are discussing about limits for minors we heard about that also in the inaugural session we are discussing about misinformation and labelling of deepfakes even Prime Minister Modi talked about that in the inaugural session but we are doing it all now after a lot of things have happened and my point, that’s my opinion we have already unmodifiable consequences so I think that when we talk about when we should regulate we should regulate and we should regulate and we should regulate and we should regulate and we should regulate and we should regulate if we should let the innovation flow and act only ex post.

Sometimes we might be wrong and risk unchangeable effects. So we need to build a balance that doesn’t hinder innovation, but also identifies human rights challenges. The AI Act tried to build a risk -based approach, identifying areas where we need AI to be overseen, workforce use of AI, healthcare use of AI, administration of justice use of AI. We want to be sure when we deal with that that data used for training is quality data, cybersecurity is sufficient, the governance of the data is solid, and there is human control. These are examples of what we have identified. Everything. And in fact, we even chose to prohibit. a few use cases, for example, predictive policing, for example, emotional recognition in workplaces and in study places, manipulative subliminal techniques.

I don’t think it’s a taboo to choose that some use cases of AI, we don’t want them in our society, and we just keep them out. So I think this approach based on the risk, you can look if you like it this way, if you want to modify, but it’s an interesting perspective, because you can choose what you think is in need of a certain regulation, and you can also promote transparency, which I think is crucial to build trust. Without trust, especially in democratic contexts, it’s impossible to accelerate adoption of AI, which is still a big challenge from both the global north and the global south. The numbers tell us that a lot of companies, or public administrations that could benefit from an ethical and correct use of AI, they are not using it because they don’t know what could

You put forward a very important point, Brando, that is like perhaps we might not be able or we might not want to decide what the technology should do for us. But for sure we might want to discuss and agree on what we do not want the technology to do for us because these are unacceptable uses of deployment. And in this case, this also highlights the importance of awareness, of the centrality of people, of having this human -centered approach. And here I would like to invite Virginia into the conversation because of course you, as an educator, as part of this beautiful world of educators, as a professor, you have this constant contact and the ability to interact and nurture the humankind.

So what do we have to do to avoid that people are just consumers or, you know, are possibly exposed to it instead of stealing the technology to work where we want to go?

Sure. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me to be here. Again, like all my previous colleagues, I want to go back to the title. And I’m not going to talk about the balancing part. I’m just going to claim and to be controversial and to wake up all. We are doing both the innovation as the ethics and regulation side all wrong. We are doing it not in the way that it needs to be done. On the innovation side, we are doing it wrong because we are somehow understanding innovation as the capacity of using this hammer that we found out a couple of years ago of Gen AI or whatever. And now we want to use the hammer to nail any nail that we find out.

Innovation is much more than that. innovation is really challenging ourselves to go further. And I want to go back to a sentence that has come with me and is the main thing I’m taking from this summit today. In a couple of sessions ago where I spoke, someone was saying, most people developing AI never experienced power cuts, never experienced broken roads. I would like to go further. AI, and I have been working in AI for 40 years, all the different types of AI that existed before, has been developed extremely on the Western tradition, the Cartesian tradition. We think, therefore we are. I think, therefore I am. First it is individualistic, and then equates intelligence with cognition. Human intelligence is much more than cognition.

If you would think about AI developed for instance in the African Ubuntu tradition, it says, we are, therefore I am. It would be a completely different type of AI. So we do need to challenge ourselves not to go with this hammer that is there already and try to find the nails and call that innovation. It is not innovation. It’s just running around like chickens without heads and see if one of those hammers works. So that’s one. On the side of ethics and the regulation, we are also assuming there are two things that usually come with the idea, and especially in this type of combination, that ethics is this kind of finger that points, thou shalt behave, thou shalt be good, and that regulation is about prohibiting you to do things.

Neither ethics is the finger, nor regulation is necessarily only about prohibitions. Moreover, regulation like AI, like the hammer, like the telephone, is not about prohibiting you to do things. It is about prohibiting you to do things. It is about prohibiting you to do things. It is about prohibiting you to do things. It is about prohibiting you to do things. It is about prohibiting you to do things. artifact that we built we built regulation and we can apply to regulation and to ethics the application of ethics exactly the same type of principles that we apply to technology let’s experiment, let’s try let’s verify, let’s evaluate let’s see what’s there and not have this idea of the finger or the loss written in stone which stays there once and forever so that’s going back and now very quickly on your answer because I don’t want to take much time I think that education needs exactly to start by this point technology alone is not enough so we really need to up our education of the engineers, the computer scientists the data scientists on the humanity side we know as engineers we know very well how to solve a problem, we never ask ourselves why is this a problem who has this problem, what are the alternatives to my solution who gains, who loses, what is gained, what is lost this is humanity We need to somehow bring that together in the engineering case and in the humanities and social science case.

We need them, because I’m an engineer, to help us understand that we need to be much more precise in what we are talking about. AI at this moment is actually an empty signifier. It doesn’t mean nothing. Everything is AI. Nothing is AI. All kinds of things are AI. The applications are AI. The sectors are AI. The technology is AI. The research, everything is AI. And we cannot just go around with this word which actually means magic. In most politicians’ talks, it means magic. And we want to regulate magic. Okay, good luck. So we need the humanities, the social science, to really help us. As being precise about what are we doing. So this is the education we need.

fantastic you couldn’t have put it much easier to me to then ask Paola how are we doing that in companies because this is very easy to say we need to translate the principles the values in concrete models of that actually work work for a company, work to deliver results and work for people

yes indeed, well first of all thank you for that and I mean we were just talking about how this is our last speaking panel of the week and that was a fiery way of drawing things together, I really appreciate it, kind of an energy boost so yeah, I think the answer is actually much more practical and much less abstract than one might imagine and so I’ll just tell you a little bit about my experience I spend my days at Salesforce both testing our products and making sure that our AI has features baked into it so that our customers There’s no, I can observe what’s going on and know how to tweak the controls and understand, for example, when they should set for an AI agent to escalate to a human or a human to escalate back to AI and so on.

And when we do this, it’s not like we think we at Salesforce have all the answers because clearly we don’t and we serve a variety of industries and all over the world and so on. But everyone, all of our customers are basically asking the same questions, right? They’re asking, how do I know what kind of results I’m getting? How can I tell if something goes wrong? What are my options if something goes wrong? What part of AI ethics is your responsibility and what part is mine, right? And these questions don’t necessarily have the most mature answers because we’re in the early innings. of AI agents and a lot more work. to do. But actually, these are the right questions to be asking and also allows for some flexibility and some cultural or industry specificity for people to find the right answers to the questions.

So that would be part one of my answer. It’s actually very, very practical. To adopt AI, companies and organizations need to be able to trust that it’s going to work. They don’t want to be embarrassed by it, right? And they’re not going to be able to scale it if it doesn’t work. So that’s number one. The second thing is also increasingly what we’re finding when we work with companies on this is that the most successful companies at Scaling AI put the people at the center of the transformation. They work with not just top down, like you shall use this application. They give people a chance to sort of have a voice around what is actually working.

What is actually most useful to them in the day -to -day work? Where is AI going to actually help them and where is it kind of useless? right and it’s that kind of understanding of how work actually gets done what actual processes are going to benefit from that kind of application that I think is really important and allows people to sort of stay at the center of this large -scale transformation that we’re part of

that might happen or should happen in the context of making AI ethical by design?

Well, in my current role in ETIO, which is the think tank for government of India, we’re looking at what are the unlocks for technology, including AI, to ensure that we can use technology to solve for some of the biggest problems, right? Now, what Professor Virginia said about AI as a hammer, I think that’s a luxury of the developed countries, and I do agree with you when it comes to developed countries. But when you come to developing countries where you don’t have a lot of resources, you cannot afford to use the technology that takes a lot of deep investment to sort of do things where you’re not sure. You’re not sure of the ROIs. And one of the things, examples I want to give is as part of this summit, there were seven working groups that were set up looking at different problems.

I chaired one of the working groups on economic development and social good, which was all about impact and how do you scale impact, right? And we had around 50 countries participating. Now, one of the things that came out of that working group was, which is one of the outcomes of this summit, is the creation of AI Impact Commons globally, and it’s online. You guys can look it up, aiimpactcommons .global, which has impact stories from more than 30 countries, and counting, and it’s growing every day, with learnings on what kind of problems can be solved and how do you scale it. And by I said it’s a luxury of developed countries is because when you look at those impact stories, and most of them are from developing countries, and you’ll be amazed with the kind of problems they’re solving, from malnutrition to pharma, you know, to suicides, how do you lower pharma suicides by using technology to improve yield.

Thank you. ensure that they don’t suffer from climate changes and shocks. I mean, the problems are so inspiring. So I think it won’t be fair to say that we don’t know what problems we are solving today, and I will absolutely stand for that. And I think it’s – I’ll go back to what Paula said. I’m not sure if industry today is really putting human at the center of the loop, but I think they need to. They absolutely need to. I do, because as we develop technology, for example, the end goal right now of – seems like the end goal of AI, all the big companies are talking about, is AGI. Now, when you look at what does AGI mean, it’s about control.

Why do we want to build something to control everyone? Why don’t we want to build something that is going to augment lives? And if we could change the narrative, then I would say, yes, humans are at the center. Right now, I think we still have – we still have a lot of work to do to bring humans back into the center of the loop. And it’s something I think we have to realize and industry has to realize. that that is the only way you can build sustainable businesses. And that’s how you sort of build your staying power. So it’s going to be very important to do.

Absolutely. And it’s about having these different entities around the table, but also having different governments and having this multilateral setting talk to each other to have regulation or more generally, because at the end of the day, we talk a lot about regulation, but regulations are part of the policy framework that one could put in place. So actually, let’s go to Brando, because I was seeing he was kind of calling me with his eyes by the time we were talking, and I’m sure he wants to add on the multilateral setting. Please, over to you, Brando. Perhaps you were not calling me, but you’ve been called in. Never the less.

Well, I think that it’s very important that we use occasions like this, this summit, to… to advance a global cooperation framework. And for sure… it’s also a part of the mission of UNESCO to unite different cultures and approaches to what we are talking about. And you explained it earlier, the longstanding work of the organization. But I think that we need to face the reality that there are issues where global cooperation will be crucial and that it’s still not sufficient. Let’s think of military use of AI or the existential risks of losing control of very powerful AI models. This is something that is part of a controversial debate, we would say. But I wouldn’t dismiss renowned scientists that sustain that we are.

in a context where the lack of globally adopted rules are putting us in very significant danger. And this is also part of the idea of balancing innovation and ethics. Because for sure we need domestic rules to foster the best opportunities out of the various use cases of AI. In these days I met many companies that were working on very practical, extremely useful AI use cases to ameliorate our life. To ameliorate. To ameliorate societal good. But this cannot be left in the hands of just the… judgment of private sector companies that have a specific objective, profit for their owners or shareholders, it’s not societal good they might want to add that on top but that’s not their objective, it’s natural, so we need to have frameworks in place on what is our daily impact with AI and we need to build common standards the more broadly adopted standards we have globally the best will be to reach results but we also need a step further that is global cooperation on those issues where we cannot actually do very much domestically they are global issues and I think that with an increased geopolitical tension soon the use of AI for peace will be quite an important topic on which the international community has to find a way to take quick steps forward I hope that our leaders will deal with that

I can’t agree more with the need to coordinate and have an approach that is global and actually allow me the prerogative of the moderator to call my ADG Tophie I will take the consequences of that but what I would like to ask you is what it means to have people at the center and let’s remember that in your case, given the work you lead on the communication and information sector what is the role of the information Virginia was hinting at that before in terms of awareness could you please share a bit of those insights

Thank you Maria Garcia let me pick it up where Brando left it, he said AI for peace maybe some in the room know why UNESCO was created back in 1945 80 years ago almost to the day the mission of UNESCO was and has been to build peace in the minds of men and women how? through education culture, sciences, communication and information everything happens in the mindset of the people today of course we want AI to be a force for good but it could be also a force for hazards, for harm for risk I tend to say technology is neutral it depends what humans make out of it it could be a force for good it could be a force for you mentioned wars or unwanted things so yes humanity in the loop that’s fundamental I always ask myself and that’s my team at UNESCO I say if whatever we do in the field if that transforms lives then we are spot on if you make the beneficiaries of our educational program whatever if you can make them more successful through what you offer them then that’s impact.

Where is the impact? AI can transform lives, yes. And you mentioned to us some examples. It can help cure cancer, as you said, provide food for the needy people, and so on and so forth. We want that type of AI. And AI does not stand for artificial intelligence. AI stands for all -inclusive. That’s AI as well. So if you have that perspective to things, if you really put humanity in the loop, at the center, not only in the loop, in the center, and allow me one minute to share with you, I have been at UNESCO for five years. My most memorable day happened last week in a tiny village in remote southern Africa. A village in which people had no access to radio, no TV, no mobile telephony, no internet, nothing.

They always felt we were second -class citizens in this country. Imagine that you don’t have access to your own internet. Do you have that information? you don’t know what’s happening around you you cannot call your relatives living in other cities this was the case of 15 small communities what UNESCO did, it provided first community radios, set up a tower with transmission equipment so through the radio people have information know what’s happening and when we did that, telecom operators came in to plug in their equipment to provide mobile telephony, and then it became internet connectivity, and then UNESCO put in place early warning systems, because these areas were very much prone to floodings, and whenever that happened it wiped out the cattle the livelihood of the people, etc that’s transforming the lives of the people, AI can contribute in a huge way to that extent and I think if we put that at the center, then of course it has to be ethical, it has to be human centered, it has to be accountable, transparent, all the principles that we talked about, and then comes the issue of …

advocacy, capacity development because more informed policy makers will go this route but if we don’t bring up awareness if we don’t do the advocacy and the capacity building and the training then of course we can see that some companies or some people going for the buck for the profit out of this technology not the social benefit not transforming lives

thanks very much all over to you because the company is at the end of the speech so over to the company and really how you see also this fact of including the other stakeholders in what you do and how that can transform and help you deliver on AI that is added by the company

well thank you for saying that and I actually think that it becomes more and more obvious that that’s actually the only way to scale the technology um um And, you know, but just think about, think about if you’re developing a technology that’s meant to serve many different markets and many different populations, that you need to know, for example, like we have in our AI agent, we have a voice capability. We need to know that that voice capability, even if we’re just talking about English, forget about other languages for a second. We’re just talking about English. It needs to work on different vernaculars of English, different accents, etc. I work a lot on product accessibility, right?

It needs to understand a deaf accent, for example. And so the most inclusively designed technology is going to be the one that’s most successful. It’s going to increase accuracy rates and so on. I also think this is to that end it’s actually a very very exciting time to be able to use AI for inclusion and so I mentioned for example product accessibility one of the things that to me that’s most hopeful and most exciting about this time is that like we’re starting to see AI agents that correct in real time we’re working my team is working on this at Salesforce correct in real time code that is not accessible or correct in real time a browser extension so that if you’re like on your phone and something comes up and maybe a common problem is you’re trying to zoom out or in and it breaks it will correct it in real time and these are the this is this kind of technology is the difference between someone that’s able to use some software to actually get their job done or someone that’s excluded from getting their job done and so again I guess I guess the point that I’m trying to make is the most inclusively designed technology is going to be the most commercially successful and also this is an incredibly exciting time to be doing

I’m really happy to hear from the voice of the industry that the more, so those that include are actually not making a favor to those that get included, but actually the AI, the systems get superior. And so that is something I think that’s another comment of a common legend out there that says, no, you know, it’s costly and perhaps then, you know, the profit is not there. What we are hearing from the voices of the companies is really like, well, no, because it’s a superior product, it’s a better product, it performs better. Last but not least, back to our Virginia. Especially here, I would like to listen from you about what you think is the role of a specific component of human capital, that is the skill.

And we have heard throughout this week the importance of upskilling, reskilling. And is that really the solution?

thank you very much firstly going back to if I made the impression that hammers are not useful it’s not the case there are many useful hammers my point is more like we need a toolbox we don’t need only hammers and even outside of the western world we are too much focused on hammers maybe the skills yes we really need to focus on skills we need to focus on our own capabilities on our lived experience and so on someone talked about AGI and indeed at this moment the AGI concept is about power is about providing power to those companies that claim they will build it how are they building it is what I call the play -doh approach they are putting all the data of the world with all the capacities of the world creating a huge ball of play -doh if anyone who played with We played out before, you know, that after you play, there is no color, there is no shape, there is nothing anymore.

It’s just a thing. And then, of course, that thing might do, but no one knows what’s inside, what came in, what came out, and so on. We need to go much more broader in understanding how this AGI is. What fundamentally AGI means, a system that is more intelligent than us, that can solve problems that we cannot. We already have AGI. We always had AGI. It’s called collective intelligence. The moment that we work together, we can do more than each one of us. If we are using the AI technology that we are developing to support this collaboration together, to develop the different skills, to integrate all our different capabilities, our different differences, our different experiences, our different capabilities, our different abilities, our different abilities, the different tools that we have developed.

then we get a much broader bouquet, not anymore a bowl of Play -Doh without color, but a huge bouquet of flowers of all those colors and so on. So AGI is about, and we cannot let the big companies run away with the concept of AGI by the idea that they are going to create God which is going to solve our problems. AGI is about us. It’s about putting all us together because our collective intelligence is really what, at the end of the day, is going to solve or to support us solving our problems. It’s just one more thing, and I think that’s also part of the skills. Technology, and there I disagree with you, is not neutral.

All technology embeds and encompasses our choices, our options, our data. All of that is part of. We have to understand technology as a non -neutral. artifact, and take those capabilities and also embrace the different perspectives and the different colors of this. But again, altogether, that’s the only way forward, is not giving up and hoping that AI is going to solve whatever complex problems we have. Now it’s really embracing and enforcing collective intelligence. That is AGI.

Excellent. Now, collective intelligence. Now we are going to have a collective set of questions, just a couple, because the time doesn’t allow for more. So, please, by the time you want to intervene, be absolutely short, say your name, say whom you want to ask the question to, and the question without doing the history of humankind before shopping with a person. So, I have to say, I spotted that surface, and there was a lady on this side. Now I think she got shy, and she just put the… So, let’s start by that gentleman. No, it’s the gentleman behind you, I’m sorry. is there I can do everything from moderating to giving you the part we are proactive and problem solving let’s go your name is

hello everyone myself Rajan I am from business club TV and I am the CEO and the founder of the startup so I have a very basic questions for professor Virginia Dignam yes so professor I have a question for you what is AI policy

Wow, okay, how many hours? Okay, very shortly, AI policy is about the tools, the capabilities, the skills, the information, the knowledge on the understanding how to address the impact of AI. Not the technology, not the designing of the technology, but really addressing the impact of this technology from the whole loop and all development from the beginning, asking ourselves, why are we using AI? Is that the best problem that we have? To the way we are developing it, to the way that we are evaluating. And addressing the impact of it.

No, I’m sorry, because we have to give it, let’s be inclusive, let’s allow the other. to speak as well. Please, that lady, yes, exactly, the one with the hand raised. It’s just down here, three rows ahead. I’m going to be gender equal, so one -on -one. I’m not going to have the men speak because typically you’re the fastest to raise your hand, the women, we are more sharp. Go ahead.

I love that. Thank you for that. Hi, my name is Rita Soni. I don’t know who should answer this question, but at the beginning of this panel, I heard someone say those that are developing AI and designing it probably have never experienced a power cut or potholes in the road. I thought that there would be more discussion about who is actually involved in the humans in the loop. Dave Donnie, you know me. So I have to ask this question about the people that are actually developing it and whether we’re thinking about responsibly employing them. Right now, we know that there’s overhauls of half a million people in the world. And so, I’m going to ask you to think about that.

that we consider impact workers. They’ve typically been excluded, but now they are. So how do we support this as a movement of getting those that have experienced power cuts to help design and develop it? This is a development -related question.

Who wants to attack it? Because we are over. That’s the last question, and then we will have to say thank you and continue the conversation in parallel.

Yeah, I fully, I mean, you know, if you’re talking about have developers suffered, to develop the technology, power cuts, anyone who’s working out of Bangalore or any Indian cities, yes, they have. They’ve definitely suffered in the development. Now, I think, Rita, the point you were making is how do we make it more inclusive? How do we bring in? And I think that’s something that goes back to the perennial question, is how do you ensure that you democratize not just access to technology, but you also democratize design and creation of the technology, right? And it’s not just gender. It’s also how do you diffuse it down to smaller cities, so people who are actually facing the problems in smaller cities.

And I think at least in India we are doing that through our initiators like Startup India, etc., which is more focused today on building capabilities in Tier 2, Tier 3 cities, not users, not just for adoption, but actually for design and development. So there’s a lot of focus, and I’m sure there are founders here who have come from the smallest of cities in India. And the best part is when we track the numbers, the growth of startups and founders is higher in the Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier 4 cities than in Tier 1 cities. So that tells us we’re doing something right.

enjoyed at least like half of as much I have enjoyed this panel. Please join me in thanking the journey from your to be and we’re going to do a large show so please stand up we’re going to do a selfie with all of you in the back come here stand like this so we’re all together this is our collective intelligence thank you thank you very much thank you thank you Thank you.