The economy, trade, security and sustainability are amongst the key focus areas of the G20 summit this summer, but leaders must also find time to address the growing gap between the worlds of technology and policy-making. A strong human hand and global cooperation is vital to ensuring today's (technological) industrial revolution brings benefits to everyone.
The G20 summit in Hamburg this July will see globalisation put to the test in the face of increasing protectionism - with issues like global free trade and the global climate agreement under threat. The agenda to push forward areas for global integration and cooperation will be full, and political personalities will grab the headlines. But leaders must also prioritise cooperation on the rapid rise of all things digital and machine.
We have already had a number of major wake up calls. The recent crippling global "cyber-outage" caused by WannaCry ransomeware, headlines of AI-informed propaganda influencing political campaigns, forecasts of the speed of automation and its impact on jobs, and doomsday warnings of the emergence of super intelligent machines from the likes of Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. The impact of technology on culture, politics, business, environment, the economy, and ultimately on world order, is spiraling.
The global, digitally-enabled Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is already the fastest period of innovation ever. It is just beginning, and its growth is exponential. Underpinned by all things digital, 4IR technologies include AI and robotics, the internet of things, augmented and virtual reality, nanotechnology and biotechnology, to name a few.
The disruption of many traditional markets and industries is already underway, reshaping the status quo. As tech pioneers push the boundaries of these technologies, and churn out new algorithms, apps, platforms and solutions that claim to make our lives easier, closer, healthier, and more productive, how can we ensure these transformations address today's big challenges for people and planet, and don't exacerbate them?
Today Berlin plays host to the T20 summit - when the top think tanks from G20 countries provide policy recommendations to G20 leaders ahead of the G20 summit. As a member of the T20 Digital Economy Taskforce, my recommendation to the G20 is simple: make the Fourth Industrial Revolution humanity's first sustainable revolution.
To harness the potential of the 4IR for people and the planet, the G20 can champion an approach that includes:
- building the global and national governance structures and policy mechanisms to address the unintended negative consequences of technology change; and
- unlocking and scaling 4IR innovations that maximise progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals - including innovations that respond to the new risks and challenges presented by the 4IR itself.
Governments have a critical role to play, and our paper this week for the T20 examines what that might mean in practice.
The governance challenge is even greater than in previous industrial revolutions due to the complexity, pace, and global and sectoral breadth of change in the 4IR. Acting early to manage unintended consequences will be vital and the role of public policy and oversight in this is key.
But the potential that 4IR advances offer for building better systems in the future is also becoming more real every day.
For example, in Transport, advanced materials are close to underpinning battery breakthroughs for inexpensive, quick-charging energy-dense batteries which will outcompete internal combustion engines. Mobility will soon be shared, automated, connected, smart and powered by clean electricity or fuels.
In Energy, the future is personalised, localised, optimised, clean and distributed. Billions of renewable devices will be connected by the IoT, optimised by AI, with peer to peer transactions enabled by blockchain.
And in Finance, AI, blockchain and IoT, enables increased access and decentralisation of the financial system to serve the unbanked and underbanked, improve market integrity and could perhaps provide early warning signals of systemic financial strains.
The potential is there for 4IR technologies to come together to drive structural changes to our human systems: our cities, transport and energy networks, financial markets, and our agricultural and industrial value chains. But as we use the power of the 4IR to build these new systems, we need the mindset, incentives, oversight and checks and balances to make sure we are building inclusive, sustainable, resilient and ethical systems.
From safeguarding the negative risks, to unlocking the full potential of 4IR innovation for humanity, here are some of our report's key recommendations to the G20:
1. Safeguard. Develop international and national safeguards, including standards, market mechanisms, measurement and disclosure, to ensure a sustainable and responsible 4IR
2. Mainstream a "responsible" approach into national technology policies, including employing social and environmental impact considerations in digital strategies
3. Invest. Commit large scale basic and applied R&D investment towards priority sustainable 4IR challenges, encouraging multidisciplinary research.
4. Accelerate. Promote national and international innovation programmes and investment to accelerate "4IR for good" solutions, ventures and partnerships.
5. Promote. Deliver a global "tech for good" campaign to educate people and industry about how tech can be a force for good, and the importance of ethics.
6. Co-create, with industry input, policy and incentives that encourage corporate policy and governance for responsible technology, including developing business charters for responsible technology.
7. Ethical. Evaluate ethical aspects of the relationship between people and machine systems (e.g. implications for privacy, boundaries to human / digital augmentation, the rights of people) and institute policies and procedures to address ethical aspects of cyber-physical systems.
8. Accountable. Develop a concrete framework for algorithmic accountability, to ensure transparency and positive outcomes, from avoiding discrimination to optimising for sustainability.
G20 leadership can help ensure that the 4IR supports global growth which is inclusive, sustainable, and aligned to delivering the Sustainable Development Goals.
Moving forwards we will be working with the T20 to establish a Taskforce on “Sustainable 4IR” to provide expert input to G20 policymakers on this crucial, fast-moving and cross-cutting area for cooperation. One thing is for sure, it's not just about catching up, but about building agile processes and policy, and strong industry-government collaboration. Change in the 4IR is rapid, and we should expect (and prepare for) surprises along the way.