FormerUnited Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who served from January 2007 to December 2016 will be a Harvard Kennedy School Fisher Family Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project in the academic year 2018-2019.
After his time in the United Nations, Mr. Ban has been actively promoting global agenda including SDGs, climate change and woman’s empowerment. Since January 2018, Mr. Ban has been inducted as Co-Chairs of the Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens in Vienna, Austria. Since February 2018, he has been elected as the President of the Assembly & Chair of the Council of Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI). In April 2018, he has been elected as the Chairman of Boao Forum for Asia.
Mr. Ban strived to be a bridge builder, to give voice to the world’s poorest and the most vulnerable people, and to make the United Nations more transparent and effective. For his sincere dedication to making the world a better place, with peace and cooperation between countries, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was also awarded the World Leader in Peace, Security, and Development by the Boston Global Forum and the Michael Dukakis Institute in 2016.
In his acceptance speech of this award, he brought the challenge to build up the partnership between leaders and business community as well as civil society in order to deal with world problems such as climate changes, SDGs, etc. He also believed in the transformative power of collective action.
The Michael Dukakis Institute will partner with the World Leadership Alliance- Club de Madrid in building the Next Democracy Generation by using AI and AIWS models. They are expected to launch a Policy Dialogue on AI in 2019.
The World Leadership Alliance-Club de Madrid (WLA-CdM) has been partnering with the Michael Dukakis Institute (MDI) to collaborate and develop the AIWS 7-Layer Model to build the Next Generation Democracy. This project addresses the main factors that are affecting the world’s democracy, including new technologies and social media in the generation of AI.
The President of WLA-CdM, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, serves as Co-chair of AIWS activities and conferences along with Governor Michael Dukakis, Chairman of MDI and his colleagues. Recently, Mr. Nguyen Anh Tuan, Director of MDI had a discussion with President Vike-Freiberga and Secretary General of WLA-CdM about the possibility of co-hosting a Policy Dialogue on AI in 2019. Governor Dukakis also sent a proposal letter to leaders of WLA-CdM for further discussion. The Policy Dialogue in AI is expected to strengthen the awareness of AI opportunities and risks as well as propose the best strategies for AI development.
On September 20, 2018 at Harvard University Faculty Club, Ms. Beatriz Merino – Former Prime Minister of Peru and Member of MDI’s AIWS Standards and Practice Committee spoke at the AIWS Conference, with theme “AI-Government and AI Arms Races and Norms”.
AI has become greatly influential to our lives. Despite its undeniable benefits, there are many risks as well. To avoid unexpected incidents, global regulations are essential.
In the recent incidents related to Facebook, many users’ data was leak since the world’s data protection and privacy was looked down on. While Facebook operates on an AI platform, it does not follow the Royal Society’s new publication on ethical and legal challenges of governing AI—implied by a senior European commission official, Paul Nemitz, principal adviser, one of the architects of the EU’s far-reaching General Data Protection Regulation. Facebook holds the information of billions of people, but their AI and employees are only a small group that is shaping the world.
With the power centralized to the group of Facebook’s developers, AI is becoming more and more pervasive. Realizing this issue, Nemitz wrote that “we need a new culture of technology and business development for the age of AI which we call ‘rule of law, democracy and human rights by design’,”. Without clear regulations, internet economy has resulted in a widespread culture of disregard of the law and put democracy in danger.
Nemitz also drafted the framework for AI including some of the principles to prove AI trustworthy:
AI that makes decisions that affect individuals should give intelligible reasons; when a machine engages a human in political discourse, the machine should be required by law to disclose that it is a machine;
AI that applies rules must conform to the same tests that are used to decide whether laws themselves are legitimate, such as consistency with fundamental rights, due process and proportionality.
Establishing the principles for AI is exactly what the Michael Dukakis Institute (MDI) are working on. So far, MDI has established the AIWS 7-layer Model with the fourth layer – Laws and Legislation: Laws for the Role of AI in Building Next Generation Democracy. This issue was also discussed at Boston Global Forum’s BGF-G7 Summit Conference, which was held on April 25, 2018.
According to AI Trends, AI World – one of the most important partners of the Michael Dukakis Institute, a meeting between representatives from Alphabet, IBM, JPMorgan Chase and other academic experts – was held by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to discuss about the future of the quantum computing.
Quantum can deliver results faster than any systems. “While a traditional computer has to sequentially explore the potential solutions to a mathematical problem, a quantum system is able to look at every potential solution simultaneously and generate answers—not just the single best but nearly ten thousand close alternatives as well—in less than a second,” explained Arthur Herman in Forbes.
Recently, Ford Motor Company “signed a $100,000 contract with NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to have quantum computer installed in its autonomous car research,” said IEEE Spectrum’s Mark Harris. There is a great potential for this development, including diesel optimization for commercial truck fleets. It can come up with the shortest route through many cities.
Not only Ford, there are also other companies that are seizing quantum’s opportunity. Volkswagen is now using quantum computing to enhance software’s learning technique to facilitate environment learning. This application can be of great use to automated parking. It can also utilize the performance of other fields such as searching, cryptography, and machine learning.
“We expect quantum computing to develop toward maturity over three generations spanning the next 25 years,” they predict, “Companies could be using early-generation machines to address practical business and R&D needs much sooner.” This is also what the third layer (Standards for the Management of AI Resources and Development) of AIWS 7-Layer Model focuses on.
