The United Nations Centennial Initiative: practice of Fundamental Rights in AI & Digital Societies

Sep 6, 2021News

The United Nations Centennial initiative was launched by the Boston Global Forum (BGF) and the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) in 2019 as the United Nations planned to mark the 75th anniversary the following year. It brought into its fold some of the finest minds of our times as they sought to anticipate the world, and the United Nations, in 2045, the year of the world organization’s centennial. The core concepts of the initiative are reflected in the book “Remaking the World: Toward an Age of Global Enlightenment”; these include the idea of a social contract for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) age, a framework for an AI international accord, an ecosystem for the “AI World Society” (AIWS) and a community innovation economy. Some of these ideas have already begun to be put into practice, including a Global Alliance for Digital Governance and the evolution of an AIWS City being developed by NovaWorld in Phan Thiet, Viet Nam as a pilot project. AIWS City is a virtual digital city dedicated to promoting the values associated with AIWS. It looks to bring together a global enlightenment community of scholars, innovators, leaders, and citizens dedicated to fostering thought, creativity, and ethical behavior by combining AIWS City and NovaWorld Phan Thiet, fostering later flagship cities.

The United Nations came into being as a cerebral, as much as political, innovation, the very first resolution of its General Assembly, in the January of 1946, was on the “problems arising from the discovery of atomic energy.” 75 years later, in the January of 2021, Governor Michael Dukakis announced the “Artificial Intelligence International Accord Initiative” whose goal he described as “to stimulate a global conversation that will make sure AI is used responsibly by governments and the private sector around the world.” It is precisely conversations of that nature this volume, and Boston Global Forum Roundtables over the past months, have fostered, and which this discussion will take forward in the specific context of fundamental rights in a world which, over the next 25 years, will see a new shaping to the possibilities and the limitations on the use of artificial intelligence, shaping a world governed by international law and the exercise of international as much as individual and, indeed, intellectual, responsibility where the creativity and innovation of the human person work to shape a world worthy of our times just as surely as that world works to foster and further, in the phrase of the United Nations Charter, the “dignity and worth“ of that human person.

September 9, 15:00-16:05 CEST/9:00 AM – 10:05 AM EST

Plenary V:  The United Nations Centennial Initiative: The Practice of Fundamental Rights in AI & Digital Societies

Facilitator:  David Silbersweig, Chairman, Department of Psychiatry and Co-Director for Institute for the Neurosciences, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Professor

Lead speaker: Ramu Damodaran, Co-Chair of the United Nations Centennial Initiative

Panel discussion:

  • Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Member of Club de Madrid, President of Latvia (1999-2007)
  • Kyriakos Pierrakakis, Minister of State and Digital Governance of Greece, Chair of the Global Strategy Group, OECD
  • Thomas Patterson, Research Director of The Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation, Professor of Government and the Press of Harvard Kennedy School
  • Sean Cleary, Advisor of Club de Madrid, Executive vice-chair of the FutureWorld Foundation, Member of the Carnegie Council’s Artificial Intelligence & Equality Initiative’s Board of Advisors
  • Tran Dinh Thien, Professor, Senior Advisor to Vietnamese Prime Minister