Mahi Sall, Advisor, Fintech-Bank Partnerships, Payments and Financial Inclusivity
January 25th, 2023
Mahi Sall is the CEO & Founder of FinXpair, a Berlin-based strategic advisory boutique firm focu[...]
The new urgency of global tech governance
Brookings | | Sep 10, 2020
Pandemic lockdowns, digitalization, and the acceleration of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) are all driving a shift in global governance. Since the world’s technological leaders will also be geopolitical leaders, the competition for dominance in cutting-edge sectors like artificial intelligence is intensifying. The 4IR technology race will be the primary factor influencing global economic and political arrangements in the post-pandemic future.
Although the United States remains the top AI power, it is closely followed by China, and then by other players such as Russia. For its part, China has already invested an estimated $300 billion in the field (including chips and electric cars), adopted a national innovation strategy (“Made in China 2025”), and enabled the rise of pioneering tech giants like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. But while China has massive potential for AI development, it also has a lot of work to do before it surpasses the U.S. Studies show that China still lags on three key fronts: hardware, research, and the commercial sector.
See: Global Survey on Impact of Covid-19 and Recession Risk: Fintech and Financial Institutions
Beyond the U.S. and China, European and Asian countries are also pursuing 4IR innovation. The United Kingdom, for example, is in the top quartile of countries in terms of AI readiness, owing to its top-tier research universities and generous public research funding. Similarly, many Asian countries have demonstrated an obvious advantage in terms of technological diffusion and robot density. With 774 robots per 10,000 workers, South Korea is far ahead of most other countries; and Japan, with its already-dominant automobile industry, has begun to establish itself as a leader in autonomous vehicles.
Against this backdrop, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated trends toward digitalization, with an array of 4IR technologies being adopted to track, trace, forecast, diagnose, and contain the virus, in addition to enabling remote work, e-commerce, and other behavioral shifts. In fact, it was an AI platform that first spotted the signs of a viral outbreak more than a week before the World Health Organization’s official announcement. And since then, AI and machine learning have been used to track and anticipate the evolution of the pandemic, identify high-risk patients, and optimize resource usage.
Moreover, scholars are using AI to detect new COVID-19 outbreaks and to drive the research for effective treatments or a vaccine. But this work points to the need for more regulatory clarity at the global level. To avoid zero-sum “vaccine nationalism,” we need better processes for the cross-border sharing of data and technological solutions, so that no one is left behind.
The recent dynamism in health care is emblematic of 4IR geopolitics more broadly. Plenty of attention has been devoted to the escalating Sino-American rivalry since the start of the COVID-19 crisis. Less noticed is the opportunity for developing countries to use the crisis as an impetus to expand their own adoption of 4IR technologies.
In Africa, for example, an AI-powered SMS platform has been deployed to deliver educational content to out-of-school children who lack internet access, smartphones, or even textbooks. Such innovations will become even more important the longer schools remain closed. Similarly, retailers and consumers are increasingly relying on e-commerce and mobile money to maintain social distancing and preserve supply chains. And in agriculture, more farmers are using information from big-data platforms, augmented by the Internet of Things, to guide their decisionmaking.
See: What to expect from Biden-Harris on tech policy, platform regulation, and China
But fully capitalizing on these opportunities will require more coordination between the public and private sectors and with multilateral institutions. By its very nature, the 4IR competition tempts countries to use their economic power to shape international standards. In a data-driven age, how leading governments define their approaches to regulation, including key issues such as individual privacy, will affect the entire global economic order in the years ahead.
This dynamic is already evident in how different countries have managed the use of AI-driven facial-recognition and digital contact-tracing tools during the pandemic. In South Korea and China, these technologies were widely adopted early on, and have (so far) proven effective in limiting the spread of the virus, but indisputably at the expense of individual privacy.
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