探花精选

Under-Secretary-General Amandeep Singh Gill, 27 February 2023

[English version; as delivered]

Thank you very much. Since it is the first time that I take the stage at the Mobile World Congress as the UNSG’s Tech Envoy, I want to begin by thanking the organizers for this opportunity. It is a great pleasure to be here at this signature event in the digital and tech calendar.

Trevor, you started us off with a 19th century example (Warren and Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, Harvard Law Review, December 15, 1890) that is relevant today. Let me pick a couple of other 19th century examples to get us into the substance of our topic.

The first is the motion picture that the Lumière brothers presented in 1896 in Paris. The arrival of the train shocked the audience, some of them panicked and ran for the door. Today, if you look back at motion pictures and videos, it has largely been a benign technology. It has done a lot of good. Of course, there has been some abuse, but by and large it has been a benign force in our societies, in our economies.

Around the same time in the 19th century, mobility was set to be transformed. And as a society, we made a choice to go with the internal combustion engine. This choice had a number of other implications - how our cities were designed, how our houses were built. And today we are dealing with the tremendous externalities of those choices. There has been a lot of good coming from mobility, but some of the choices we made around technology have had immense consequences for the environment, have left a trail of destruction, if you will, for something that is common heritage of all of mankind. So, between those two extremes (between motion pictures and fossil fuels driven mobility) where do we end up with the choices we make today with regard to the Metaverse?

It is up to us, but recent history is sobering. If you look at the recent experience we have had with digital technologies, overall, it is again largely positive. However, zero in on certain sectors such as social media the picture is more mixed and I am afraid that with what we see today regarding the choices being made around the Metaverse, we could end up in a situation where there are a lot of externalities. Externalities that governments, civil society and others would have to handle.

Therefore, what I'm going to talk about today is some of the consequences that we need to be mindful of and some of the things that we need to do; things that the private sector that is in a race to build the Metaverse needs to take to heart and implement from the word go. Now of course, don't get me wrong. Innovation is important and the Metaverse may lead to several things that are useful for society. The combination of immersive technologies, artificial intelligence and digital platforms that allow us to interact at distance may create new opportunities. For education. For truly immersive experiences for students that help us to deepen learning and that help us to reduce the time taken to train specialists, whether it is firefighters, policemen, soldiers or other professionals who undertake dangerous and risky jobs. It may help us revolutionize the way we generate empathy. For instance, when people watch a virtual reality simulation of how it is to live in a refugee camp, it has been shown that they become more generous in funding refugee programmes.

There are other applications with regard to how we work. We could improve sustainability by obviating the need to travel for meetings. The Metaverse may create platforms whereby co-workers can engage with each other, almost get to shake your hand, the kind of feeling which still makes people take the airplane and come to conferences like this because there is nothing like face-to-face interaction. So, there are those advantages that lie out there. But at the same time, we cannot be blind to the risks and some of the unintended consequences that lie ahead of us. Our experience with social media platforms recently is a cautionary tale.

First of those challenges is related to privacy. Just 20 minutes spent in an immersive reality experience may generate 2,000,000 data points about a person. And I am not even talking here about the interaction that you may have in the Metaverse with other avatars or vendors who may be offering you things to look at, to purchase. So, the difficulty today we have with enforcing data protection and privacy online gets exponentially modified with the Metaverse where we engage with body movements, which are a unique signature in themselves. It will be very easy to identify who you are when you engage in that manner.

So that's just one challenge that we have ahead of ourselves. The other is safety and security online. The companies that are building the hardware and the software and the platforms for the Metaverse, they are very focused on consumer safety. You have an HMD, a head mounted display on, you don't want to trip over, or you hurt someone else. After 20 minutes you may feel sick or dizzy. We are addressing those kind of safety issues but what I am talking about is safety online. Today, you have gender-based violence, you have targeted harassment of a number of communities who may be suffering from a power deficit in the analog world - women, children, minorities, politicians of a certain race or gender. When you have a similar experience in the Metaverse, it is not just like someone sent you a nasty direct message, or you saw something on a tweet. It is much more impactful. The physicality of the Metaverse makes it emotionally very different. We already have cases of sexual harassment in the Metaverse. So, this challenge of safety online that we have today is going to get multiplied many times over, just like the privacy challenge.

The third challenge that we will face is that of distraction. Your mind cannot be in two places at the same time. Either you are in an immersive reality in a virtual world, or you are in the physical world. You cannot be in two places at the same time. In fact, the hardware you have today is designed to block out the physical world. So obviously we make a choice when we enter the Metaverse. People could be spending hours every day. I have a story from a friend who studies these things for a living. He thought he was gone for 15 minutes but when he came out it was 45 minutes. This is addictive because the experience is so real. The mind thinks you are in that environment, so you may end up spending a lot of time in the metaverse. There is an opportunity cost for that time. Opportunity cost in terms of your relationships in the real world. Opportunity cost in terms of the time you are spending solving real world problems. If you have seen the movie Ready Player One, you have this virtual reality fantasy world and you have a crumbling world outside. Choices have consequences.

And this has consequences for our children, and I am sure the panel will get into some of these issues. Children already suffer from gaming addiction. The manner in which the younger generation today processes information and relates to text is very different from previous generations. That is not an ideal outcome in schools. It is not just school, but it is also sleep. The impact there is on children's sleeping patterns apart from their thinking patterns. We have not even understood that fully with regard to the two-dimensional screens we have today. When it comes to the 3-dimensional, we will have a significantly different challenge.

And I could go on, say by talking about misinformation and disinformation, but I just want to underline that this is simply not a new media. It is not just simply drawing the line from 2 D to 3 D experience. The mind reacts differently to these technologies, and we need to rethink safeguards, safety, privacy, data protection in a different way.

I want to end this talk by giving a call to private companies that are building the Metaverse to ask themselves three questions. And those questions are: number one, when you are spending X dollars on hardware, software, platforms and user interfaces, how much of that X are you going to spend on governance and safeguards? From the beginning, by design by default.

Second, when you are going to get together and discuss interoperability and other industry-wide collaborative efforts which would make it easier for everyone to thrive on the metaverse, how much are you listening to or inviting those who may not necessarily think like you to be part of those discussions? Here I mean, transdisciplinary expertise, expertise from the field of ethics, behavioral science, psychology, child psychiatry because the consequences are not only about the bottom line and about hardware and software. These are society wide consequences that we need to be thinking about.

And my third question is: When you are going to put something on the Metaverse, can you please ask yourself, is it really necessary? Is that a problem that needs to be solved on the Metaverse? Can it be solved differently?

So those are three basic questions. Just as a starting point, and I'm sure there will be many, many more questions that we will need to answer as we go around building these emerging technologies, not just the Metaverse as we heard at the outset, we will have similar choices around Generative AI, we will have similar choices about the next generation intelligent networks.

A big question underlying all of this would be: Who is building these technologies and for whose benefit?  Behind all this lie asymmetries of power. If it is a few companies that are going to be building the large language models, the Generative AI that may become a new infrastructure, with the best of intentions, I think we will still have a problem if it is not a more diverse, more democratized innovation space. If there is there is more diverse participation in this space, we will still have problems, but there will be less risk because diversity allows us to handle risk.

I want to thank you for your attention today and I want to end by inviting you to take interest in the Global Digital Compact that is proposed as an outcome for the Summit of the Future next year. The Secretary-General has given a call, which Member States have endorsed, for Leaders to come together next year to think about some of these global challenges and how to govern our digital spaces in a manner that future generation will continue to benefit from the digital innovation in a manner which is inclusive, which is safe, which is secure, which is sustainable. Thank you very much.