缅北禁地

Imagine a world with no hunger, where every child attends school and no one dies from a communicable disease. This is not a utopian dream, but rather our collective vision for a society where no one is left behind. It serves as our guiding spirit—our raison d’être—as we work together towards the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The World Economic and Social Survey 2018: Frontier Technologies for Sustainable Development (WESS 2018)—the flagship report of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA)—describes technologies at our disposal that can help us eradicate hunger and epidemics, increase life expectancy, reduce carbon emissions, automate manual and repetitive tasks, create decent jobs, improve quality of life and facilitate the achievement of new heights of prosperity for all.

While such possibilities are alluring, let us remember that technology cannot make its own choices. Technologies cannot, on their own, reach the people that need them the most. Policies—still shaped and guided by human beings—are needed to bridge the great technological divide that persists among individuals, regions and countries, helping them realize their sustainable development potential.

In the past, it took decades for a technological breakthrough to spread across countries. The process is different for many new technologies. Mobile phones, for example, reached billions of people in less than 20 years. The Internet is another technological advance that more than half the world’s people use every day. These are great examples of enabling technologies used by countries and regions to explore new windows of opportunity to accelerate development and to ‘leapfrog’ a linear path of progress.

What are frontier technologies? As the WESS 2018 makes evident, there is no unique set of such technologies. We are witnessing the rapid development of a broad spectrum of interrelated and interdependent technologies that are fundamentally transforming the world. Advances in one foster breakthroughs in others. In the field of renewable energy, for example, advances in energy storage are enabling breakthroughs in electric vehicles. Similarly, artificial intelligence (AI) is making robots and automation processes more efficient.

Unlike our experiences with previous breakthroughs, communities and societies can adapt and adopt frontier technologies with relatively low upfront costs. For example, we do not need massive capital investments to replicate an algorithm and make it work in a new economic or social setting. Portability, replicability and affordability are the essence of many frontier technologies. They can create an even playing field for all countries, especially the least developed countries (LDCs), and allow them to achieve their full potential, often bypassing earlier and less efficient means.

The WESS 2018 also makes it clear that there is no guarantee that frontier technologies will deliver sustainable development. If we do not put the right policies and institutions in place, many frontier technologies can potentially do more harm than good. Robots and AI, for example, may eliminate millions of jobs without replacing them with new ones. The creators and owners of such machines will likely become more prosperous at the expense of millions of people.

With advances in frontier technologies, we are likely to experience higher levels of income inequalities unless appropriate countervailing policy measures, including strengthened social protection, are put in place. Nevertheless, the cautionary tale of the WESS 2018 comes with an important silver lining. If we manage to harness frontier technologies and make them accessible and available to the people who need them most, there is a strong chance that we will achieve positive sustainable development outcomes. The question is how we make that “if” a certainty.

In ensuring that developing countries can benefit from frontier technologies, they must build necessary human capital. Developing countries will also have to build the enabling infrastructure to ease their access to frontier technologies. If two-fifth of the world’s population have either no or unreliable access to electricity, we cannot expect them to take advantage of online education and learn to write computer code. Given the window of opportunity to leapfrog will not remain open for long, Governments must clearly and unequivocally prioritize the formation of human capital and necessary physical infrastructures to reap the potential of frontier technologies.

The WESS 2018 explains the central role of a properly designed and executed national innovation system in countries’ efforts to leapfrog. There is no perfect model of a national innovation system, but all successful systems have a few things in common. They all provide institutional networks for learning; facilitate the sharing of technological knowledge; enhance absorptive capacities; and expand access to finance. The window of opportunity to catch up hinges on how quickly developing countries are able to master the will and put in place an enabling innovation system that can develop, diffuse and adopt frontier technologies for sustainable development.

Even a strong national innovation system requires external support. While a national system can create a conducive environment, it will still face considerable challenges in accessing many technologies developed in advanced economies. In facilitating developing countries’ access to critical technologies and narrowing the technological divide, we will need to develop a more flexible and SDG-supportive intellectual property rights regime and address the excessive concentration of market power. There is a clear and urgent need for a global dialogue on these issues.

In March this year, the United Nations will continue its collaboration with the Boao Forum Secretariat to organize a sustainable development sub-forum at the . The sub-forum will focus on the impact of frontier technologies on sustainable development. The United Nations remains a trusted and impartial forum for Governments and other stakeholders to discuss and determine the trajectory of frontier technologies. This is duly reflected in the Secretary-General’s Strategy on New Technologies. Underscoring the importance of fostering inclusion and transparency, the Strategy establishes that the United Nations must provide a platform for Governments, businesses and civil society to make collective choices about new technologies, anchored in the values and obligations of the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It also tasks the Organization to “promote the development of partnerships across a range of actors to increase collective knowledge, test ideas, and expand dialogue”. These principles will guide the efforts of the United Nations to bridge technology divides and foster sustainable development for all.

The United Nations can play a vital role in identifying technologies that are critical for achieving the 2030 Agenda and the interconnected SDGs. The clock is ticking—we must act now to achieve the SDGs by 2030. We cannot afford to miss this precious window of opportunity to leapfrog towards sustainable development for all, with the help of frontier technologies.

Op-Ed by Liu Zhenmin, 缅北禁地DESA’s Under-Secretary-General, ahead of Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference
Photo by?Aaron Burden?on?Unsplash