Digital Technologies for Development, with a focus on Health and Education
Amandeep Singh Gill is the CEO of the I-DAIR project (International Digital Health & AI Research Collaborative), based at the Graduate Institute of International & Development Studies, Geneva. He holds a PhD from King’s College London, and a B.Tech from Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. Previously he was the Executive Director & Co-Lead of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation. He was India’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva and served in various capacities at the Ministry of External Affairs, New Delhi with postings in Teheran, Colombo and a visiting scholar’s role at Stanford University. Select affiliations of Dr. Gill include the membership of the UNESCO Ad hoc Expert Group for the Ethics of AI in 2020; Co-Chair, Global Future Council of the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Values, Ethics and Innovation (2018-2019) and member of India’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. Ambassador Gill is a published poet and has written a book on the history of the Nuclear Security Summits.
Digital technologies have created enormous wealth and transformed our lives with new tools and services. At the same time, there is a growing digital divide between those who have access to the digital opportunity and those who do not. It is particularly worrisome that advancements in artificial intelligence and big data are limited to a few geographies. There is an opportunity to show that digital technologies can benefit everyone, and help us move faster on development in priority areas such as health, education and agriculture.
A single company in the Silicon Valley wants to spend 10 billion dollar every year over the next 10 years to build the Metaverse where we can live in fantasy as Avatars selling and being sold to. What would we get if we spent a tenth of that money across the globe on digital technology for sustainable development? How could we leverage these incentives to accelerate progress on Universal Health Coverage, build human capacity, accelerate the transformation of our economies to a low-carbon future, and ensure food security for all?