Vice-Chairman for International Affairs, Lithuanian Union of Journalists |
LITHUANIA
Short Bio: Ernest Alesin is the Vice-Chairman for International Affairs at the Lithuanian Union of Journalists. He has 30 years of professional experience in the media sector, including leadership roles in television, radio, print, film, and podcast production. Mr. Alesin actively contributes to strengthening media ethics, freedom of expression, and international cooperation. Since 2017, he has been involved in international programs supported by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Baltic Centre for Media Excellence. Mr. Alesin is also the Head of the Association of Minority Media in Lithuania and currently, he is pursuing a Master’s degree in Sports and Tourism Management. Ernest Alesin is a Member of the Media Council under the Ministry of Culture of Lithuania, where he contributes to policy discussions on media diversity, media resilience, and the protection of minority voices in the public sphere.
Event: SDGs Conference 2025
Date: September 24, 2025
SPEECH: The SDGs Conference 2025 is taking place at a truly critical moment when the year 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and the 25th anniversary of the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda. It also coincides with the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly. These milestones remind us that while progress has been achieved, it remains fragile and must be advanced through leadership that is inclusive, resilient, and forward-looking.
I have spent more than 30 years in the media sector, and I have seen firsthand how societies, institutions, and narratives change. Just as journalism has been transformed by technology, globalization, and shifting values, so too must we recognize that the future of governance and civic engagement depends on transformation. The world around us is changing, and we must be ready to respond by solving today’s challenges and by building tomorrow’s solutions.
The panel “Women and Youth as Leaders for Civic Engagement and Social Change” focuses on the vital role of women’s leadership in shaping the future of the United Nations, the dangers posed by backlash against women’s rights, the urgent need to address intergenerational trauma, and the restoration of youth trust in inclusive governance and multilateral institutions. These are not abstract debates; they are questions that define the future of global governance and our capacity to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
I come from Lithuania, a country that, just twenty years ago, could hardly imagine the reality we live today. We had our first woman president, Dalia Grybauskaitė, whose leadership marked a turning point for the country. Today, women hold the highest offices: the Prime Minister is a woman, in fact, the second woman to hold this office in Lithuania, and they also serve as Ministers of Defense, Education, Justice, and Culture. Women chair parliamentary committees, lead banks, and run unicorn companies. Just a year ago, two of the three top positions of state, Prime Minister and Speaker of Parliament, were both held by women. Women also led the ministries of Finance and of Economy and Innovation. This is not an exception anymore. This has become the new normal. It has transformed the culture of governance, strengthened democracy, and built greater trust within society.
However, leadership is not only about women’s representation. We must also recognize the crucial role of youth leadership. In Lithuania, we see this in the work of school parliaments, where students practice democracy at an early age, and in LIJOT (the Lithuanian Youth Council), which brings together youth organizations from across the country to influence national policies. These are not symbolic exercises, but real platforms where young leaders learn responsibility, representation, and dialogue.
Across Europe and globally, youth leadership programs, from the UN Youth Delegates to the European Youth Parliament and many regional youth ambassador initiatives, are creating a generation of leaders who are courageous, innovative, and unafraid to challenge outdated structures. Their voices are essential if we are to renew multilateralism and ensure the future of inclusive governance. Throughout Europe and the world, women are also redefining leadership in times of crisis. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, has carried the weight of COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, and the economic transformation of the European Union. Giorgia Meloni became the first woman Prime Minister of Italy, leading one of Europe’s largest economies. Kaja Kallas of Estonia has become a symbol of determination in the face of war. And Maia Sandu, the first woman President of Moldova, has led her country toward European integration despite immense external pressure and internal resistance.
These examples show us that leadership, both women’s and youth’s, is not simply a matter of equality. It is about resilience, building societies capable of withstanding crises, and ensuring that decisions reflect trust, diversity, and long-term vision. We must learn to look at people not through the categories of gender or age, but through the lens of their ideas and their ability to shape the future. The challenge before us is to recognize and elevate the solutions that will serve generations to come.
Executive Director, Institute for People and Technology | USA
Short Bio: Dr. Michael L. Best is Executive Director of the Institute for People and Technology and Professor with the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology where he directs the Technologies and International Development Lab. He was founding director of the United Nations University Institute on Computing and Society in Macau SAR, China. He holds a Ph.D. from MIT and has served as director of Media Lab Asia in India and head of the e-Development group at the MIT Media Lab. Professor Best is Associate Editor for Global Computing with Communications of the ACM and co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the journal Information Technologies and International Development.
Event: SDGs Conference 2025
Date: September 24, 2025
SPEECH: Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that everyone has the right to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and in part information and ideas through any media, regardless of frontiers. I was reminded of an essay I wrote quite some time ago when my colleague in a public forum recently stated that this essay was the first time that anyone had directly claimed in a publication that the internet itself was a human right. I am not sure that it was the first time, but this was two decades ago, and it was probably one of the first times amongst the collection of such publications.
So, two decades ago, I wrote an essay entitled “Can the Internet be a Human Right?”. The title of the essay is a question. But as I reread the essay itself, I realized that I had answered that question for myself at that time in the affirmative. Two decades ago, I was a very young scholar, and when I reread this essay, I was impressed with was my claim in this material that access to the internet itself is a human right. That is the reciprocal claims of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for being able to seek, receive, and impart information. The realization that the internet today is fundamentally the mechanism with which we act, beyond the statement of how the internet could be a human right. If we come to today, my question for us all is, has the bloom fallen off that rose?
As my fellow panelists have also noted, there is a janus-faced nature to the internet today that we are balancing multiple equities. The online gender-based violence that is perpetrated on people across the planet is indeed sobering. In the nature of this kind of multiple equities today, would we want to challenge the notion that the internet itself could be a human right? Access to the internet is required if we wish to seek and receive information. I would like to argue that the designs of the internet, social media, and AI platforms are part of the problem. Those platforms and systems are no longer what the UDHR would contemplate as part of a human rights-based approach to informational exchange.
I would like to illustrate a case that I am personally involved in Myanmar. In 2018, the UN established that Facebook was used in Myanmar to incite hate and offline violence against the Rohingya people, who are an ethnolinguistic Muslim religious minority population in Myanmar. The UN had already established that the military was engaged in genocide against this minority population and community. The UN Special Rapporteur explicitly called out Facebook as an instrument towards that genocide, which is extraordinary. The United Nations is essentially pointing a finger at a social media platform being a part of a genocide. It was not a good look for Facebook or Meta, and they approached me during the 2020 election, asking if I might be a partner with them to flag, track, and monitor the dis and misinformation, electoral irregularities, and hate speech on Facebook during the 2020 election.
It is not just about Facebook, but at the time in Myanmar, the Internet was Facebook. This is because of a program that they run called Zero Rating or Free Basics, meaning that for the people of Myanmar, Facebook was free back then, but if you wanted to do other actions on the internet, you had to pay for data. I called this a walled garden in an essay I wrote 8 years ago, which is a metaphor for what I think that Meta at the time was doing.
“I stroll the gardens of this virtual garden along with all of my best friends. I chat with my buddies, play games, shop at the many concessions, or engage even in serious activities around politics or education. My friends all love the garden, and so do I, spending hours a day delighting within its walled confines. All the while, the proprietors are monitoring every aside I make to a friend or lingering glance I place on a storefront window. The proprietors are well-meaning enough, but they realize someone has to pay for all the costs associated with the grounds. They portfolize my size and my glances and sell them to storefront managers who can use the information and personalize my shopping options, constraining my experience to match their calculation of my interests. We feel free in our choices as we linger on the grounds, though of course, it is a well-planned architecture is not without influences. The managers had a brilliant new idea. At the entrance gates, these newcomers are welcomed freely, and they stream in. But when it comes time to exit, to everyone’s surprise, they have placed ticket booths. It was free to enter, now they pay to leave.”
There are two important aspects about the design of these platforms that are not because Facebook, Meta, X, TikTok, or WeChat is debased or depraved. It is simply a business model, an economy of surveillance and engagement. When Facebook surveil, me is to my choices for the sandwich I eat for lunch, it is not due to a debased interest in my love of roast beef. It is simply that they would like to sell that choice to a lunch meat company. So that motivates them to find out what I am eating for lunch, and then it further motivates them to elevate information that is going to engage me and keep me on the platform.
It is the engagement part that creates a platform that wishes to bring up mis and disinformation, to highlight hate speech or problematic speech, and to indeed create echoes and create the strongest opportunities for rights inflicting content online. So fast forward today to Myanmar, Facebook has been banned there, as have most social media platforms, because in February of 2021, the military junta took control of the country, destroyed the democratic process, and to this day are in control, perpetrating human rights and civil rights abuses against the democracy programs that are in the country.
It is a little rich that a platform that was cognizant of human rights abuses pre-military coup would be the one that the military junta would choose to ban. Meanwhile, Meta has dismantled its content moderation programs globally, and Twitter is a hellscape of harmful content. The UDHR may still purposefully affirm all these rights to receive, seek, and impart information and ideas, but in the presence of a designed Internet world that is about surveillance and engagement, is that a rights-affirming world? Is the internet in that instance a right itself, as I believe 20 years ago naively? Or is there a possibility for a new design of the Internet? If so, then are we able to move forward to put it in place?
Co-Founder, Tika, Award-winning Journalist | NEW ZEALAND
Short Bio: Ms. Alison Mau is an award-winning journalist with more than thirty years in major television, radio, and print media roles. A long-time advocate for gender equity, in the wake of the global #Metoo movement, Ms. Mau created a groundbreaking investigative journalism project at NZ’s largest news platform in 2018. Over five years, the #MeTooNZ project published dozens of major investigations and supported hundreds of survivors to tell their stories, leading to widespread change in the way sexual harassment is reported by media. Her leadership of the project has been recognized in national and international awards. In 2023, Alison Mau Co-Founded Tika, a tech-first access to justice charity designed to remove the barriers survivors experience when seeking justice and accountability. Her bestselling memoir, No Words For This, was released in April 2025.
Event: SDGs Conference 2025
Date: September 24, 2025
SPEECH: Kia ora koutou katoa. Ko Alison Mau toko ingoa. In the Māori language of Aotearoa, this means hello, my name is Alison Mau. I’m from Aoteraoa New Zealand, a beautiful country at the bottom of the South Pacific – a country with a stellar reputation for peace, a stable democracy, and, in particular, for its global leadership in the gender equity space. We were the first independently governed country in the world to grant women the vote. We were among the first nations in the world to achieve majority female representation in parliament. When I Googled that to check the exact details, the AI overview told me that milestone was built on “a long history of women’s political empowerment” in our country. But ours is also a country that bears a shadow not many in the wider world know about. We have appalling levels of domestic and sexual violence that belie that stellar reputation, much worse than our closest neighbor, Australia, which last year declared violence against women a national crisis.
In fact, in New Zealand, we have the worst rates of domestic and sexual violence in the OECD. Although it is not framed that way in public discourse, the truth is we are facing a national crisis of gendered violence in our small, idyllic country, and increasingly much of that is taking place online, or with the use of technology to coerce, control, and terrorize.
Zooming out for a moment. Internationally, the rise of online and technology-facilitated violence against women has become one of the most pressing human rights challenges of our time. It is ubiquitous and creates real-world harms, both psychological and physical. The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women has defined this abuse as “Any act of gendered violence against women that is committed, assisted or aggravated by the use of ICT such as mobile phones, the internet, social media or email against a woman because she is a woman, or that affects women disproportionally.”
This might look like a partner controlling a woman using spyware, tracking software, or the health apps on her phone or smart watch; the online environment is being used to spread misogyny or attack public figures to silence them; new technologies leading to new forms of abuse, such as the spreading of deepfake images; or the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. In my years as an investigative journalist writing almost exclusively on gendered violence, I have seen many cases of all of those categories, and even personally experienced one of them. But it is a case that falls into that last category, that really sticks in my mind.
Samarah, that’s not her real name, is a New Zealand woman who came to me in desperation after years of trying, on her own, to track down and stop the man who was posting sexual videos of her without her consent – all over the internet. Or at least that is what it genuinely felt like to her. She had done what society considers “the right thing to do”. She had gone to the police. They had taken a case forward.
She had undergone intense and victim-blaming cross-examination by this man’s defense counsel. And despite the fact that she could prove that he had uploaded the video to dozens, maybe hundreds, of pornography websites, her perpetrator was acquitted and set free. How could this happen? Well, at the time of her trial, under the New Zealand legislation called the Harmful Digital Communications Act, prosecutors had to prove that the offender intended to cause harm. A high legal threshold that made convictions almost impossible. That loophole was closed in 2020, but too late for Samarah.
Even after leaving journalism, I have kept in touch with Samarah, and I know she has spent most of the past decade chasing around the world wide web, filing take-down notice after take-down notice to porn websites, only to find the footage pop up somewhere else. Samarah is now part of a massive class action made up of women all over the world, which is suing Pornhub for allowing non-consensual videos like hers to remain online. This might sound like an outlier, something so horrible that it can only, surely, be happening in isolation. I am very sorry to say that when it comes to gendered violence online, it is everywhere you look and growing at an alarming rate.
A 2015 study by the United Nations Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development showed that almost 75% of women surveyed have experienced some form of gender-based violence online. A 2020 study covering 45 countries and conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit reported that 85% women have experienced or witnessed online and technology-facilitated violence. In my own country in 2017, Amnesty International released results of a study across Europe, the US, and New Zealand, which showed that a quarter of all women had personally experienced online abuse and harassment motivated by gender at least once in their lives. In 2021, UN Women reported that 60% of women in the Middle East had suffered from online and technology-facilitated violence and had reported it in the past year.
The intersectionality of victim-survivors must be acknowledged, too. There are much higher rates of abuse and harm in the LGBTQI+ community, and Black women also experience higher levels of abuse online. Sometimes it is your profession that will put the target on your back. I know from personal experience that women journalists are targeted disproportionately, and so are women in politics. In New Zealand, we are holding local government elections next month, an event that comes around every three years. The surge in racist, sexist, and sexualized abuse against women who are putting themselves up for those local council seats has made national news headlines for months already.
In 2020, at New Zealand’s general election, there were 263 women candidates standing for election to our national Parliament. In the lead-up to the election, those women were sent 200,000 toxic messages on Twitter (now called X) – most of them directed at Jacinda Ardern, and other women politicians like Chlöe Swarbrick from the Green Party and Judith Collins, of the National Party – so this was a misogyny issue, not a political one. How do I know about those 200,000 tweets? Those 200,000 abusive messages sent to women political candidates back in 2020 were detected by a custom-made Twitter Bot created by a women-led tech company called Areto Labs, a pioneering AI-driven content moderation company tackling digital harm.
When a tweet to a woman politician reached a threshold of awfulness, the bot would immediately tweet something positive and affirming back to the candidate. There is legislation in the wings that could help, and I would say not before time, because while technology-facilitated harm races forward, legislation to combat it tends to plod along in the distance, and it seems, is given few opportunities to catch up. A new bill called the Online Safety Duties for Platforms Bill has been mooted by New Zealand’s main opposition party, and if passed, it would impose legally enforceable duties on social media companies where there currently are none, protecting children, limiting harmful material, and taking down deepfakes. Unfortunately, it does not cover racist or misogynistic pile-ons as they would fall outside the Bill’s definition of harmful material. If the Bill makes it through, we will have to wait and see if it makes much of a difference. And finally, there is a light in the darkness for victim-survivors of sexual harm – whether it happens online, or IRL. And that is TIKA, the new NGO I have co-founded with the New Zealand barrister Zoe Lawton.
When I stepped away from journalism in 2023 after years of investigating sexual violence in the wake of the Global #MeToo movement, I was disappointed that all the awareness-raising and all the survivors’ voices we had platformed had not made a single dent in the truly terrible reporting rates, which had stayed stuck at 7 per cent for 10 years. That meant 93% of harm, including online sexual harm, was going completely unreported. We asked each other, my co-founder and I, what would budge those statistics. What could we build that would sweep away the barriers of shame and self-blame, aloneness and isolation, fear of not being believed or having their experiences minimized and allow people to confidently and privately make a report and take the steps towards accountability they craved.
We decided the answer lay in access to justice using two things: collective action, and technology. So, over the past 2 years, having raised more than $2 million in cash and in-kind support, we built a secure platform that uses algorithmic pattern matching to bring together groups of survivors of the same repeat perpetrator. We do it this way because we know that perpetrators rarely only harm one person, and there is better evidence, a better chance of an early guilty plea, a better chance of a conviction, and more support and comfort in numbers.
Once you register with TIKA, you have automatic lawyer-client privilege, a chance to find out whether your perpetrator has harmed anyone else, and a number of different pathways each group can choose for justice. Not everyone wants a criminal trial, so we offer restorative justice, a civil claim, or mediation, for example. The choice always remains in the survivors’ hands, and our lawyers advise and support the group for free because we are a registered charity to the conclusion of their chosen justice pathway.
TIKA is a very special word in te reo Māori. It means justice, or what is right, and we’re grateful to have had it gifted to us by tangata whenua, the people of the land. TIKA is a concept and a technology that has international appeal and a number of different use cases, and when we launch the TIKA platform next month, we expect to hear from thousands of New Zealanders who have experienced gendered harm online, whether it be harassment or online criminal acts under the HDCA and the Human Rights Act.
If I could finish by harking back to Samarah, the young woman whose life has been swallowed whole for ten years by the actions of that one man who posts her video online. I know one thing: I know that Samarah shares the same fervent wish that I have heard at least once from each and every one of the thousands of survivors I have spoken to. Samarah is desperate that no one else gets hurt. She wants her perpetrator stopped before he causes any further harm. And that’s where we come in.
Associate Professor, UPEACE, Deputy Director, Global Center for Peace Innovation | COSTA RICA
Short Bio: Dr. Mariateresa Garrido is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Law at UPEACE, the Doctoral Committee Coordinator, and the Deputy Director of the Global Center for Peace Innovation. She is an international lawyer and holds a Doctorate from UPEACE and her main research area is related to the exercise of the right to freedom of expression and the protection of journalists in Latin America. Dr. Mariateresa Garrido is also researching the interaction between human rights and Information and Communication Technologies, using mixed methodologies and legal research to explore the linkages between the law and new technologies.
Event: SDGs Conference 2025
Date: September 24, 2025
SPEECH: I would like to begin with an important question: Where do wars start? From the UNESCO charter, we learn that war starts in the minds of people. War doesn’t start with AI or technology. War starts with the information we consume, in the information we distribute and engage with, and with the information we create. This implies an important social change that comes from the Fourth Industrial Revolution, specifically from the creation of information networks, how they operate, and how we are part of the distribution process.
In today’s networks, information is the main good that we are discussing and distributing, creating. Then, it is essential to understand the information creation process. Coming from the idea of the minds of people, it’s in our minds where the separation of us vs. them is created. It usually relies on the creation of stereotypes and highlighting the differences that create divisions; in other words, division is fueled by not knowing each other and the lack of understanding of what can make us a common group. These ideas impact us deeply. On one side, they lead us to the use of stereotypes that secure separation, and on the other side, they help us to justify the creation, consumption, and distribution of a very particular type of information. In consequence, information as a tool must be evaluated as a chain.
When we talk about misinformation or disinformation as a tool for warfare, we’re usually looking at the idea of the creation of this type of information. Thus, when we refer to disinformation campaigns, we limit its study to an operation in which information has been purposely created to produce some harm. In this scenario, we recognize the use of bots, mass distribution of content specially designed for social media and internet-based platforms.
On the side of misinformation, we refer to information that might not have been created with the purpose of causing some harm, but it ends with conversations that are misleading. One example of this happened recently in Costa Rica when one congressman visited an area affected by intense rains, and when sharing about it with the media, he sent a picture of him in the affected place but from a previous visit. We know that he visited the area, but when he sent an image that was not from that very specific moment, he was misleading the media and the population in general. In conclusion, the main difference between misinformation and disinformation is the purpose and the goals for which they are created.
Continuing with the idea of the information chain, once it is created, it is massively distributed, permeating the information ecosystem, in both digital and non-digital networks. The digital distribution usually starts in social media, which is one of the biggest dissemination channels for this type of information because it is fast, emotional, and easy to relate to the situations people are facing. Then we also have media taking over, in some cases, traditional media using breakout news, without an exhaustive checking process.
Some of the problems we see in the distribution process are the existence of echo chambers. These are networks created around our interests and that impede us from receiving information that is posted outside those chambers. So, thinking of the idea that war starts in the mind of people, if we’re only receiving information that is confirming our stereotypes and biases, then it is extremely easy to use information as a tool for warfare, because it is endorsing the preexisting believe of us vs. them. Then, the question is, how do we break this cycle? What do we do? The answer is simple: analyze the information. Some of the questions we can ask ourselves are: What is this information bringing to me as a person? How am I part of this echo chamber? Am I contributing to the distribution of misinformation or disinformation?
Disinformation campaigns rely on the use of emotions to ensure a connection with the audience. Thus, if it is relying on us vs. them, outrage and stereotypes, fear, anxiety, and conflict, then it is very likely that we are receiving disinformation.
To move away from the temptation to share that content, we need to consider our responsibility and find a path to disrupt the cycle, and it is precisely on this point that we go back to our minds.
If we are conscious of who we are in the network society, how this information is getting to us, then it’s easy to take effective actions to break the cycle by doing something different. To counter the effects of these campaigns, it is worth identifying the main beneficiary of the information, the context, or the group for which disinformation is relevant, and considering the larger effects of the division that it is causing.
We must recognize that it will be specific people or groups who are creating this type of information and disinformation campaigns, with clear goals and intentions. They need society to think about a specific topic, and they are disseminating information to increase division and polarization. This is why, before sharing, it is crucial to stop and say: Is it worth sharing?
These are simple questions to explore, and that I want to leave you with, because if war begins in the minds of people, so does peace. We need to be intentional in the creation of peace, and for that, awareness of the type of information we consume and share is essential. If we can fight the temptation of sharing content that promotes division and polarization, we can do our part to build the society we want.
As we say at the University for Peace, if you want peace, work for peace. This work starts with us, in the most private space – our mind – and from there it impacts our networks and our society. If you can identify how the information is affecting you and stop the distribution cycle, you’re already building peace.
As users, we’re not powerless, we can create change by bringing unity when we recognize the us vs. them dynamic, dismantling echo chambers by accessing different ideas and consuming information that challenges our believes, and stopping the cycle by impeding the limitation of these types of contents. Change doesn’t happen suddenly, but remember, if you want peace, work for it.
Head of Responsible Technology Program, Human Technology Institute | AUSTRALIA
Short Bio: Ms. Sophie Farthing is Head of the Responsible Technology Program at the Human Technology Institute at the University of Technology Sydney. A human rights lawyer, her work encompasses human centered approaches to new and emerging technologies, with a current focus on AI governance and regulation. Previously, Ms. Farthing was the Senior Policy Adviser to the Australian Human Rights Commissioner. She has held legal policy roles at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Sydney, at National Council for Civil Liberties in the United Kingdom and was appointed the Research Assistant to Baroness Hale of Richmond in the United Kingdom Supreme Court. Ms. Sophie Farthing recently served on the Australian Human Rights Commission Expert Reference Group on Neurotechnology and Human Rights.
Event: SDGs Conference 2025
Date: September 24, 2025
SPEECH: As a human rights lawyer, I have been working in AI, governance, and technology policy for almost a decade now. The Human Technology Institute, based in Australia, is coming to this fourth industrial revolution, looking to see how we can ensure new and emerging technology is adopted in a way that is human-centric, so that we get the benefits from this very powerful technology, and we do not steer towards that dystopian future that we definitely all fear. First, I would like to give a proper framing for what civic technologies are. Like artificial intelligence, there is no fixed definition, but as we think about civic technologies, we are looking for the positive examples. The ones where the use of technology is transparent, where there is accountability, and it is used for the public interest. Therefore, when we are talking about the revitalization of the Sustainable Development Goals, we are in an incredible era where there is so much potential and a lot of peril.
Artificial intelligence is one technology, and there will be other examples of civic technologies that are going to be relevant to the SDGs. My focus on AI is because of how transformative this technology is. So, if we are thinking about potential, it is incredible what AI is going to be able to achieve because it is pervasive and now touching on all parts of societies and economies in very different ways. We surely have a huge digital divide, and we are getting an AI divide as well. As we have had past technologies that have completely transformed societies, that is what AI has the potential to do if we make the right choices with the right questions. If we approach the AI in the right way, then we will be able to use these technologies to revitalize and to work towards the attainment of the SDGs.
I also would like to note that we steer between two extremes, with a polar extreme headline of “AI could wipe out humanity,” which had many political ramifications, to the claim that “AI can be worth trillions,” referring to huge productivity and jobs. But what we are doing at the Human Technology Institute is focusing on examples showcasing how AI is being used now. We can get very distracted with the AI debate, and that is certainly occurring in particular environments globally. We can talk about the promise of AI transition from the promise of AI as one extreme to claiming that it will wipe us all out, taking our jobs. We must have practical conversations to make the right choices.
I would like to elaborate on the promise and the peril when it comes to using AI to achieve the SDGs, and the best way to do this is by speaking of examples. As I am coming from Australia, I have got a very particular example of AI from my country and how we are approaching it. During the week, I have met an obstetrician who specializes in high-risk pregnancies in Australia, where there is an excellent health system, but in our rural and remote areas, there are a lot of challenges. This woman`s health professional was talking about diagnostic tools; the majority are powered by AI. She was saying that this new tool is not replacing what she does when she goes out to rural and remote Australia, but it is speeding up the time she must make a diagnosis quickly and therefore see more people and offer more help. These kinds of examples about health are very incredible when it comes to the use of AI. Ending hunger is another area with life-changing impacts of AI. I spoke with another person from Mali who has developed an app that is launching this week. The application will provide local people, including farmers and non-farmers, with information about growing food using the land around them, with the kind of information about weather and possible crops that could be planted. This is about the accessibility of information.
My computer scientist colleagues at the Human Technology Institute are globally leading a Bayesian statistical analysis and deep machine learning, looking at the education system in New South Wales, the state in which I come from. They have taken huge swaths of data held by the New South Wales Department of Education. After organizing that data and feeding it into their very spectacular mathematical formulas, they receive incredible algorithms.
What they are doing is looking at all this data that has been held for decades, and they are trying to understand why some kids finish school particularly strongly, and some finish at a disadvantage. One of the interesting findings is the unexpected causal relationships. Not only the correlation, but they are using AI to understand causation, which is the lower socioeconomic status that might indicate how well a child finishes school, if they finish school at all. In fact, they are finding a sense of belonging. These kinds of examples of AI use are the ones we need to really lean into when it comes to achieving the SDGs. We, of course, have a lot of frightening examples of how AI is undermining human rights and dismantling democracy. We must have a kind of environment in which healthy and well-functioning democratic institutions can operate. And AI is really undermining that ecosystem when it comes to misinformation. Social media is another good example of how powerful business models that are driving particular social media trends are having impacts on the health of young people and all of us. Seeking to understand how AI is reshaping public discourse in Australia and everywhere around the world is really important when we think about this promise and peril. How do we get the most out of AI?
We could have many different futures when it comes to AI and achieving the SDGs, but we need to be very careful about our decision making. We need active leadership at this point in time. As we are talking about AI revitalizing the attainment of the SDGs, it is addressing that global divide which is hugely significant. We are talking about the benefits of AI streaming to developing countries and even echelons within developed countries. We need good governance, ethical regulation, and human rights protection at the very core of all those regulatory instruments.
Ernest Alesin
Dr. Michael L. Best 
Alison Mau
Prof. Mariateresa Garrido
Sophie Farthing