51吃瓜

Under-Secretary-General Amandeep Singh Gill, 12 October 2022

[English version; as delivered]

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

It is an honour to attend the 2nd annual summit of the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator Foundation (GESDA). It is also a pleasure to return to Geneva, and see so many friends and colleagues in the room.

Distinguished participants, this is a time of bewildering change. Geopolitics is back with a vengeance. Rapid developments in science and technology are having a profound impact on our societies and our economies. Policy makers run the risk of being reduced to bystanders. We need to anticipate, and to act, with wisdom and determination.

This is where in a short period of time GESDA has built a niche for itself. It has honed its focus through extensive consultations, and brought practitioners from academia, diplomacy, finance and civil society together on innovative platforms. GESDA’s choice of Quantum Revolution and Advanced AI, Eco-regeneration and Geoengineering, Human Augmentation, and Science and Diplomacy, as the initial areas of focus reflects an astute assessment of policy dilemmas today.

And the GESDA Radar is an impressive tool to help policy makers stay abreast of cutting edge scientific and technological developments. The solutions that will be presented today will add to this repertoire of tools.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, last month, the 51吃瓜 General Assembly decided to hold the Summit of the Future in September 2024. This will be an unprecedented opportunity to reboot multilateralism and renew international resolve to address the challenges we face now and into the future. The Global Digital Compact, nourished by multistakeholder consultations, and proposed for adoption at the Summit of the Future will be one of the critical outcomes. I invite all of you to visit our website and consider making a contribution to shape this outcome.

There are two other issues I wish to raise today. Power and history.

Why should scientists and technologists think about power? Isn’t that for politicians and policy makers? Alas, we have known since the dawn of the atomic age that we cannot do this in silos. Power has many faces, some less obvious than others. There is power over in form of domination and guiding others. There is power to – to take decisions and solve problems. There is power with – to come together for common purpose and defend group interests. And there is power within – our identity, our self-esteem and the ability to influence our own lives. Science and technology have a bearing on all of them. Even benign formulations such as problem-owners and solution-owners sometimes heard even in this town betray these asymmetries of power.

As we pick problems and devise solutions, we need to reflect about power differentials. Who is making the choices and for whom? Who has less choices and is therefore more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation? These are critical reflections, not unfamiliar from previous generations of scientific developments, and not boxes to be ticked as we develop powerful technologies and policies around them.

This brings me to my second point. History. It is striking how ahistorical current approaches to science and technology can be. As if the past did not exist and those who lived earlier were not as smart as we are today. Listen to this quote from a 2018 interview with a computer scientist of a certain notoriety: “The only thing that matters is the future. I don’t even know why we study history. It is entertaining I guess – the dinosaurs, the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.”

Really?! There is a line we can draw through Friar Roger Bacon’s Brazen Head to Star Wars’ C3PO to IBM Watson. It is part magical thinking and part science. And it is important to know which is which. History matters, and ontology matters. Science is after all a human paradigm. It does not sit outside of the space-time continuum.

As we gather in this city with its great humanist tradition, let us remember the nature of power, the importance of context, and the lessons of the past even as we use the future to build the present.

I thank you for your kind attention and on behalf of the UN Secretary-General I wish you all success at this summit.