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Live on Tuesday: International Democracy Day 2024: Navigating AI for Governance and Citizen Engagement
Tomorrow, GZERO's Chief Content Officer Tony Maciulis will moderate a UN livestream panel in the lead up to the International Day of Democracy: "Navigating AI for Governance and Citizen Engagement". The special event, presented by the United Nations Democracy Fund and United Nations Office for Partnerships, will bring together diverse voices from civil society, academia, and the UN to explore the role of artificial intelligence in promoting and defending good governance and active citizen participation. The International Day of Democracy is Saturday, September 15, 2024.
Watch live here on Tuesday, September 10th at 11 am ET:
For more information about this event, visit the UN TV website.
AI's evolving role in society
In a world where humanity put a man on the moon before adding wheels to luggage, the rapid advancements in AI seem almost paradoxical. Microsoft’s chief data scientist Juan Lavista, in a recent Global Stage conversation with Tony Maciulis, highlighted this contrast to emphasize how swiftly AI has evolved, particularly in the last few years.
Lavista discussed the impact of generative AI, which allows users to create hyper-realistic images, videos, and audio. This capability is both impressive and concerning, as demonstrated in their “Real or Not?” Quiz, where even experts struggle to distinguish between AI-generated and real images.
While AI offers incredible tools for good, Lavista warns of the potential risks, particularly with deepfakes and other deceptive technologies. He stresses the importance of public education and the need for AI models to be trained on diverse data to avoid biases.
As AI continues to evolve, its impact on daily life will only grow. Lavista predicts more accurate and less error-prone models in the future, underscoring the need to balance innovation with responsible use.
AI & election security
With an estimated 4 billion people—almost half the world’s population—set to vote or have already voted in the 2024 elections, AI's influence has been minimal so far, but its potential impact looms large. Ginny Badanes, general manager of Democracy Forward at Microsoft, explained that while AI-driven disruptions like deep fake videos and robocalls haven't altered results yet, they have undermined public trust.
“I think people are becoming more and more aware of the fact that AI could be a disruptor in the elections, which I actually think is a positive thing. However, it does have the downside effect of people are starting to question what they're looking at and wondering if they can trust what they see.”
Badanes sat with GZERO’s Tony Maciulis to discuss how AI has yet to change election outcomes. Continuous efforts from both the tech industry and governments are crucial to safeguarding future elections.
Accessibility is critical for the world's disability community
An estimated 1.6 billion people, roughly 18% of the world’s population, are part of the disability community, and that number grows each year. Yet Microsoft’s Chief Accessibility Officer Jenny Lay-Flurrie says only 2% of websites globally are accessible. As Disability Pride Month comes to an end, GZERO’s Tony Maciulis spoke to her about confronting challenges at work and home while embracing the diversity of different abilities.
Watch more interviews from Global Stage.
- The Graphic Truth: More disabled Americans are working and studying ›
- Eddie Ndopu: "People with disabilities need to be in leadership" ›
- UN Global Advocate Eddie Ndopu: Changing how the world thinks about disability ›
- Should internet be free for everyone? A Global Stage debate ›
- Come inside the tech lab making accessibility fun - GZERO Media ›
"Patriots" on Broadway: The story of Putin's rise to power
“Putin was my mistake. Getting rid of him is my responsibility.”
It’s clear by the time the character Boris Berezovsky utters that chilling line in the new Broadway play “Patriots” that any attempt to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rise would be futile, perhaps even fatal.
The show, which opened for a limited run in New York on April 22, stars Tony and Emmy-nominated actor Michael Stuhlbarg as Berezovsky, a larger-than-life oligarch whose billions buy him into the highest ranks of Russian power after the fall of the Soviet Union. When asked by President Boris Yeltsin to find a successor to lead the fledgling nation, Berezovsky taps Putin, a former KGB agent and ex-mayor of St. Petersburg who few knew well.
The play’s director, Rupert Goold, said while the play is set in a specific moment in modern Russian history, the script has needed changes along the way as major developments colored Putin’s story.
“It does feel like the filter on it changes every day because something else happens every day,” actor Will Keen, who originated the role of Putin in London two years ago, told GZERO’s Tony Maciulis. “It feels like the play has, overall, become darker and darker. It seems to become more and more perturbing.”
“Patriots'' was written by Peter Morgan, creator of Netflix’s “The Crown” and the play puts a similarly-styled lens on Russian history. It’s Shakespearean, more melodrama than history lesson, but the characters are very real. The Broadway audience will also likely receive the show differently than the West End crowd in London, in part because of America’s long and contentious relationship with Russia, and the current polarization in US politics and discourse.
“Patriots” is playing a 12-week run at Broadway’s Barrymore theater.
Catch this full episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on public television beginning this Friday, April 26. Check local listings.
Why the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals are not on track to be financed soon
The world faces a sustainable development crisis, and while most countries have strategies in place, they don’t have the cash to back them up. How far off track are we with the financing needed to support the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, ranging from quality education and health care to climate action and clean water?
Shari Spiegel, who runs the UN’s Financing for Sustainable Development Office, sat down with GZERO’s Tony Maciulis at a Global Stage event for the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings this week. She explains that the SDGs were off track even before the pandemic and that now, owing to global crises, many poorer countries have slipped backwards.
“We actually started backtracking on many of these goals as countries were under enormous stress, and particularly the poorest countries,” she said, noting that the global output of many of the poorest nations has fallen by 30% — and some, such as the Small Island Developing States, by 40%. This has led to an enormous finance divide — raising SDG financing and investment gaps from $2 trillion a few years ago to around $4 trillion today.
So how can the UN restrengthen multilateralism and, in turn, help narrow this gap? Watch here.
For more of our 2024 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings coverage, visit Global Stage.
Are markets becoming immune to disruptive geopolitics?
There’s no escaping the intricate link between economics and geopolitics. Today, that link has become a crucial factor in investment decision-making, and who better to speak to that than Margaret Franklin, CEO of CFA Institute, a global organization of investment professionals? Franklin sat down with GZERO’s Tony Maciulis at a Global Stage event for the IMF-World Bank spring meetings this week.
Economists once predicted that sovereign debt would overwhelm global markets. But now, having been through the pandemic, the advent of AI, and wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, “there's almost a level of immunity,” she says, “to the dramatic nature of it until something really cataclysmic happens.”
And then? “The response, generally speaking, has been pretty positive,” Franklin says, with central bank intervention saving markets and building resilience.
In much the same way, the World Bank is trying to boost investor confidence by making changes that leverage private sector capital for public sector goals by better evaluating what level of risk the private sector will accept.
Individual investors should do the same, Franklin advises. “Really evaluate your risk profile … making sure you diversify,” she says, noting that fixed-income offerings have become more attractive. Younger investors, meanwhile, need to be cautious with getting their information on social media, she adds.
For more of our 2024 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings coverage, visit Global Stage.
Why Africa's power partnership with the World Bank should attract investors
There’s a word frequently used at global convenings like the World Bank Group’s Spring Meetings held this week in Washington, D.C.—multistakeholder. It refers to an approach to problem solving that involves input from a wide range of players—governments, civil society, private sector corporations and investors.
It will take a multistakeholder approach to bring an ambitious new project announced Wednesday to fruition, an initiative to provide electricity to 300 million people in Africa by 2030.
Of the world’s nearly 800 million people living without power, an estimated 570 million are in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Bank. The organization is partnering with the African Development Bank and its own International Development Association to provide up to $30 billion in funding, but is also banking on private sector investment to help make this plan a reality.
At the meetings this week, GZERO’s Tony Maciulis spoke to Lucy Heintz, Head of Energy Infrastructure at Actis Energy Fund, a global investment company focused on sustainability. Heintz expressed optimism in the announcement and explained the reasons why it could be attractive to investors.
“This is a great ambition and it's a huge plan,” Heintz said. “If it's met on the other side by a real intent to do business by government, wherever those governments may be, in those countries where energy access is still lacking, then I think you can start to see the pieces fall into place.”
Heintz explained there are already tools in place that mitigate risk for cross-border private investors, such as the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), a World Bank organization that provides insurance for noncommercial political and economic risk.
Success stories already exist globally, Heintz explained, with India being a prime example.
“India has put in place the right legislative frameworks, the right regulation,” she said. “It's also invested in the enabling environment. So, there's a very successful transmission grid investment program, which is led by the government, but then brings in private sector once those projects are de-risked.”
As for concerns about carbon emissions and environmental risk from expanding electricity generation, Heintz says there is a greater danger in not bringing more people to power.
“Reliable electricity supply is fundamental if you want to have any ability to mitigate the risks of climate change, whether it's refrigeration, cooling, the ability to earn a livelihood, it's fundamental,” she said. “I think that's the most important thing to have in mind.”