Giving Compass' Take:

• Experts discussed the potential benefits and risks of emerging technologies for global development at the Skoll World Forum.

• How can philanthropy help to encourage the development of technologies to improve their impact?  How can philanthropy safeguard vulnerable people from exploitation and suffering by emerging technologies? 

• Learn why 3D printing may threaten security.

AI offers significant opportunities to improve key development challenges: health care; market access; precision agriculture; mitigating environmental destruction; productivity; and more. It also threatens labor market disruption and broader economic dislocation as traditional jobs and industries restructure.

In terms of controlling negative potential impacts of AI, Terah Lyons, the Executive Director of the nascent Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, said, The Partnership is interested in the full spectrum of potential solutions. Policy or regulation may be the best lever is some cases; in others, the tech industry may be better positioned to arrive at answers. Regardless, development of best practices, accountability, and community building around beneficial AI must be a multi-stakeholder effort, or it won’t succeed.

At the Gates Foundation, Gargee Gosh, the Director for Development Policy and Finance at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, explained, the enthusiasm is not around silver bullet tech breakthroughs, but bundles of technologies. The challenges of poverty and public health are multifactored and need multifactored solutions. In agriculture, Gates is working with the Chinese on new types of seeds, with others on soil research, and still others on deploying new customer information platforms via mobile. Bundle those technologies and you begin to see real potential for systems transformation.

And it’s not just digital technology. The Foundation’s work on reinventing the toilet taps into a range of technologies that aren’t just information processing.

Read the full article about emerging technologies by Bruce Lowry at Skoll.