Companies, governments, educational institutions and citizens can jointly create outcomes for human wellbeing.
Copyright by Shalini Trefzer, Marc-Elian Bégin and Dr. Nabil Abdennadher.
Recently, the event : From dreams to reality was organized jointly by ELFI and HEPIA and held at the University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland campus in Geneva. Regional policymakers, thought-leaders, academic experts, and business leaders came together in a panel to discuss three hot-button topics around Artificial Intelligence (): the current state of & real-world applications, the impact of on business and society, and, the future. My colleagues, Dr. Nabil Abdennadher, Marc-Elian Begin, and I triangulated on the key elements of an ethical, pragmatic, and sustainable worldview around ; which is summarized below-
1) Human capabilities, augmented by powerful applications of and
2) Several emerging companies are reducing costs, saving energy, customizing choices and treatments and optimizing productivity in nearly every industry and every geographical location by applying advanced technologies like
3) Massive data sets gathered from what is soon going to be an edge ecosystem of 50 Billion connected devices are powering these advanced technologies. Hence, we, as business leaders, entrepreneurs, and scientists have the unique opportunity to future-proof the technologies and their applications by considering issues of data privacy, data ownership, technological sovereignty and the will of the user. Further, we have to start working deeply and broadly with the intersectionalities that populate the hyper-connected world of the future. As an example, Marc-Elian shared how SixSq‘s offerings originally developed for smart lighting and humanitarian fieldwork have now expanded into three other sectors: Retail, Factory, and Mobility. The basic offering, an open-source edge platform solution, allows for the processing of data outside the data center and closest to the origin and thereby enables both, data privacy (drop data after insights are generated) as well as
4) The other key is enablement. Thinking about
5) Hand in hand with enablement, Prof. Nabil Abdennadher delved into the social impact and consequences of the application of future technologies, arguing that social acceptability is a key barrier to full
Let’s examine an example of a smart grid which departs from the current, centralized electric distribution infrastructure and where each consumer is now connected directly to the power grid. So, instead of the single provider with total control of the infrastructure and rates, as well as the responsibility to guarantee the stability of the grid, imagine new forms of electricity production that are disrupting the market (e.g. solar and wind energy). These renewable energy sources are by definition intermittent, decentralized, and distributed across vast numbers of small-scale producers, transforming both grid management and the business model behind.
3 Comments