The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Paris, France, from 12 to 14 November 2018. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Thanks so much, everyone, for coming today. We've got quite a big room. If you wouldn't mind sort of coming in toward the middle and coming up to the front. I think that may make the conversation we're going to have a little bit later a little bit more of a conversation and less of us talking to you.
I'm really delighted to welcome you all to today's workshop on well‑being in the digital age. My name is Molly Lesher. I work in the Digital Economy Policy Division of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, which is here in Paris. We really try to focus on developing better policies for better lives.
I'd also like to very much thank the other cosponsors of the workshop. We have Carlos da Fonseca from Brazil and Marc Rotenberg from the Civil Society, Information Society Advisory Council, or CSISAC.
We decided to propose this workshop because we increasingly see that digital technologies have both positive and negative impacts on the overall well‑being on people and communities and we need to develop appropriate policy responses. Indeed well‑being is one of the focuses of the OECD Going Digital project which aims to help policymakers better understand the digital transformation that's taking place and to create policy environment for it to prosper.
Now well‑being is a specific focus of the OECD Going Digital project. This is really ongoing work so your input on it is really much appreciated. My colleague, Fabrice Murtin, will discuss this in a bit more detail.
What we really see right now, what’s emerging from the work, is that designing appropriate policy responses is becoming increasingly complicated because of the radical way in which digital transformation is impacting all of our lives. So, for example, we see growing pressure to compete with machines in the workplace, the use of algorithms and digital platforms enabling patient-managed healthcare and more efficient service delivery. But on the other side, you see the related ethical and privacy concerns and the impacts of automation on children's development and human relations, all illustrate how the new digital context affects the drivers of individual well‑being.
Now, this workshop really aims to help shed some light on how policymakers can develop a whole‑of‑government policy framework that balances all of these different dimensions and all of the positive and negative impacts.
So now we're first going to hear from Fabrice Murtin to discuss the work he's leading on measuring well‑being in the digital age. We're then going to hear from the distinguished members of our panel, which are - I'll introduce separately otherwise you're not going to know who they are right now. And then we really want to have an active exchange with you all as well as with those folks who may be online.
So now I'm going to turn over to Fabrice to come and sort of present the ongoing work. Fabrice is the head of unit on the OECD household statistics and progress measurement commission. He's an associate researcher for Po Paris and his work really focuses on well‑being measurement, the long‑term dynamics of economic development and economic policy. So, Fabrice, the floor is yours.
>> FABRICE MURTIN: Thank you, Molly. Good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure today to introduce the new OCED report entitled Well‑being in the Digital Age. This report is at the junction of two strands of work. First our work on well‑being ‑ is it working? No.
So the first strand of work is about well‑being. This activity has taken place in the aftermath of the Stiglitz‑Sen‑Fitoussi Commission. It has led to several key outputs from the OECD such as the Better Life Index and the Health Life Well-being Framework. Can I have the next slide, please?
In this well‑being framework one measures well‑being today by highlighting 11 key dimensions of well‑being ‑ health, education, income, security, jobs and so on and so forth.
The second strand of work is a Going Digital project which involves several directorates at the OECD and reviews the impacts of the digital transformation on society and the economy.
Our report will focus on people. What does a digital transformation have in terms of consequences on people's well‑being? Next slide, please.
We aim to make three key contributions. One is to provide a comprehensive review of the positive and negative impacts of the digital transformation and people's well‑being. What we call the opportunities and the risk of the digital transformation.
Secondly, we operationalize these conceptual framework, in a sense, and create synthesis of digital risk and opportunities in order to map countries in this dual space. And, thirdly, we highlight the data gaps that still exist in this landscape.
Our overarching message could be summarized into the following sentence: Safe technologies could improve the life of those who have the skills to use them. So this message is really two‑sided. On the one hand we acknowledge the many opportunities that the digital transformation brings about as it provides information for free, expanded consumption bundles and it also yields efficiency gains.
On the other hand, there are several risks, actually three main risks. One is a digital divide. As people differ in terms of Internet access and, above all, usage, and people have different levels of digital skills.
Secondly, digital literacy is difficult to acquire. Digital literacy can be defined as a complex bundle of cognitive and emotional skills that are needed to navigate safely into the digital world in order to sort out information quality, have self‑control over one's digital involvement in order to avoid mental health problems.
Thirdly, digital insecurity issues resulting to the cyber hacking and cyber bullying, for instance.
Happy digitalization would require equal digital opportunities, widespread digital literacy and safe digital environments.
For the sake of time, I cannot enter into details, obviously, but this illustrates what the report brings about. This is the list of key impacts from the digital transformation on people's well‑being. It is actually a table for each dimension of people's well‑being. One has reviewed both the opportunities and risk entailed by the digital transformation.
We also try to operationalize this conceptual framework by listing some indicators for each dimension of well‑being. Those indicators capture the key impacts that can be either opportunities or risk.
Those indicators, 33 in total, are summarized in what we call a digital well‑being wheel. As an example here's a wheel for Finland. The inner circle corresponds to the minimum outcome observed among OECD countries and the second inner circle refers to the maximum outcome observed among OECD countries. In blue are the opportunities, yellow are the risk. So you can immediately see that in Finland, for instance, there are large opportunities and relatively low digital risk.
Interestingly, we do that for 36 OECD countries. On the left‑hand side you can see that in Italy one can observe high risk and low opportunities. On the contrary, high opportunities and low risk in Finland, as I just said. And there are also a couple of countries such as Australia which are characterized by large data gaps.
To provide a kind of overview of a digital risk and digital opportunities, one creates two things, synthetic indicators by aggregating all opportunities together and all risk subcomponents together in order to have two synthetic indices, one for opportunities and one for risk. Here is the outcome from this exercise.
The first interesting finding is that there is zero correlation between digital risk and digital opportunities. So reaping the opportunities does not necessarily come with facing higher risk. If you go clockwise, starting from the upper right quadrant where are countries with high risk and high opportunities, two of them can be singled out, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.
Going down, this is the place where countries would like to be with facing low risk and reaping higher opportunities, one finds countries such as Norway, Finland, and New Zealand. Then countries such as Greece and Latvia have low risk and low opportunities. And finally countries such as Hungary or Italy face high risk and low opportunities.
It is beyond the scope of this report to try to understand the key sources, the key mechanism behind the creation of opportunities and the emergence of digital risk. However, one notices a strong correlation between this aggregate indicator of digital opportunities and access to Internet. So having access to the Internet appears to be a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition, a necessary condition in order to reap digital opportunities.
On the other end there is no correlation between Internet access and digital risk. Probably due to the fact that digital risk are multifaceted, as I said earlier in the introduction.
Finally, there are still important gaps to be filled in that field. Countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Israel, or the US, still meet an important share of the indicators, the key subcomponent indicators that we have collected.
This report also contains some statistical agenda going forward which is directed towards national statistical offices and the international academic community. This paves the way for filling the data gaps, in a sense.
To conclude, I would like to express some caveats. As evidenced in certain dimensions about the key impacts of the digital transformation, it's still debated, scattered, so we want to be cautious in this field and avoid definite conclusions.
Secondly there is a true need for harmonizing existing measures and, finally, the statistical exercise that is contained in this report has been heavily time‑consuming so it is not something that can be replicated easily, I would say. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
>> MODERATOR: Thanks a lot, Fabrice. I think what you mentioned there at the end is very important. It's been time‑consuming because you've been working across all of the different policy communities at the OECD to really try to understand how to measure well-being and all the different dimensions. We all know that having a solid evidence base is absolutely essential to making good policies. So thanks very much for that.
Now we're going to turn to the rest of the panel. I've asked them to respond to sort of two different questions. The first is what are the three most important dimensions of individual and societal well‑being in the digital age? This is a little bit trying to get to how do you assess on balance the risks and opportunities that Fabrice mentioned.
And then the second question is it's clear there are both positive and negative impacts of digital technologies on the well‑being of people in communities and how can policymakers really best assess and manage those trade‑offs. That might vary, I think, by countries.
So to start us off, I'm really pleased we have Ambassador Monica Aspe who represents Mexico at the OECD. She was previously a vice minister of communications in Mexico where she promoted the implementation of public policies stemming from the telecommunications reform of 2013 which really aims at universal access to telecom services and led to the innovative, international contest of a network that will provide telecom services to more than 100 million Mexicans as well as among other important initiatives. Monica, the floor is yours.
>> MONICA ASPE: The most important part which is that I co-chair the Going Digital friends group in the OECD.
Thank you for this invitation. The question that Molly set is not easy because it's hard to choose. The digital transformation really impacts all aspects of well‑being. So we're choosing the most important sort of difficult questions.
I chose three areas which are very important and highly related amongst them and the Going Digital initiative has done remarkable work which is education and skills, jobs and employment, wages, and work/life balance. So these are three very related areas that are for well‑being in any of our countries.
The first one, education and skills. As the nature of jobs changes so do the skills required to perform them. And this, of course, shapes the labor markets, but this also must shape the education systems, both formal and informal. There are upsides and opportunities and, of course, there are downsides and challenges.
On the upside, the opportunities, we see learning infrastructure, we have open online courses, we have open educational resources so we have new educational infrastructures that can actually help our vocation systems. We also have more flexible and personalized training, adaptive learning technologies allow us to have, for example, information in the moment that students are performing any task and know what's happening and influence and modify the teaching on real‑time basis. So there's a lot of opportunities in this sense.
Augmentative, virtual and mixed realities also bring opportunities for immersed experiences. Students can learn more in fun and interesting and environments. So this is also very helpful, especially for different kinds of learning. We all learn in different ways.
What are the challenges? Digitalization will accelerate the change in skills required. So this is happening very fast with an increase in the labor demand for digital skills, estimated by 55% by 2030. The skills demanded in the labor market are very different from those taught in the formal education system. Of course that creates a huge pressure on the education systems and a need for a life‑long learning and for changing also our formal education systems for children.
We have, therefore, also an increase in the mismatch between the skills that are generated or built in the education system and those that are demanded in the labor market. So we have very large and increasingly large skills mismatch where people have a set of skills but can't find a job for those skills and firms, companies, require workers with a certain set of skills that do not necessarily exist in the offer in the labor market. So this is a big social challenge, of course.
The second point, very related, jobs and earnings. So the OECD working, Going Digital estimates that 14% of workers are at high risk of having their existing tasks automated over the next 15 years. What does this mean? Jobs aren't automated, tasks are automated. When tasks are automated to do a certain level, the job, of course, itself disappears.
So this is 14% of workers but there's also another 30% of workers where their jobs is going to change fundamentally because the tasks performed are going to be some automated, some transformed and they will have to work every time more with technologies.
And of course there's also new jobs - app developers, social media managers, big data specialist. So there is job creation. On the upside we see the Internet does lead to the creation of some new jobs. We know that there's a very important potential for home‑based businesses, for example, markets that didn’t exist before for this kind of firms.
We also know that work ‑ jobs can become much more efficient so that could liberate time from people, from work to other activities. We also know that the Internet supports a better global allocation of skills in the labor market. So since we can go more global we can be more efficient in the allocation of existing skills and the demand of skills in the labor market. And international outsourcing can help SMEs to better compete. Higher productivity, of course, can translate into lower prices, new product. So there's an upside. But there's also challenges.
There's a distribution effect. Not necessarily the workers who lose jobs are the ones who are fit for skills for jobs created. So we're seeing some polarization in the labor market where we're seeing middle-skill becoming either high‑skill jobs or low‑skill jobs. It's not a thing about jobs disappearing and others being created but the kinds of skills and therefore wages related to the jobs that are disappearing or being created.
This also has a differential impact for developed and developing countries, of course. As we globalize these kinds of skills that are less needed or more needed are not equally distributed among all of our countries. So there's also something to think not only what we saw in the presentation which is among OECD countries, some seem to be more of the winners and some more of the losers but even more, if we go to non‑OECD countries, there is definitely a potential for a distributional effect that we need to work on through policy.
Third point, work/life balance. The ability to successfully combine work, family commitments, personal life is important for the well‑being of all members of a household and, of course, of all humanity. So the digital transformation changes this balance for the good and bad. So there is the two side.
There is flexibility, which can be great. It can be great, for example, in terms of gender equality but there is the other side which can bring also long working hours because of the same - longer working hours because of the same flexibility and we tend to see more men working extremely long hours and that creates also a strain, of course, in not only gender equality but life/work balance.
So policy actions, what can we do in front of this challenge? Skill policies, the first point is, you know, policy will set the difference between the winners and losers in the digital transformation. So there's a lot to do in policy.
We need life‑long learning. We need to stop thinking of education as something that is for children and confined to a formal education system. We actually are learning more digital skills outside of the formal education system than in the education system so there's a lot of lessons there. We need more aggressive higher education policies and life‑long learning to reduce skills mismatch. We need to increase our number of available workers to fill jobs that support the growth of the Internet economy. So train more for the jobs that are being created and less for the ones that are disappeared.
Of course we need adequate social protection which is crucial to help workers transit smoothly this transition between jobs, especially when they have been displaced. Labor market regulations, we can talk more about that later and promoting workplace flexibility and, of course, the gender front is very important in this transformation. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
>> MODERATOR: Thanks very much, Monica. You brought up a lot of really important points and on the jobs and wages aspect I think this notion of quality jobs is also something we're seeing become more and more important.
So now we're going to turn over to our fellow coorganizer, Carlos da Fonseca, who is a career diplomat, having worked at the Brazilian embassies in Washington as well as Santiago. Carlos is the head of the Information Society Division at the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs where he's responsible for the international agenda related to the digital economy and Internet governance and in that capacity he represents Brazil at the OEDC, the G20 and the ITU. Carlos, the floor is yours.
>>CARLOS DA FONSECA: Thank you, Molly, Fabrice, thank you for the invitation, it's an honor to be with you guys here. It's an opportunity to give our perspective from Brazil.
Let me start my clock here. So I have two questions to orientate my presentation. I'm going to try to be didactic not to lose myself.
The first question is about the dimensions, the three most important dimensions. I think it's very difficult to single out three dimensions, of course. Digitalization impacts almost every aspect of our daily lives today. However, being from a developing country I think it's wise to try to emphasize or take into account aspects that matter in terms of development.
So in that sense, I would say that maybe the first dimension is access itself to ICTs and use of the ICTs in the sense that access to ICTs is sort of a prerequisite to reaping the benefits of digitalization.
Access and use of ICTs still are a huge problem in some developing countries. Brazil is not an exception in that matter.
To give you an idea, a survey carried out in 2016 showed that 21 million Brazilian households still did not have fixed Internet connectivity which corresponds to around 30% of homes and 4.5 million Brazilians still did not have, in 2016‑17, still did not have access to any kind of connectivity at all. So we are talking about 4.5 million digitally excluded, which is a huge number.
Even when there is connectivity, quality and cost are another obstacle. In the case of Brazil, connectivity costs at entry level for broadband services exceeds, in some cases by far, the affordability targets defined by the Broadband Commission for Digital Development, 5% of the average monthly income. In some regions of the Amazon, subscriptions may cost up to $150 or even more a month. It's huge.
Another important aspect, I think, has to do with digital skills and this is important because it has to do with appropriation of Internet. What you do when you do have access. The same surveys I mentioned for 2016 showed that 24 million Brazilians did not use the Internet because of the lack of knowledge or skills.
The situation was even worse when you consider only the aging population, the poorest or girls and women. So it's even worse. Those are probably the two most pressing problems, I think, because they tend to accentuate the disparities, not only among countries but also within a country. You have regions with more access and regions with less, etc, etc. This, in terms of social and economic development, in terms of the access to education, the access to information, the access to job opportunities, the access even to government services that are provided digitally. So it's a huge problem.
Maybe a third aspect worth mentioning is trust and security. In Brazil in 2017, there were 265,000 service attacks. It's a huge number. 300,000 on average ‑ in all 350,000 cyber security incidents were registered. 62 million people were the victims of cybercrime. So it's also a huge problem for us.
How to deal with those challenges? So this is the second question. I think that from a government perspective, digitalization and a huge challenge because it is particularly difficult to deal with that in terms of the role of government as both an enabler of digital transformation and a provider of services because the government is a provider of digital services, and also an economic regulator. So the government has three different challenges to face.
So I believe the only way to deal with that effectively is through the development of comprehensive digital transformation strategies. Take into account those that have multiple dimensions involved and those strategies, they must point to a sort of whole‑of‑government approach in terms of the implementation of policies. If you don't have a whole of government and comprehensive strategies it's very difficult to deal with those different challenges at the same time.
That's what we try to do in Brazil. We recently, in March this year, we approved the Brazilian digital transformation strategy and this strategy is an attempt to prepare the country to face those challenges, to reap the benefits of digitalization.
The strategy was the outcome of a year‑long coordinated effort by the Ministry of Science and Technology together with over 30 ministries and agencies. It was a huge work. The main document was the result of more than six months of daily work by a great number of people.
There was a two‑month public consultation period which gather over 700 contributions to our strategy and basically what we have now is a strategy with seven main priority areas, infrastructure, development and innovation, confidence and security, education and training, international corporation, digitalization of the economy and digital citizenship. For each area the strategy establishes a broad diagnosis of the current situation and of the challenges that we face and a set of strategic goals for the next five years and a set of indicators for us to measure how we are dealing with that.
I am just finishing. Once the strategy was approved, and this happened in March, an inter-ministerial committee was established with the participation of the executive office of the President together with a number of ministries and just I think it is worth mentioning, last but not least, that this strategy now is being the object of a review by the OECD. We commissioned to the OECD a peer‑review study on our strategy with a focus on how to best implement this.
The term of reference of this review is based on the OECD integrated policy framework for digital transformation. So now we are really, really connected. Our strategy and going digital are sort of part of the same process. So this is very good. Thank you very much for the opportunity.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks so much, Carlos.
(Applause)
>> MODERATOR: It's really great to see the framework that we are developing with the multistakeholder model being put to use in Brazil. I know it's no small feat to get all of those ministries together. We see that in the secretariat trying to come to agreement on some difficult issues from different policy perspectives isn't always easy, so congratulations for that. Also hearing skills coming up again as one of the three most important issues, which is interesting.
So now we're going to move to the civil society perspective. We have Claire Milne, who has long combined her international telecoms policy consultancy practice with pro bono collaboration on consumer and civil society organizations. She's worked with the Civil Society Information Society Advisory Council, CSISAC, which is part of the Going Digital project, since 2011. She's also a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Having worked on universal service on many countries she's now most interested in helping to shape new ICTs to serve society. So Claire, the floor's yours.
>> CLAIRE MILNE: Am I coming over? Yes, it sounds like it. Thanks very much for the invitation and for the opportunity, Molly, and the other organizers.
First, I'd like to say that I'm really happy that OECD has chosen its well‑being report to discuss this IGF. I know, of course, the OECD it has that E in its name for economics and it has to be concerned with the details of economic policy and growth but at the end of the day, what is economics for? Well, I think most of us would say it is in order to facilitate human well‑being. So that's what it's all about and that's what the digital transformation is all about as well.
So I'm pleased to have the opportunity to make my three choices of topic that I think are tops and the first of them is actually what I would call work rather than jobs, which both of the previous speakers have already alluded to and I didn't hear anything in what they said that I would really disagree with so I'd like to add that I think we need to talk in terms of work rather than jobs. We've already heard there's going to be home‑based work, we know there's going to be a lot of freelancing, there's going to be prosumption where the consumer produces as well as consuming. There will be many different forms of work.
But we need to think what is work. Work is not just a productive activity whereby people contribute to the economy. It's also a very important source, of course, of income and there's been a lot of discussion about social support, possibly a universal basic income for people who don't find other sources. But it's not, by any means, only or even primarily financial.
People with work usually get a lot of their life meaning out of that, they get their social standing, they get their sense of community, a sense of what they contribute to society and so on. And we really need to think about not just how do we keep people busy during the day, how do we keep them with a wage packet at the end of the week but how do we make sure that these important social and psychological needs are going to be met? I think that's a huge challenge and it's lucky that we do have these ICTs which, I believe, are going to be an important part of the solution to this as well as creating part of the problem.
My second choice would be inclusion but I'm not going to talk about that because I'm happy, I have my colleague, Valeria, here who is going to talk about inclusion so access digital skills for everybody and so on.
My third is environment, which nobody has mentioned yet, but this is an area where, as we all know, the ICTs should be helping us to both dematerialize many of our carbon‑heavy operations and through the data that they provide help us to fine tune our activities and minimize our impact on the environment but at the same time the resources they release can be used in very environmentally unfriendly ways and although we are working towards allowing people to have more environmentally friendly choices, I think it's very clear that these are not choices that should be left to the market, to individuals. Policymakers, governments, must ensure that those options that are available are all as environmentally friendly as they possibly can be. Carbon taxation is going to be one very obvious element there. So when we make all our individual choices, they add up to something which is going to be positive for the environment through the digital transformation.
I have many more things to say but I shall stop there and hand over to my colleague.
(Applause)
>> MODERATOR: Thanks so much, Claire. So now we'll pass over to Valeria Milanes who is the executive director of the Association of Civil Rights, which is based in Argentina. She's also a lawyer specializing in IT law, as well as a researcher and speaker on privacy, data protection, freedom of expression matters, national and international conferences. She's also, like Claire, part of the CISSAC steering committee. Valeria, the floor is yours.
>> VALERIE MILANES: Thank you so much. I will bring a perspective from Latin America which is the area where we work most and add in a bit more information regarding, for example, what Carlos said, related an inclusion that Claire also made references that I will talk about that.
I have to go like steps behind and go to very basic, very basic point that is core when we talk about inclusion. That if we take, for example, the last report from the Economic Commission for Latin‑American and Caribbean, which is an office of the UN. That report marks that 56% of people in Latin-America and Caribbean use the Internet, which is great compared to previous year, but that means that 44% does not use Internet during 2017.
I'm trying to find a way to make these like additional approach, given that their main topic here is well‑being, I'm not repeat myself talking about issues, we talk in another kind of forum when we discuss normative or kind of infrastructure, property matters, or data protection property matters but if we combine all things, because my other two topics, not because I consider the three most important but I have to choose three and I choose this topic of access, ICT access and usage with this very basic point that we have to take into account which is not only access to the Internet but the quality of the access to the Internet and I have to mention here neutrality, zero rating plans when we have to think on that when we're thinking about well‑being at an individual and social level because of the repercussions that that has socially.
I have also chosen a kind of civic engagement that is also related with data. When I say data, I have to point something that I mark in every space I have the opportunity, which is the huge asymmetry between the subject of the data, the person that provides the data, and the ones that manage the data because it's not only the way that the data is protected but it's also the way that the data is used and processed and this sensation that I think that at some point it had to start to be measured and consider, this sensation of the people of being left behind is something that they do not understand and they can do nothing about that because it's sometimes the feel that we society has and it's our work.
It's so complex and it’s so apart in some ways that it has an impact, I think, beyond the way that the protection laws are implemented, beyond ethics, beyond everything. We have to add that dimension also.
Related to data, because, and I will end here, related to data we have to think also in the new technologies that use the huge, huge amounts of data that are also impacting individually and socially which are the algorithm decision-making based on artificial intelligent and machine learning processes which add also dimensions to that kind of asymmetry and feeling of the people that not understand what has happened with them and what are the processes what are the processes decided for them. Thank you.
(Applause)
>> MODERATOR: Thanks very much, Valeria, for bringing up the important issue of data protection and privacy. We all know that's an absolute key quality to trust and to ensuring that digital transformation is inclusive.
So now I would like to invite Dr Makoto Yokozawa to come up to the lectern. He's Professor of the Market And Organization Informatics Systems Laboratory at the Graduate School of Informatics in Kyoto University. He leads domestic policy strategy in Japan as the chairperson of the data protection task force. He's also the vice chair of the Internet Economy Working Group in the Japanese Business Federation. He also cochairs and chairs groups in APEC and the OECD and he's been involved, in Going Digital from the beginning. So, Makoto, the floor is yours.
>> MAKOTO YOKOZAWA: Thank you very much, Molly. That's a very long introduction, sorry about this.
This time I'm from BAIC, which is Business and Industry Committee to the OECD. You can see the logo on the top right-hand side. We are very, very happy to work with Molly and Fabrice and the OECD on not only to the Going Digital project but many things in digital technologies.
To begin with, I will just say the three focal point in my speech. One is the scalability and the structure by design in well‑being and Molly has made very good work in the latest synthesis report for the Going Digital project from the OECD which has a demographics of the structure of the Going Digital policies and what we should think about, the well‑being and going digital. So I was inspired by that and I will show something related to that. That's one thing.
The second one is a new generation of society in Japan, and maybe next near Japan G20 we will speak about something about the society 5.0, which is expansion of the industry 4.0 by Germany. And thirdly, I would like to highlight the trust. The trust is here. You have the badge and you see the word trust here. So that's again very important.
So let's begin with the first one, the structure and the scalability. So if you can see the characters, I am just talking about the smart life, smart works and smart communities and then smart cities and the biggest one is a smart society and the society 5.0 by Japan's proposal.
In each scalability, in each scale we have to think many different things. For example, the smart life and smart works, my panelists have spoken about education and skill development. So that well reflects here. A smart office and smart house and healthcare, Medicare and the silver economy, which is the aging society. So we have to look into that.
The smart communities and diversity and opportunity, which is also spoken by the previous speakers and the structure design, is something the government or policymakers have to look into that.
The smarter cities, technology and innovation, efficiency and sustainability, and the bigger scale a smarter society should look like the design and coordination and cross-border coordination the OECD has is expected to play a role.
This is a rough structure. Also we have to think about the many structures like this. I won't go into this, it's too much, but the product manufacturing, network communication, service solution layer, and content layers and investment confidence layer which is trust, we have to think we have many, many issues on the right‑hand side. All of this is related to the well‑being by digital.
So what is digital? We may think about that again. The digital technology can provide the internal efficiency improvement or the modulization, decentralizing and outsourcing. The manufacturing industry and also the globalization or localization, a new solution or innovation. So many things can be achieved by the digital technologies that will lead to the well‑being.
So the society 5.0, we have a long history from the beginning of the human civilization. We have the hunting society, agrarian society, industry society, information society and next should be the super smart society. Keidanren, the Japan Business Federation, is thinking at the society 5.0 with connection to the S3G 17 goals.
If you are interested in, you can visit this URL to see what is the society 5.0 and what is actually the Japan businesses thinking about.
And what is technology? A couple of speakers have talked about the block chain and AI but it's not only that, it's really printers and smart battery for the photovoltaic cells relate to the sustainability, is all related to the well‑being.
So I will be skipping this and just showing this, some image of what Japanese business is doing. This is a traffic on society and the big data analysis and many things.
The interesting one is the ‑ okay. So the trust, finally. So the privacy protection, personal data protection is well considered in many forums, including OECD. So OECD in 1980, OECD has offered the privacy guideline. It's a very famous one. It should be a very good example of what OECD can do in the well‑being process.
We have the GDPR in EU and the privacy framework as well. So most based on the OECD privacy guidelines in 1980 and that was amended in 2013. So this ‑ we would expect OECD to play a role to showing the way forward like this. So that's what I wanted to emphasize.
And the smart is many things so we should think about the smart, what is smart? Thank you very much.
(Applause)
>> MODERATOR: Thanks very much, Makoto. That's the first time I've heard the society 5.0 and I will be happy to be part of something super smart so that's exciting.
Last, but certainly not least, we have Katie Watson, who is a policy adviser at the Internet Society. She supports, develops and advocates for the Internet Society's Internet‑related public policy positions on access, on security and on privacy in North America. So, Katie, the floor's yours.
>> KATIE WATSON: Thank you very much. I agree with the things you all have already said and you have touched on a lot of the things I was also going to mention but as you all have mentioned as well, the Internet is becoming more ubiquitous every day and the positive impacts are huge, the opportunities are huge. But at the same time there is this very significant digital divide and as the positive impacts grow for those who are connected, it widens the gap in very meaningful ways, and especially as we move toward the society 5.0, the areas that are unconnected, not just from the Internet as we think of it as a laptop or a phone, but from all of the things that come with that, it's going to have really massive implications for those communities.
So I agree, Carlos said it as well, you have to start with access. It has to be the first thing that you do is figure out which communities are unconnected, why they're unconnected and how they can get connected themselves because it's not the same solution everywhere you go. So we need to be working very closely with those communities to figure out what solutions work for them.
But then with that access comes the trust aspect, which a couple of you talked about as well because if you don't trust the Internet, if you don't trust the devices that are included on the Internet then you're not going to use it. We're seeing more and more of that, especially in North America right now, as relates to security and privacy, and it seems to me, you know, five years ago we reached this point where everyone said yes, you have to have the Internet and if there was an opportunity to get the Internet by and large people wanted it.
Now with so many privacy and security risks there's a bit of push back. I think to really build trust in the Internet and not only have access but people actively engaging online, you have to focus on all three of those things - the access, security and privacy pieces.
It's all in our best interest to say do that because it's not until everyone is online that we can truly benefit from what the Internet could be.
In terms of what policymakers can do to facilitate that, it really comes down to something the Internet Society has talked about for years, the multistakeholder model, the reason why we’re here now.
When you work with experts from a variety of feels and include different viewpoints, you're likely to get innovative solution to these issues. It's something that I've been lucky to see in my current position. We work in Canada specifically right now we're work on IOT security and we've engaged this really amazing group of people from many different backgrounds including government, tech sectors, private sector, public interest, academics, and the kinds of solutions that they've come up with that they could all be engaged in to actually make IOT more secure are really impressive and not something that I think any one group could do on their own.
So moving forward, I hope to see more projects like that. Senegal and France have started their own projects that are very similar and hope they will continue to be used in other countries because it really does have to be a collaborative effort. We need to include more people at the table to come up with the kinds of solutions that will be necessary as this technology evolves.
To close, I agree with what everyone has said and looking forward to the conversation.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks so much, Katie. Now is the fun part. We're going to open it up and hopefully have a good and lively discussion with you all. We've also got Irvin here online. Irvin, please feel free to come in to the extent that you would like. Does anybody have any questions? The lady in the back with the iPad. No, okay. Sir.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm from India and I like the presentation from Japan. I have worked with the Guidelines Development Group for Digital Health and let me emphasize that if you really want to achieve what we call the Internet of trust, we will need evidence. One of the things we feel that when we are looking at guidelines or, you know, doing up regulations, we always feel that there is not enough evidence that we can recommend adoption or scale up.
So I think this is a very impactful forum, the Internet Governance Forum, and I think this should take the role of collating all evidence which is scattered across the globe. I think we have what we call islands of excellence where we have excellent projects delivered but we need evidence. So I think I would come down to say it is a precondition to build trust so let's validate and document evidence so that people can use it to scale up and adopt. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks so much for that comment. Is there anybody else in the audience that would like to ask a question to one of the panelists based on the presentations or bringing up another issue that you think is important? Sir.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello. Edmond Chung from Data Asia. Sorry, I came in late but I caught half of the presentation on the opportunities and risk indices, I guess. I wanted to ask a question about how, especially the risks part is defined and the reasons why is at Data Asia we actually just launched what we call a youth mobility index and we're looking at a bunch of indicators to think about what youth digital mobility is and one of the core aspects is to change a little bit the narrative that is only about access and freedom online to digital mobility, mobility to support youth development.
So I'm quite curious, I might have missed ‑ you might have already covered it but I'm quite curious how you look at risk in terms of simply the cyber security online, privacy or also the risks for young people unable to utilize the Internet, you know, and utilize it in an open and, you know, mobile manner in that sense. Not using mobile phones but able to mobilize resources and people online.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks so much. Fabrice, would you like to answer?
>> FABRICE MURTIN: Very quickly. Our starting point is the OECD well-being framework which highlights 11 keys of people’s well‑being ‑ health, education, income, jobs, environment, personal security and so on and so forth.
So the idea was to actually review all the impacts of the digital transformation. On each of those well‑being dimensions. For each of them we actually found, by looking at the wide literature, both opportunities and risk. Then we came up with 13 indicates or digital risk and we just aggregated them together in order to build a synthetic indicator of digital risk.
>> AUDIENCE: What are included in the risk ones? You mentioned 13, some examples?
>> FABRICE MURTIN: So there are plenty in the field of education. For instance, inequality in the digital skills. In the field of employment you have the number of jobs that are destroyed as well as negative effects on job quality. In the field of environment one has e-waste. In the field of governance, one has ‑ in the field of security, cyber bullying and the number of security incidents and so on and so forth.
>> CLAIRE MILNE: I wonder if I might just add a quick point there. I'm sure it's very noticeable, that when you look at your blue and yellow bars in those nice charts, they are not strictly commensurable. You can't assume because a bar is the same length as a blue bar there's any sort of balance there. And balancing these things will depend on what scale you're looking at and every individual has a different balance between opportunities and risks, and aggregating them at the national level conceals a lot of that.
>> FABRICE MURTIN: Quickly to follow up on this, the dimensions are the ranks for each indicator. In a sense this is comparable. However, we are completely ignorant about the relative importance of the various indicators and impacts. This is the job of policymakers, in a sense, to highlight policies in terms of policy intervention.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Andrew Bridges, I'm have Silicon Valley. The motto for IGF this year is the Internet of trust. I deeply admire the work of OECD, its empirical objective, evidence‑based approaches and I very much like the categories in the well‑being index, I think they're excellent. But it seems to me that we are facing a fundamental crisis in the world that is not an Internet crisis because you think you could substitute any number of variables for the word Internet in the blank of trust. It could be the government of trust, the relationships of trust, the media of trust, the legal frameworks of trust.
It seems to me that one essential condition of well‑being is the stability of expectations and the confidence in the good faith of others and that without stability of expectations, as to something being true or not, and of course many things are always subject to revision, scientific knowledge is subject to revision. Without some fundamental confidence in stability of perspectives, in confidence in good faith of others, I think we can't begin building anything.
My question for you is looking at the various well‑being categories, where do we put that? Is that part of social capital? Is that part of civic engagement and governance? Is that part of social connections? Do we need a new criterion or does this fit well within other criteria? Thank you.
>> CARLOS DA FONSECA: I'm very glad that you raise that point. I'm responsible of the trust experiment run by the OECD, which is called Trust Lab. So we run surveys about trust. Trust in others and trust in institutions using experimental methods.
This being said, it's true that trust in digital technologies is not here properly reflected as it should be and this is your point. So in the future we're thinking about broadening the scope of those trust surveys and trust experiments in order to better reflect, understand what drives trust in technologies and how can we foster it, actually.
So, yes, you're right, trust is not yet here properly reflected. Trust is multidimensional. It's about trust in institutions which relates to the governance field. It's about trust in others which relates to social capital and trust in technology relates to ICT access and usage. It’s deficient.
>> AUDIENCE: My concern is I would hate for us to focus just on technology which, in my view, is a mirror of society. If we do not have trust in teachers, trust in reporters, old‑fashioned paper newspapers, trusts in technology to me is sort of a microcosm and can't be abstracted from it, is my only concern.
>> MODERATOR: If I can just come in here. We've been talking about the well‑being framework that Fabrice is doing I think a great job in moving the bar forward on sort of measurement side, but we're also developing at the OECD what we call an integrated policy framework that Carlos mentioned where we try to see what are the key building blocks for making key transformation, not just for economy but also society.
One of those building blocks is indeed trust and the idea is you do have metrics to the extent you can and it's the area where we are the furtherest behind, and we know that. But also you have policy guidance that OECD has developed over the years. We have security guidelines, we have privacy guidelines, we are protecting consumers in ecommerce and the framework is trying to set out the policy case for why trust is needed to try to give some high‑level principles on what that mean and we work with the multi stakeholder model. We're not just focusing on our members in trying to develop this.
That's another important aspect of the Going Digital project in trying to foster trust because what trust means to someone from China may be very different to what trust means to someone in France or to the US. So every country is going to have to, a little bit, take these high‑level principles and put them into their own context.
We can give some direction but we can't give this sort of recipe for everybody on that. So thanks a lot for raising that. Do we have any other questions from the floor? Yes, ma'am.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Catherine Ty. I have a question for Dr Makoto. In your presentation you mentioned that smart city's next step is a society 5.0 and we all know that smart city is a worthwhile effort to better public lives and well‑being of human in general.
I'm just curious if there are any potential risks to smart city because we all know that there are some State actors who are providing assistance to some nondemocratic regimes and that raises some concerns internationally. So if you can just comment on ‑ because we know the benefits of smart cities, so the government can be more efficient, can better provide services. So if you can just comment on some potential risks.
Then another question, if I may, for the Valeria. You mentioned that there's a symmetry between a person who provides data and a person who manages the data. I thought it’s a very interesting comment/observation because there's a power asymmetry, that's a capability asymmetry and in this day and age a lot of corporations which also operate in nondemocratic countries, you know, when they have these kind of a capacity to own their customers' or users' data, what do they do with it in the face of this asymmetry? So if you can just comment on those. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks very much. Maybe we'll start with Makoto.
>> MAKOTO YOKOZAWA: Thank you for the very good question. Well, yes, smart city is one of our invention to have the well‑being with technology, I agree with that. But it's not limited to the smart cities. The smart house, the smart communities will have the same risk, a similar risk.
I would like to highlight someone has talked about ‑ already talked about trust and the security and that's one of the risks in this smart cities as well. And adding to that, we might have to take care of the intellectual property, totally different things that the protection of children online. So maybe many, many risks that has the origin and the utilization.
So we can't expect or we can’t forecast at all so we don't know what will be the next step with the children protection or the intellectual property things. So we must think what is important is the sharing, the experience and the knowledge about ‑ in the cross‑border coordination. Now the smart city development is owned by the communities, local communities, local government on a very small scale. We might have to think of expanding the scale of the smart cities, that's one thing.
I'm not quite sure if this is quite answering to your second question. So, as I mentioned, the OECD's 1980s privacy guideline is a very good example but we have two practical enforcement of the guidelines. One is the European GDPR which is based on governmental regulation. And second one, on the contrary. We have the APEC privacy framework which is based on self‑regulation, that's totally different. So the basis is the same. So maybe we have to think the balancing, which is better in which occasion, okay? So it's not 100 perfect for all occasions but Japan has actually taken the middle between the GDPR and the creation approach. So the similar things would happen in any risks in the smart cities or smart communities. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks so much. Valeria.
>> VALERIA MILANES: If I do not understand properly your question, let me know. Point of asymmetry is something that we try to highlight because we understand that each time that symmetry is making bigger and bigger and of course it's a question of balance. I would say that mainly, not only from the State but also from private corporations because sometimes private corporations are even stronger than some States. At some point some States have not a word against private corporation.
For example, and I was listening to my colleague here, self-regulation is okay but it's something that also generates concerns at some points because maybe makes unbalance and asymmetry bigger.
I have not answers but I think that given the people agency, do not forget data protection rules are quite important. It's assured that maybe not everybody understand and use the rights that data protection brings because our experience in everyday work is that people on an everyday basis does not properly understand what is happening with the data.
If they had access to legal instances, administrative instances, it can be quite discouraging to be that. So that is our work but also the work of everybody who is involved here to understand properly what is behind that. If we are properly committed with the human rights, human people, people‑centered rights, if we want to put people at the center that should be the aim of the understanding.
Giving people agency and also implement transparency rules, explainability rules, not only when the problem happened but from the very beginning to make clear diagnosis to understand, to proper explain why you are adopting this kind of methodology or technology and it will be getting worse because smart cities is a reality.
In the context that I came and that I explained these 56% of people using Internet in 2017, which meant 44% of people not use Internet, we, in Latin-America, we are talking about smart cities. In fact the ITU is pushing a strong agenda there on this smart city. So we have these products.
So I think we have to talk all the time and do not get tired of talking about this and making the points because like we all represent different interests, that's true, but we have to find the commonalities from in the diversity and keep on pushing that. I'm not sure if I answered your question.
>> KATE WATSON: If you don’t mind I’d like to add something to what you said about the security risks of IOT because I completely agree with you, there are so many of those traditional risks when it comes to the data that's being collected. But especially one thing we're seeing with smart city devices is the people interacting with these devices often don't realize they have been interacting with them because they're so ingrained in traditional dumb applications like in streetlights or sensors in the sidewalks and things like that. There's some real community benefits from those things but there's also a huge risk that if that data were to be leaked, consumers would have no idea they were included in any sort of risk.
So one thing we found that will be important moving forward is consumer education applications, whether putting up a sign or doing some sort of media campaign but starting with the very basic point that these devices actually exist in your community is huge.
>> MODERATOR: If there's any more questions, maybe we take one more and then I'm going to let the panelists have something to say. Any other questions from the floor? Sir.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. Most of what you've been talking about is really interesting, if I take it from a government perspective. It gives great entry point for governments to think about well‑being and improve the conditions.
If I look at it from the individual's point of view, I found less hints as to what can I do myself to improve well‑being in the digital age. Is there anything you're thinking about in this direction?
>> MODERATOR: Thanks for that. Is there anyone on the panel who wants to take a stab at that? Makoto?
>> MAKOTO YOKOZAWA: Again, it's a very good point and I would like to point the security guidelines from the OECD were renewed in 2014, if I remember correctly. The topics for the business players, the biggest one is the multistakeholder and that says that the individuals are equally responsible for the cyber security, okay?
Before that, only the service providers for business or government or the critical infrastructure operators, they are solely responsible for the cyber security. But it has changed.
Also, of course we have to take care of the education or the awareness development of the cyber security but we can't improve further the cyber security aspect without the collaboration of the individuals, as you said.
So this is a tremendous change from the government, a top‑down approach to the bottom‑up approach. So maybe some similar things we can see from all over the world discussion. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: So I'm going to give our great panel one more intervention, if they would so wish. Monica, would you like to start off?
>> MONICA ASPE: Thank you very much. I will try to comment on the discussion. One point is I believe it's important to think of the noncompetition among different aspects of world being in digitalization. I have devoted most of my career to access, to ICTs, but however, the discussion of access before quality of digitalization I think we should rethink that and we do that a lot in developing countries.
Because for one thing, the impacts are for everyone and not just the connected. Impacts on skills, impacts on the job market, that effects everyone, connected or not. So we need to think on both sides access and equality of digitalization at the same time.
The other point is the quality of digitalization is also key to digital inclusions, it was talked about in this panel the pushback because of security or privacy risks so it affects access and digital inclusion.
A third related point, people are increasingly exposed to digitalization without even knowing. There is facial recognition technologies and you're just walking there and you're the subject of this ‑ or rather an object of this digitalization. So we need to rethink the discussion on access.
Lastly, on the risks of smart cities, I see in the discussions of smart cities a risk of the cities in developed countries are applied to developing country cities many times and they're not necessarily applicable. And I think that's a big risk because buying technology doesn't always lead to adding to development. In smart cities, especially in developing country, we should always think of the public service driving the digital policy and not the technology.
When we don't have the same processes in place in public services and we have a layer of technology, we don't get the same result in developing countries what you can get in a more orderly cities in terms of their delivery of public services. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks so much, Monica. Is there anyone else on the panel?
>> CARLOS DA FONSECA: I just wanted to refer to two of the questions that were proposed for debate for us, we didn't have time to discuss that. One of this is digital divides and the other one is the aspects are not quantified. I think from the perspective of developing countries, this digital divide issues is hugely important. As I mentioned before, it has to do with disparities and within the country and between countries and it's very difficult to deal with in terms of policy solutions because basically the range of dimensions of digital divide, they are not excluded and, on the contrary, they tend to accumulate.
If you are in a developing country and you are a poor person living in an urban area, access to ICTs is probably more difficult than if you had money. But if you are a poor person living in a rural area in a developing country, it's even more difficult and then if you are a poor person in a rural area and it happens that you are an old person, even more complex. And if you are a woman probably even more complex. If you are from an Indigenous descent, etc, etc, etc. It goes on and on. It's very difficult to deal with that.
Then what is the solution? Of course policies, public policies, education, qualification, trying to get more women, for instance, in the ICT sector. In the case of Brazil we only have 20% of people working in the ICT sector that are women.
On the other hand, and going back to this issue of quantifying, one of the problems that we face in Brazil, but I think in other countries as well, is the lack of data that is desegregated by gender. This is a huge problem because we do have surveys, etc, but not always the data is desegregated by gender or race so it makes it more difficult to pinpoint specific problems and to figure out policy solutions for those problems.
We have faced these difficulties in establishing our strategy. So I think this experience was very important for us because not only we try to figure out solutions but basically what we did, as we elaborated, the policy was really to have a very clear view of the very different problems and the complexity of those problems. So now we have a very clear picture of the situation in our country. I think it's some of the things I wanted to mention.
>> FABRICE MURTIN: Thank you, Carlos, very much, for this point. May I simply mention the first follow up to our report will actually consist of desegregating those indicators by gender. This will be, I think it will be released in March.
>> CLAIRE MILNE: Thank you. I'd like to come back to the question of what are our tools for measuring these developments and how things change and obviously the OECD already benefits by a lot of surveys, you go around and ask people many questions. But I think there are a new set of tools that are valuable to get more considered decisions and getting people to face up to the trade‑offs and these opportunities versus risks and these are the tools of deliberative democracy which we are beginning to see more of now. And I do feel that these can play an immensely valuable part, not just in helping policymakers to understand what a social balance might be for these trade‑offs but also helping to build the trust which our colleague here has so rightly referred to. It's trust in society and if people can feel that their views are being taken into account, that must be positive.
>> VALERIA MILANES: I would add some aspect that maybe it complicates a bit this perspective but we also see from our work that it could have an impact on this well‑being aim that we are trying to point here which is about surveillance. Nowadays, most ‑ I won't say every country but most countries are using surveillance technologies with a proper aim of pursue crime but we also know and we have information that sometimes that surveillance is diminishing the free expression of people online and that also has an impact on the civic engagement and the possibility of making stronger states and civil participation. So that is something that is happening and we have to be aware of that. Thank you.
>> MAKOTO YOKOZAWA: I should be very brief and we have talked about the trust and many things and I would like to add trust by design or a well‑being by design, work with the OECD and all governments and also the multistakeholder. Thank you.
>> KATE WATSON: I completely agree with everything that you all have said. I'm glad you mentioned the trust by design and that comes with many different pieces and I think it applies in so many different ways too. In my mind it's not just the devices that we use but every different platform we use online as well should be secure, private and trustworthy by design.
But I'm also really glad we brought the conversation back to access again, and especially you mentioned Indigenous communities. That’s a group of people that have so often been forgotten in every possible sector. So including them in this space is hugely important and it's not just making sure that outsider looking in we help them get online but really consulting these communities and asking them do you want this technology first of all, because it's your right to say no, and then if you do want it how can we help you? As a community what do you want to do? What role do you want to play in your own connectivity? Do you want to own these networks? Do you want to own some sort of portal? What is it? I'm really, really glad to hear you mention that because it has to be the next big focus for as a community.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks so much. I'm not going to wrap up because we're already a bit over time. Thank you so much to you and the audience and as well as to our really distinguished panel. I think you've given us all a lot of food for thought. I think Fabrice's main message that skills are the key to sort of unlocking the positives of digital transformation has been well verified. I think we've also gotten a bit of homework on our side as we continue to develop the ongoing digital work on well‑being from a policy side. Thank you very much to the panel and if you would join me in giving a round of applause.