Egypt, represented by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), participated in the “Ethics in Technology and Internet” Conference, organized virtually by the Republic of Poland and the United Nations, on May 31, as a preceding event for the 16th annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF), due to be held in Katowice, Poland, on December 6-10, under the theme “Internet United”.
The Conference is one in a series of events called "Road to IGF," organized as an international initiative of the UN and IGF, aiming to initiate and facilitate global discussion about the most current and urgent issues related to the internet functioning.
During the Conference, the Advisor to the ICT Minister for Artificial Intelligence (AI) participated as a speaker in a panel discussion. The talk stressed the importance of making responsible choices when deploying technology, especially high impact technologies like AI, and highlighted that AI development, especially at the research stage, needs to be an interdisciplinary effort so as to be beneficiary to everyone or at least with minimum harm to others.
In addition, the talk revealed that the Egyptian government’s main priority while adopting AI is to serve the country’s development goals, and use AI as a tool to solve Egypt’s development challenges and to benefit Egypt on its ambitious and highly accelerated road to economic growth, which is reflected in the slogan of the National AI Strategy “AI for Development and Prosperity”.
Moreover, the role of public–private partnership (PPP) in making AI projects sustainable, financially buyable and technologically innovative, was also highlighted during the talk.
IGF is a global multi-stakeholder platform that facilitates discussions on public policy issues pertaining to Internet governance. It was one of the most important outcomes of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that mandated the UN Secretary-General to formally convene the Forum.
