Interview by Martina Fuchs
TORONTO – China is a global technology and artificial intelligence (AI) leader playing an increasingly important and crucial role to promote responsible tech around the world, a United Nations (UN) official has told Xinhua at Collision, one of the world’s leading technology conferences taking place in Toronto from June 17-20.
“China is obviously a global leader in technologies, especially AI,” said Lambert Hogenhout, Chief of Data, Analytics and Emerging Technologies at the United Nations. “Just in the past few weeks we’ve seen the system Kling AI from Kuaishou which is cutting-edge, very impressive videos.”
Kling, developed by the Kuaishou AI Team, is a text-to-video AI tool. It empowers users with remarkable video generation capabilities, allowing them to effortlessly and efficiently create artistic videos.
“Besides AI, there are other areas of technology where China is really leading such as alternative energy or solar technologies,” Hogenhout, who has spent the past 25 years working both in the private sector and with international organizations such as the World Bank and the UN, said.
“These are opportunities where technologies can be shared with other parts of the world that badly need them,” he said.
The United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) is based in New York and aims to enable a better, safer, more sustainable future through innovative technology and has three key strategic goals: accelerating innovation, building cybersecurity resiliency, and enabling digital transformation.
Hogenhout also emphasized: “Precision agriculture and the prevention of disasters is another area where AI can play a very important role and where China has a lot of experience. There are plenty of opportunities.”
However, he also warned of the risk of adopting new technologies too fast: “One of the things on my mind is that with technology moving so rapidly and being so exciting, people are very much focused on what they can do with AI now.”
“But it’s also very important to think ahead, two or five years from now. Think of a Canadian ice hockey player. He or she doesn’t skate to where the puck is, but where it’s going to.”
“That’s the mindset we have to keep in mind as we start preparing for policies on AI technologies and responsible tech,” Hogenhout stressed.
Collision, which is part of the Web Summit events, has gathered 37,832 attendees from 117 countries, it said in a press release.
It is the last Collision event, and its final year in Toronto, before it transitions to Web Summit Vancouver in May 2025.
– Xinhua
