00:00Luca Belli is Professor of Digital Governance at FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro.
00:07The creation of the WAICO provides a very interesting opportunity for developing countries to have basically a stronger voice in
00:17global AI governance.
00:19Most existing fora are pretty much dominated by a handful of very developed countries and very few, very large corporations.
00:29So I see quite positively the establishment of WAICO as an opportunity for rebalance AI governance and to make it
00:40more representative,
00:41especially if the organization manages to focus on capacity building, on knowledge sharing and on practical cooperation.
00:49How can countries build their own AI capacity, digital sovereignty, without ultimately being totally reliant on the countries and the
01:00tech companies that are so dominating AI?
01:03We know that the USA, of course, is the leader, but China, which is part of BRICS, is the second
01:08biggest in terms of this new technology.
01:11How can smaller countries retain their digital sovereignty?
01:16Yeah, that is something I've been working a lot over the past decade.
01:19And actually, again, it is a very complex picture that you have to analyze in order to find a sustainable
01:26solution that is tailored for your local needs.
01:29But what is important is to understand that digital sovereignty is not synonymous with digital isolation.
01:35You do not need to build the entire tech stack by yourself.
01:40It means having the ability to make independent choices and remain connected with other partners and with strategic allies in
01:52order to build jointly your digital sovereignty, your AI capacity.
01:56You can only increase your own capacity to innovate if you have a wall of society approach, a systemic approach,
02:07and if you understand that AI risk must be connected with the need to develop your own compute infrastructure, develop
02:15open source technologies,
02:17and connect all this with cyber security, with development of infrastructure.
02:23So I see that WICO is a very important step ahead.
02:27And it is in the very same line of development from the global south.
02:33The BRICS has also been advocating for over the past decade, or 15 years actually now.
02:39So I think that the goal here of digital sovereignty is to have the capacity to have choices according to
02:46your own interests and your own values.
02:48And at the end of the day, nobody can be sovereign alone.
02:52And you need to cooperate and coordinate with others to be sovereign.
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