Realizing our Digital Future and Shaping its Impact on Knowledge, Industry, and the Workforce (2018)

Digital technologies are transforming the early 21st century, leading to the creation of entirely new industries based upon machine learning and artificial intelligence and lowering barriers to participation in and access to data, education, and communication tools for citizens around the world. It is believed that international cooperation will be essential in key areas of security, accessibility, and regulation to secure a digital future that is inclusive, democratically governed and ethically minded in which open data and reliable information can circulate. With these objectives, the Academies propose the following principles of action:

• Inclusion and access with the goal of equal opportunity to participate in and gain from the digital transformation, to channel gains equitably and eliminate digital divides.
• Information literacy relying on a comprehensive educational plan for all age groups with the objective of providing skills and tools allowing citizens to critically interpret, verify and validate the quality of information circulating in the digital infrastructure.
• Quality of tools and standards through robust mechanisms for production, validation, access and dissemination of open data, information and machine learning systems, to strengthen reliability and security, preventing tampering, manipulation and privatizing use of data and ensuring that machine learning algorithms are interpretable by non-specialists.
• Democratic governance in the form of regulatory frameworks to set up an oversight of internet service providers, social media and other entities and prevent private monopolistic or oligopolistic power in the digital economy and to ensure open and neutral internet, protection of digital data and respect for norms of individual privacy.
• Employment and training policies to encourage new economic activities, foster emerging technological sectors and ensure that the benefits of new technologies also be distributed to workers and that schemes be available for their training and reemployment.
• Ethics and human values should guide the development of digital technologies, artificial intelligence and big data analytics and intervene in all stages of digital innovations to preserve values of freedom, democracy, justice and trust.