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The author is chair of the UN Statistical Fee
When the UN created a Statistical Fee in 1946, the world was nonetheless recovering from the devastation of the second world battle. Then, there was broad consensus that solely dependable, internationally comparable knowledge may stop battle, fight poverty and anchor world co-operation. Almost 80 years later, this perception stays simply as related, however the context has modified dramatically.
The world now faces geopolitical and environmental crises in addition to a profound digital transformation. Information has grow to be a strategic asset. Controlling it right this moment means affect over the longer term. The speedy rise of AI, powered by huge volumes of knowledge, presents the UN with a frightening problem: those that management knowledge right this moment will form AI tomorrow — and with it, the narratives that outline public life. Because the affect of business platforms and algorithmic techniques grows, public establishments are falling behind. Nationwide statistical places of work — the spine of impartial knowledge manufacturing — are below extreme monetary stress.
This erosion of institutional capability couldn’t come at a extra crucial second. The UN is unable to reply adequately as it’s dealing with a staffing shortfall itself. As a result of ongoing austerity measures on the UN, many senior positions stay vacant, and the director of the UN Statistics Division has retired, with no successor appointed. This comes at a time when daring and revolutionary initiatives — corresponding to a newly envisioned Trusted Information Observatory — are urgently wanted to make official statistics extra accessible and machine-readable.
In the meantime, the specter of focused disinformation is rising. On social media, distorted or manipulated content material spreads at unprecedented velocity. Rising instruments like AI chatbots exacerbate the issue. These techniques depend on internet content material, not verified knowledge, and are usually not constructed to separate fact from falsehood. Making issues worse, many governments can’t at present make their knowledge usable for AI as a result of it isn’t standardised, not machine-readable, or not overtly accessible. The area for sober, evidence-based discourse is shrinking.
This pattern undermines public belief in establishments, strips policymaking of its legitimacy, and jeopardises the UN Sustainable Growth Targets (SDGs). With out dependable knowledge, governments can be flying blind — or worse: they are going to be intentionally misled.
When international locations lose management of their very own knowledge, or can’t combine it into world decision-making processes, they grow to be bystanders to their very own improvement. Selections about their economies, societies and environments are then outsourced to AI techniques educated on skewed, unrepresentative knowledge. The worldwide south is especially in danger, with many international locations missing entry to high quality knowledge infrastructures. In international locations corresponding to Ethiopia, unverified info spreading quickly on social media has fuelled misinformation-driven violence.
The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated that robust knowledge techniques allow higher disaster response. To counter these dangers, the creation of a world Trusted Data Observatory (TDO) is crucial. This UN co-ordinated, democratically ruled platform would assist catalogue and make accessible trusted knowledge all over the world — whereas totally respecting nationwide sovereignty.
It will host a world metadata catalogue, a specialised search engine that signifies what knowledge exists, the place it’s saved, the way it was collected and the way dependable it’s. Crucially, the uncooked knowledge would stay below the management of its nationwide producers, guaranteeing that high-quality knowledge is clear, interoperable and usable within the AI age. The TDO would assist belief the place right this moment there’s doubt.
Historical past has proven us the implications of neglecting the general public curiosity in digital areas. A small variety of expertise firms now dominate huge swaths of digital infrastructure, management knowledge flows, and form public discourse at scale. We should not repeat these errors with AI and knowledge.
Information should not be handled because the unique property of the few. It’s a world public good, and the UN should step up as its steward — in order that residents, establishments, and governments alike could make selections primarily based on reliable, inclusive knowledge. Reaching this imaginative and prescient requires political will, funding in institutional and technical capacities, and new partnerships between governments, academia, civil society, and the non-public sector.
A current UN convention recognised that top high quality knowledge and statistics allow evidence-based coverage selections and improve accountability and transparency. However motion should observe: the way forward for democracy, improvement and peace will rely upon whether or not we put reliable knowledge on the coronary heart of world governance.
