Administrator Samantha Power on “Development is Digital: Harnessing Technology's Potential for a Better World”

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ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you so much, Mr. President. So, I will say a word in a second about my time here at Carnegie. But let me just start by saying in my day, we were not called Junior Fellows, we were interns. So, congrats, young people here - Junior Fellows on the upgrade. Thank you, Tino [Cuéllar] and Carnegie.

I mean, this institution is so dedicated to peace, to security. And, fundamentally, you know, I think over the years has really evolved to placing an appropriate emphasis on dignity at the heart of peace and at the heart of security. And, it's amazing to have you at the helm, bringing so much experience on the rule of law, on domestic policy challenges of profound import in recognizing the connection between the domestic and the international. There's a saying there is no over there anymore. And, really, you are the perfect person to take up the mantle here. There's been incredible leadership of Carnegie in my sentient lifetime, starting with Mort Abramowitz, my first boss, Jessica Matthews, Bill Burns. So lucky to have you here at the helm, Tino.

So, back to my time at Carnegie. I did have the chance to work for Mort Abramowitz, who was president here, who helped internationalize Carnegie's footprint around the world and did many other things. He'd been a lifelong diplomat and came after leaving the Foreign Service and been Assistant Secretary and Ambassador in Turkey, Thailand. And he came here and he was a life changing mentor for me, truly, and he taught me many things. But one of the lessons he drilled into me, perhaps above all others, was coming out of his government experience, in governments abroad, our own government. Just saying again, and again, look, governments can do great good and they can do harm. What we do depends on one thing - people. It depends on the values that we hold and the choices that people make. And I think this is a very fitting lesson among, again, the many lessons he taught me starting right here at Carnegie. But it's a very fitting lesson for any discussion about technology.

Fundamentally, technology is transforming our planet. How it does so will depend on the values that we have, the choices that we make. There is a show, a TV show, that some of you may have seen called Silicon Valley. Nodding, generation gap in nods. But anyway, it's a hit comedy, and it parodies tech culture. And, in that show, there is one phrase that you hear more than any other which is "making the world a better place". It's a constant mantra repeated by characters who believe that whatever app or technology that they have a hand in developing, is inherently noble, will inherently benefit humankind. The CEO at a big tech company tells this to employees in the inspirational video that they play every day on the company bus taking people to work.

In another episode, a presenter at TechCrunch, tells us how they're, "making the world a better place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols." The once great hope in real life about how technology could improve our future in this telling becomes a punch line. And it's really reflective of how the tech optimism that so many of us felt during the early Internet era, when many of us took for granted that extending technologies around the world, would inevitably invariably expand knowledge and empathy and economic opportunity. We see how that tech optimism has receded such that it becomes a punchline on a TV show.

The reality has proven different. It turns out that there is nothing inevitable about anything. Technology can deepen inequality just as it can reduce inequality. It can divide communities, as we see here at home, for sure, and all around the world just as it can connect us. It can spread hate, it can spread lies just as easily, it seems as it can spread compassion, connection and truth.

Today, with advances in AI specifically set to upend industries across the planet, it's clear we stand at the cusp of another technological upheaval that none of us really can predict. And with so much of the optimism that characterized the early internet era now gone, it may be tempting for some to give in to defeatism. Since we know that we can't stop the march of technology, maybe it's tempting to sit back and hope for the best to disappear, in fact, into our technology. But, needless to say, we can't do that. We need to take action, we need to be intentional. We need to learn from the challenges of the past to carve a different course. We need to embrace the fact that today, development is digital - economic development, human development is digital.

Already over the past 10 years, as internet usage in low and middle income countries has doubled, technological evolution has helped accelerate progress across virtually every aspect of development. When development is not progressing in a community, in truth, it is very often because people are disconnected - disconnected perhaps from the health care they need when they're sick, from the education or training they need to pursue their dreams, disconnected from the financial services that give them the resources they need to invest in their futures, disconnected from their governments, themselves.

So, USAID putting technological connection to one side, USAID has always been in the connection business. And I have seen firsthand now how we are using technology to build all of these other connections, these foundational connections in society. And in doing so, I've seen how these initiatives can transform countless lives around the world. I'll just give you a few examples.

In Tanzania, I met mothers who had experienced severe complications or emergencies during pregnancy or childbirth. They described how these complications would often force mothers like them in their country, in their society, to walk miles just to try to get treatment or to be able to deliver their babies. And that's because of the absence of transportation - this endangered their lives, it endangered their babies lives. Things we take for granted, being able to get a ride to a hospital, to an emergency room, to get access to an ambulance - in these really remote communities it's just not an option. So walking, bicycle, boat - I mean the variety of transportation that people had to employ just to try to save their baby's lives.

So, USAID worked with the Vodafone Foundation to develop something called the m-mama. And this is one of the cool things - you can actually download this app on your phone. m-mama is an emergency transport system for mothers and babies. It uses volunteer drivers who are connected to a digital database to get moms to hospital for emergency c-sections when ambulances just aren't available.

The best way to think about this is it's a kind of Uber for pregnant moms. And if you get, download the app you can actually watch right now a mom who's being transported using a volunteer driver who put their name in the database and render themselves available. Because it turns out, actually transportation, however rudimentary that gets you to care can be life and death. You need not have the accouterments of an ambulance to save a life in fact.

In the pilot region, maternal and newborn mortality using the m-mama app fell by nearly 40 percent over four years. So, we have worked to scale this across Tanzania - worked very specifically with the Tanzanian president and government. And, recently, we have taken m-mama to other African nations.

Today, I'm pleased to announce that we have just crossed a major milestone. As of this week, m-mama has helped get moms and babies to the care they need in 100,000, emergencies - saving thousands of lives. And we are just about to scale this with the World Bank and others who see just how incredibly cost effective and life saving this is.

In Fiji, to give you another example. I visited a place called Nabila village, which lies very close to the coast, making it particularly vulnerable to more frequent and intense storms. The storms can often damage village infrastructure, including things like water pumps and tanks. And, in remote communities, getting replacement parts for these items can be difficult, often leaving the community for months on end without clean water for extended periods.

So, USAID's Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance brought 3D printers to the community, allowing them to make whatever replacement part they needed themselves and quickly. And I watched this technology in motion producing pipes and bolts, and things that otherwise would have taken potentially months to obtain. This way the community is more resilient, better able to bounce back from disasters.

And in Ukraine, I met a woman whose home was destroyed by Russian strikes, who used Ukraine's state-in-a-smartphone app, so-called Diia, which USAID helped develop to submit photos of the damage. So, she uploaded those photos so she could get the recovery money then downloaded or provided to her phone ring-fenced, so she could only use it to buy building materials to avoid corruption and other transgressions. And with this simple service through an app, she was able to move back home and rebuild. Diia has connected citizens with more than 120 government services all at the touch of a button. The Ukrainian people can renew their IDs, they can start a new business. They were pioneers in digital passports, they can register the birth of a new child, all from the same platform. This has turned Ukraine into a global leader on e-governance and the innovations that they have made during this conflict have propelled them even further ahead.

We will talk about Ukraine building the plane as they are flying it while that plane is under gunfire, Diia's adaptability and all that it has added in wartime has been a major source of resilience for the Ukrainian people. And I'm very pleased to have with us today my dear friend Ukraine's Ambassador to the United States Ambassador [Oksana] Makarova, who has been such a champion of Diia and so much innovation in the Ukrainian economy and society.

So, now, we have artificial intelligence coming online providing thrilling, new opportunities to reach people with even more targeted and powerful information and services. And I'll talk more about AI in a moment - I know thrilling is not the only word that comes to mind when people think about AI. As more aspects of our world move online, billions of people still have not, in fact, moved online. And Tino spoke to this at the beginning. This is creating bigger than ever gaps between the digital haves and the digital have-nots that risk perpetuating and deepening inequalities across the globe.

Meanwhile, authoritarian governments and other actors are using increasingly powerful technologies. With tools like facial recognition, to survey people, to manipulate information using increasingly convincing deep fakes, launching cyber attacks against their adversaries. Many tech capabilities are growing faster than our ability to fully understand them, never mind to manage the potential harms. And our growing reliance on technologies make the consequences when they fail catastrophic.

Just last week, we saw a single tech outage ground flights, shut down banks and close businesses across much of the planet. These are terrifying risks - to governments and grids, to supply chains, to food and water systems, and even to the basic human need to be able to make sense of what is true and what is not. All told, technology is alongside climate change, one of the two most decisive forces shaping development today. And whether it is a force for harm or good will depend, as Mort Abramowitz always said, on people, on us, and the choices that we make now and going forward.

So, today, we need to follow the early optimism of the internet era, not with defeatism but with determination. Determination to come together to take what we think are three essential actions to minimize the risks and maximize technology's potential to improve lives.

First, together, we must extend the reach of technology across the planet so that no person or company is left behind as the world digitizes.

Second, we must build coalitions that set the rules of the road and establish protections so the technologies are developed and deployed in ways that guard against harms and respect human rights.

And, third, we must accelerate the application of technology on behalf of humanity's greatest challenges, which do seem only to be growing.

I'll take each of these in turn.

First, again, no people or nation should be left behind in the digital revolution. Right now, two parallel worlds have emerged - online and offline. And as more services, interactions, and business models go digital, those who don't have access will be at a severe disadvantage. Still, today, a whopping 2.6 billion people are not connected to the internet, most of whom, of course, are in least developed countries - those least developed countries where USAID works - and actually most of whom are women. Women are 15 percent less likely than men to use mobile internet.

To date, it is estimated that women's exclusion from the digital world has cost the global economy one trillion U.S. dollars in GDP. If we don't solve these fundamental gaps, then as we increasingly use tech to drive development progress, we will paradoxically be exacerbating inequalities. Some time ago, USAID partnered with a digital agriculture platform called iCal that gave farmers in Kenya a library of information on crops, livestock, and soil - and gave them texting connections with agricultural experts so that they could get answers to questions in real time. But even though roughly half of Kenya's farmers are women, they didn't have the same access to the phones that they needed to use these great iCal services.

So, at the time USAID was partnering with iCal, only 13 percent of users were women. That meant a significant portion of Kenya's farmers were not able to benefit from this critical investment, putting Kenya's women at an even further disadvantage. And it's not just individuals from marginalized groups that could be left behind if we don't equitably expand tech infrastructure - it is entire countries. Before countries can digitize services, they need to have reliable broad based connectivity. And, they need secure, comprehensive databases that can communicate with one another. And while countries can take advantage of many AI applications with basic digital connectivity in order to build their own AI models, they need to have foundational infrastructure in place like plentiful energy and computing power. Cloud computing can be expensive and really difficult for emerging economies to access.

And, get this, right now, there are four times as many data centers in the Commonwealth of Virginia than there are on the entire African continent. Just think about that. When some nations have the technological services that can attract business and investment and others simply do not, then the nations that need the growth and development that technology can bring those that need them the most are shut out from it. And they are more likely to turn to other partners like Russia or the PRC to support their digital transformations - and those countries are very eager to step in, unfortunately, without a commitment to safeguarding privacy, sovereignty, or human rights.

We can give countries a different option. And while it is true that extending digital connectivity and services across the planet is going to take massive resources, the truth is that many private sector partners are eager to invest in these efforts. Organizations like USAID are convening private sector partners and local governments - we are using catalytic finance, grants, technical assistance to unlock investments that meet countries' most critical digital needs, so that connectivity is extended as equitably as possible.

Right now, USAID Missions are conducting what we call digital ecosystem country assessments, with 31 of these completed to date, to understand countries' most pressing tech needs, and we are helping shape partnerships where the private sector can help meet these needs. Just weeks ago, for instance, I was in Armenia, launching a partnership between the Armenian government, Amazon Web Services, and USAID to help modernize Armenia's government digital infrastructure.

This strategy to draw in private sector partners, to meet priority needs is working around the world. USAID's Digital Invest program, the flagship digital infrastructure project under President Biden's partnership for global infrastructure and investment, has launched 13 public private-partnerships to extend last mile connectivity and digital financial services across the world. All told, an $8.5 million investment from the United States helped to raise over $300 million in private investment capital to date, which helped an initial 11.2 million consumers across 40 countries access the internet and digital financial services. That is a 40-1 return on investment and we are only getting going.

We are also working with the private and public sectors to accelerate gender digital equality. Last year, Vice President [Kamala] Harris launched theWomen in the Digital Economy Fund, a USAID-Gates Foundation partnership that has already generated more than $1 billion in public and private commitments to close the gender digital divide. Last week, a fund announced a call for proposals from private sector partners who are seeking technical assistance to scale commercial solutions that increase the digital inclusion of women. Companies can apply at widef.global, widef.global.

And we are working to share lessons from countries that have seen real success in their own digital transformations. We are partnering with Ukraine's extraordinary Ministry of Digital Transformation to help bring best practices from its groundbreaking state in a smartphone app - Diia - to countries like Ecuador and Zambia. And this very afternoon, USAID is going to be signing MOUs [Memorandum of Understanding] with two other global leaders in digital government, Estonia and Latvia, to partner together and help other nations boost their own digital capabilities. We need more of this collaboration.

So, today I'm announcing a new platform, digitaldevelopment.org, which will offer investors, academics, civil society, and donor governments easy access to national digital strategies, to research findings, and to other key resources for a given country - helping us all align our efforts to support countries in their digital transformations. At the same time, however, as we extend the reach of technologies, we also need to build coalitions to set rules of the road, and build protections to guard against harms, and to safeguard human rights. And that is the second feature of USAID's approach that I would like to touch on today.

Already, emerging technologies, as you know, are giving authoritarians powerful tools - to survey, to manipulate, and even to attack communities around the world. The People's Republic of China, for instance, has provided facial recognition software to at least 80 countries, enabling mass surveillance and targeted repression of dissidents and activists. Cyber attacks are causing increasing damage from ransomware, to attacks against critical infrastructure to hacks health clinics and civil society organizations. One single cyberattack in 2017, NotPetya, caused an estimated $10 billion in global economic damage. Think of the harm particularly in low income communities when damage like that takes hold.

As you well know, generative AI is providing new tools to manipulate information through deep fakes that have been used to spread everything from false public health claims, to lies to discredit democratic leaders, with women leaders often at the receiving end of the majority of those attacks. In Moldova, to give just one example, the reformist President Maia Sandu, who's running for re-election this year, had to dedicate a significant portion of her New Year's address to refuting a deep fake video that showed her mocking poor people and banning a cherished Moldovan holiday tradition, making rose hip tea. We will continue to see these sophisticated customized deep fakes attempting to manipulate the will of people, as this year alone, two billion people are voting in elections around the world.

And some of the potential harm from emerging technologies can also be inadvertent. When AI is built on datasets that reflect the bias and discrimination of the world around them, it can go on in turn to perpetuate and amplify those biases. This is a particular risk when almost all of AI is being developed in places like Silicon Valley, and Shanghai, and Singapore, not Lima or Lusaka. And as AI is increasingly deployed in fields like health care and law enforcement, these biases can have life and death consequences.

As we are beginning to grapple with here in the United States, AI also holds the potential to significantly disrupt the global labor force. This is not an abstract worry in the countries where USAID works. High employment is a major source of anxiety already, for citizens and for leaders in many countries. In some cases, it is already leading to mass protests and to instability. What happens if, as one recent report projected, AI automates 75 million jobs out of existence. To make matters worse, with 70 low and low-middle-income countries at or near debt distress, many do not have the budgets to provide social protections for those who lose their livelihoods.

The rules of the road for the AI age are being written as we speak and we need to write them to prevent these harms. The Biden Administration has been a leader on shaping AI regulation governance. In the past year alone, the administration has led the way in developing both the first ever United Nations resolution on AI and the first multilateral agreement on governing advanced AI systems - the G7 code of conduct. We then work to expand that framework through the UK and Korea's AI summits, deepening collaboration on the steps we must take to limit AI risks. We launched the voluntary commitments to mobilize companies to focus on safe innovation and to harness AI toward meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. And last fall, President Biden signed an executive order establishing new standards for responsible AI use.

USAID is leading on to critical workstreams under the executive order, alongside interagency colleagues, developing an AI in Global Development Playbook and a Global AI Research Agenda. USAID was among the first to consider AI's impact on development with our seminal AI in Development report back in 2018. We went on to launch our own AI Action Plan in 2022, now we are building coalitions to get more donors, governments, and private sector partners on board, and to lift up the voices of those most impacted by the harms of technologies like AI, so that the rules of the road are shaped by those who will be impacted by them the most - rather than the top down state centric approach promoted by Russia, the PRC, and other authoritarian states.

For instance, through the Equitable AI Challenge, we convened a community of practice of over 400 participants principally from developing countries to share how AI is already impacting them. And, through our support of the Global Index on Responsible AI, researchers in 138 countries are collecting data as we speak about how AI is affecting things like gender equality, public participation and awareness, and cultural and linguistic diversity. And we are using these insights to shape better policy. We spearheaded the development of the Donor Principles for Human Rights in the Digital Age, so called, which establishes rules and best practices for technologies to be developed in safe and equitable ways that respect human rights. Already, it has the endorsement of 38 partner governments, and we are a founding member of the growing AI for Development Donor Partnership that coordinates AI efforts around the world. We are partnering with countries to track potential shifts in industries and employment from AI, and help them craft strategies that protect workers rights and economic opportunity.

But, of course, no matter the size of our global coalition, there will be some who attempt to use emerging technologies for harm. So, at the same time, we also need to work to build resilience in communities around the world. In Indonesia, we helped develop a cutting edge AI tool called the Misinformation Early Warning System, which highlights manipulated online content, and determines how it is being spread, empowering people to take action. For example, Muse, as it is called, surfaced a PRC affiliated bot network that was using female western sounding usernames to promote a positive narrative about the treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang province. This evidence led several social media platforms to remove this content according to their content standards. It just goes to show just as the capacity for technology to manipulate information is accelerating, so too in fact, can the capacity for technology to detect that manipulation. And, through the so-called Promoting Information Integrity and Resilience Initiative at the Summit for Democracy, we are helping boost the capacity of citizens and civil society organizations to detect and guard against information manipulation.

We need to invest, as well, in strong cybersecurity, both for ourselves and the partners running our own programs which often collect sensitive data. For our partner nations, I mentioned Ukraine's groundbreaking Diia app, this app relies on highly sensitive data about virtually all of Ukraine's citizens' data. Data that is now incredibly valuable to the nation invading it which is of course renowned for its cyber attacks. But, over the past decade, we have been investing in helping Ukraine build its cybersecurity capabilities, helping to move data to the cloud where physical attacks could not cause outages, to train cybersecurity professionals, and to run training exercises to respond to potential attacks. Thanks above all, to the ingenuity of the Ukrainian people, but also to some of these support efforts, Ukraine has been able to respond to attacks quickly, limiting potential damage. And Diia has sustained, remarkably really, the provision of secure essential services to the Ukrainian people.

Third, and finally, even as we work to limit the potential for emerging technologies to do harm, we also need to maximize their extraordinary potential to do good, and help to take on some of the world's greatest challenges. The possibilities are infinite. Already, AI has been a game changer in the fight against tuberculosis. TB is difficult to fight, partly because people don't experience symptoms until they are already very sick and have already been transmitting it in their communities. Screening with chest X-rays is very important. And scanners can be mobile enough to fit into backpacks so they can be brought even to remote clinics. But, radiologists in many nations have limited capacity to quickly analyze these X-rays and recommend treatment. So prevalent, again, is this risk. So, now we are working in seven countries to deploy AI-based detection software that instantly reads chest X-rays and gives people diagnoses.

In Nigeria for example, this tool helped improve case detection of TB cases by more than one third in the course of a single year. Take food security - weather, of course, is the most significant cause of crop yield loss for smallholder farmers in Africa. Challenges that are increasing with climate change causing more severe and less predictable weather events. So USAID is supporting an initiative to use AI to analyze highly localized tropical weather patterns, and then create weather alerts and actionable advice on how to adjust farming practices accordingly. How to translate all of this into local languages, and then send this information to farmers by text message. That way, the farmers can make adjustments accordingly.

Take environmental protections. This is an amazing example, the Amazon Rainforest, absolutely essential to the health of our planet, but it's so vast that it is difficult to protect. Illegal logging can happen in such remote areas that Rangers often don't know it is happening until it is too late. But, USAID funded an organization that sets up listening devices over enormous areas that uses artificial intelligence to identify the sounds of chainsaws, which combined with satellite data and geospatial technology that we support, can help Rangers intervene quickly.

And emerging technologies like AI aren't just changing what we can do. They are transforming how we do it. Right now, with the challenges that we face globally vastly outpacing the resources that we have to take them on, AI is offering tools that can help us as an Agency be more efficient, more effective, and more inclusive throughout our work. It is helping USAID team's save time on a range of work, so that our folks can dedicate more of their time to the creative, high value work where they can really use their skills.

It's helping us connect with the people best placed to drive truly transformative, sustained change in their own communities - and that is local partners. It is often difficult for USAID to connect with and fund these partners since we often speak different languages, and I will admit, we have a series of administrative and reporting requirements that make USAID difficult for small organizations with limited resources, only maybe a few lawyers if any, to navigate. But technology can change the game. AI is making it easier than ever for us to translate funding requests and applications to help organizations navigate our rules and regulations and to meet our administrative requirements without creating undue burden on their staff. For instance, a few weeks ago, I saw a demonstration of how a Haitian Creole speaker could take a long USAID document in English that gives the person all they needed to know about how to apply for funding, they could take that document, not speaking English, drop it into an AI tool, and ask the document in Creole questions about requirements, deadlines, and anything else covered in the document. Instantaneously, the bot would respond in Haitian Creole and give the responses back. And, again, that partner, very soon, will be in a position to put those proposals forward in their own language almost irrespective of what that language is. This is just the beginning.

We know that as technological capabilities expand, and as the reach of technologies increase across the planet, opportunities to use emerging technologies to take on humanity's greatest challenges will only grow. But, to take advantage of this moment, we need to be prepared, we need to have the right tools at the ready to jump at the opportunities, and we need to take on the risks.

That is why today I'm pleased to announce that USAID is working to establish a new independent office that will expand the role of digital access - of digital I should say - across all of our development work. This new office, which will elevate the current technology division under our Bureau for Inclusive Growth, Partnerships, and Innovation into its own independent office reporting directly to USAID's front office, will lead the implementation of the new 10 year Digital Policy that we are releasing today. It will help us deepen our partnership with low and middle income countries who are looking for a reliable partner as they navigate their digital transformations. It will provide greater support to our network of digital development advisors and geospatial specialists that we have in missions around the world, who have their fingers on the pulse of these transformations and are an invaluable source of on the ground knowledge and relationships. And, it will better enable us to convene partners from big tech, low and medium income countries, universities, and civil society to build the coalition that I've been describing, for inclusive rights respecting tech around the world.

And to get our specialists the resources to carry out this work, we will, this year, double our budget for USAID's technology team. USAID, as a whole, invest hundreds of millions in digital programming around the world, but historically, our technology division itself has had a budget of just $15 million to support missions and bureaus in this work to help them staff up, and help countries make the foundational tech investments that make it possible. So, this office of digital technology will have more catalytic resources on hand to advance the three priorities that I laid out today.

Companies who see opportunities to partner, other donors and civil society partners engaged in building a more vibrant and democratic digital future, partner countries who see more opportunities to work together, please connect with us. The actions we take now will determine whether this next age of technological advances will bring more inequality, exploitation, subjugation, or whether it will connect more people across the world to essential services, to economic opportunities, and to each other.

Development is digital. If we come together to extend the reach of foundational technology across the planet, to put the safeguards in place to manage potential harms, and to deploy technology to take on humanity's greatest challenges, then technology can in fact play a role in making the world a better place for people everywhere. That will no longer be something that is said ironically on TV shows, that will be a deep truth and a foundational part of our transformative journey together.

Thank you all.

MR. MARIANO-FLORENTINO CUÉLLAR: Congratulations and thank you for those remarks. We are going to plunge right in and I am going to start where you started, which is with the show Silicon Valley, of course. I think a premise for the show is that Silicon Valley is not only a geography but it's a state of mind - and one that has its quirks. And, of course, well, one element of that state of mind is it's kind of optimism about what technology can do, it's also potentially misleading at times.

I was struck by the sheer number of examples you provided and how interestingly different they are from chest X-rays to translation of how technology can have an impact on development: m-mama, Diia in Ukraine. I wonder if you see any themes or insights we can glean from looking at the places where those examples actually work, that might counterbalance a potentially excessive tech optimism, a sense that the technology can solve every problem, which I think is not your message, your message is more nuanced. But it is an optimistic message and I wonder where, where you see the limits of that vision and what maybe ties the examples together?

ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, I mean, governance of all kinds is the Sine Qua Non of development. I like to say that development is the three legs of this stool, physical security, national security, international security, economic development, and then governance and rights. And if any one part of the stool is too short, the whole stool is unstable. And, I think, even though countries manage to have, you know, significant economic growth spurts, with unstable stools, eventually, you know, all three of these elements are necessary. And why do I mention that in the context of technology, because in many of the places where we are working with our civil society partners, or even with governments, as far behind as we feel in this country, the governance conversation around digital is just not advanced at all. And then if you look at the role that this is, you know, again, the tech pessimism, tech pessimist, I should say in me, because we're, I think all of us have these dueling voices in our minds.

But if you look at the extent to which the absence of umpires and the fueling of polarization slash extremism, the ways in which people go to extremes and technology, technological algorithms, push people in those directions by and large the greater extremism in our societies around the world are reflective of that, then what you get is an ecosystem that is more divided, we are ahead of many of the countries in which USAID works in, showing this with a kind of polarization that then in turn, makes it harder and harder to come together to bring about the kind of tech governance or the embrace of norms that I've just been describing.

So, that sort of, you could say, vicious circle, is something really to worry about. And, you know, I think that development is a beautiful sector, because it lends itself to bringing these tools to bear on behalf of enhanced citizen welfare, human welfare, but we can't escape the backdrop. In other words, you could have very specific tactical solutions that really are enhancing health and welfare, but against the backdrop of growing dictatorship, or growing ethnic tensions that are that are being propelled by, I don't want to say the same tools just because they all have the word tech in it, or the word digital, you know, these are very, it's just such a broad universe of help and harm that can be brought about.

So that's why it feels like we're only beginning to taste the possibilities of the good that they can do. But it's a race against time for the broader functionality of our democracies and of governance. And even I was talking to my team about this week, Cass and I have two kids a 15 year old and a 12 year old, and we are in the kind of stringent side of the spectrum when it comes to phone access, and so we've been spared a lot of what so many families have have gone through but so to have our kids been spared a social life unfortunately.

But our son has just is getting politically sentient, and there's a lot going on, turns out politically, and having the experience of having a child who's very impressionable teenager - 15, but coming and just repeating, just saying, "no, but it says it, but it's true, it says it", and I'll go okay. So, he's kind of like Rip Van Winkle, he hasn't been gradually becoming, he's just now been reading books in school and now he's seeing things online, and the things that he's reading in school by and larger true broadly speaking, even if you want to debate them, and they have opinions in them, and so too it, must be the case that what he's reading on Twitter is true, including what they say about his mom, you know, it's like, "did you?" And I'm like "no!"

But that's here, you know, and so part of what USAID funds is media literacy and curriculum. And trying to reach kids younger to build these critical faculties. But, again, we have an advanced economy, we've been at this for a long time debating these questions for a long time and we're where we are. So, the countries in which we're working are soft targets to cyber attacks but they're also again, many crippled with debt distress. So where did the resources come from? We struggled to get them textbooks. So now we're gonna get the media literacy and textbooks at the same time? I mean, this is just going to be really really challenging

MR. CUÉLLAR: Part of what nicely fits in your remarks now, and in your speech earlier as a sense that notwithstanding the perils, the difficulties, the unresolved questions, that doesn't mean we can move forward on some fronts, right. So as we think about the world you'd like to live in seven years from now, let's say that's not a long time in the grand scheme of human history. Sketch out what sort of governance, sort of philosophies you would like to see have taken root around tech, and also what USAID then would be doing that might be different from what it's doing now, as these ideas, reforms, initiatives that you're putting in motion take root.

ADMINISTRATOR POWER: I'm sure we can have more sophisticated people speak to the broader sort of tech evolution that needs to occur. I think for me, it boils down to intentionality at every turn. You know, when I think about some of the harms that technology has exacerbated, you mentioned my work on mass atrocities and genocide back in the day. The ways in which the social media platforms, and I'll give you actually an example from Sri Lanka, where one of the advisors to the President said, the germs are ours, but Facebook was the wind. And the ways in which social media companies have expanded their operations globally, really knowing that the content moderation capability was not keeping up with the content propagation online, and yet, you want to grow, grow, grow, and expand, expand, expand, and that shouldn't happen.

If there isn't the capacity when something is happening on your platform to be able to comply with your own terms of service, and address something that is producing mass violence, if you can't even meet that threshold, rethinking the expansion, like having as a design feature these safeguards built in rather than once you learn the lessons and then as an afterthought.

And so, of course, much more thought is being given to that now than was, I think, in the past, but it's to understand how rudimentary the systems are, and how powerless so many of the countries we work in feel because so many of the decisions about the algorithms, and the content meant they were all made in these faraway land, this faraway land called California from their perspective. And, increasingly, there are other other platforms coming online, which then also become a challenge because what we hear from the large platforms that can bring this intentionality and can at least build the infrastructure to comply with their terms of services. If it's not us, it'll be someone else. So that race to the bottom problem now is an additional feature.

So that intentionality, I think, governments right now are coming to us and wanting digital infrastructure, digital services, digital as a feature of so many of our development programs along the lines of what I've described. I'd say there's more knowledge of an enthusiasm for that than the second part of the speech that I was talking about, which is the norms and regulations, not that they don't want them. But it's just until you even have the infrastructure and the services that comes along after where you then start to realize some of the more nefarious effects. And so, again, if in our engagements we can embrace, if both those paths can be pursued in parallel, so that we're not playing catch up, those countries in those communities are not playing catch up. That would be ideal. And you mentioned USAID and asked the question that's a little easier for me to answer.

You know, with climate change, it is now really the case that just about all of our programs have to take account of changing weather patterns, and, yes of course, agricultural programs and health programs, and malaria programs, but even education programs. And, you know, specifically on adaptation, on the fact that extreme weather is just changing development, it's changing, it's altering landscapes, migration patterns, everything. So, you just have to take account of it everywhere.

Digital really is the same. And so if I think about USAID in three years, never mind, seven years, it is that whenever we are putting out a request for proposals, whenever we're thinking about an advance in clean energy, an advance in learning outcomes in a classroom, and advance in drought resistant agriculture - climate smart agriculture, that the digital component is just built in as a design feature from the beginning. I mean, I tried to get at this a little bit in the speech where I talked about our digital office that we are now pulling out and making it, hopefully, a hub that will have spokes into the rest of the Agency as it does already, but this will give it a much bigger platform. But this will have its own, you know, modest budget to be funding digital programs that are digital per se, but our Global Health Bureau, our Democracy Bureau, our Food Security and Environmental and Resilience Bureau - all of those should have huge digital programming components.

And, it's almost like seven years from now, for sure, you'd almost want it to be the case when you put out a proposal, or request for proposals, or when something comes in, the default is that it is thinking through a tech application or component. And that if it isn't doing that, you kind of have to explain why. I mean, I think that's where we're heading, and the quicker we get there, again, the more efficiently also we will use our resources.

I also think that this is a little inside baseball, but for our Agency, the economies of scale I talked about burdens that local partners have, the thresholds they have to clear in terms of reporting requirements to work with USAID, how hard that can be, and how we can do away with some of those things for our own teams, our own team spend an inordinate amount of time filling out forms and doing paperwork, and that takes them away from the work that caused them to come to USAID in the first place.

And so, I don't - this is not just a small parenthetical, but oh yeah and yes, we can use AI and harness technological efficiencies internally. I mean, this is going to be a major recruitment tool, a retention tool, like working at USAID is going to become much more about I hope, and I believe being out in the field, in the communities, listening to them, taking their leads from them. I mean, we talked about locally-led development that will become easier to enact when people are not chained, ironically, again, to their computers filling out forms or behind desks. I mean we don't want these jobs to be desk jobs and this can help us.

MR. CUÉLLAR: I definitely noticed that you spent some time highlighting how this is not just about what the U.S. and USAID can do for other countries, but what the technology can do to transform USAID and a transformed USAID will still be navigating a challenging world. And I want to highlight two places where you raised some interesting points that, again, might not have made it into any speech, but I reflect I think of a sort of real intellectual honesty.

One is your recognition that many partner countries to USAID and the U.S. struggle to see how they're going to build the infrastructure themselves and data centers, the capacity to have a sovereign take on computers - and you know, there could be policymakers, tech companies that might say, well, what's the difference between having access to an API that gives you everything you want, and having your technology physically located in your country. But, you and I both know that, from the perspective of those countries, that distinction can be profound. So that's one.

The other has to do with what the rules of the road might be over time, and what the U.S. zone angle is in a world of geopolitical fragmentation. And the word trust comes up because it suggests to me that so much of what you laid out in the speech requires continuing relationships of trust between the U.S. and its partners between aides, and the context you have in these countries around the world and I wonder how you have approached these challenges of building trust, and simultaneously sending a message that what you're doing what your team is doing, is good for the partners good for the world, but also is aligned with U.S. interest?

ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Yeah, I mean, there is a lot of mistrust out there, I'll just maybe take that as the jumping off point, there is mistrust and the mistrust is being fueled by, you know, maybe a critique of American foreign policy in some quarters, but also just lies about, you know, what the United States is doing, lies about the kinds of tools that we are bringing to bear like vaccines or climate solutions. And now you have large state actors getting behind those lies and, you know, perpetuating those myths.

So, we just use USAID as an example but this would be true of development agencies, donor agencies at large, and certainly true of other U.S. agencies. We have to get our strategic communications efforts supercharged. But, I say that with humility, I mean, I say it, because, you know, look at our, again, our domestic landscape - hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on election campaigns, and the challenge that anybody who's in an election campaign has breaking through. We face those same with these, like very modest, you know, communications.

Budgets, we at USAID, for a longtime has been - Congress supports us in this regard, has been very good about branding. And it really matters, like you meet people, and they, you know, they know where their boiler came from, or their generator, or their drought resistant seeds, you know, they know that it's from the American people, and then that really matters. But branding is not communications. And, you know, we're a community that talks to one another, and you know, I think have made a lot of progress just in the last couple of years learning that telling the story of the work is not about putting data out on how many people were reached, but it is really about fundamentally about about storytelling, but it's also about finding a way to break through.

So, we piloted, you know, ad buys in Kenya, you know, on social media, just to make people aware of our food security work and its dividend. And the reach of, you know, a very modest pilot ad buys far greater than our traditional communications tools. So we're learning and we're trying to scale but again, government is not famous for being first in communications, sophistication.

And the competition you mentioned the geopolitical forces that are out there. The investment that they are making in this aspect of what they are doing is astronomical, just in terms of the resourcing. I mean, everything from TV stations and, you know, online publications that are state based and whose budgets dwarf those of, you know, some of the U.S. tools, again, the hidden hand and the ways in which they are maligning really valuable work that we are doing and again, what that's unfortunate, and not a good thing for all the obvious reasons, but also, it can undermine the development intervention.

So it goes beyond even trust in us, it's also trust in these kinds of investments that really can make - bring about significant improvements in health or education, whatever. So we have to recognize that embrace that I talked about digital as a kind of design feature of our mindset. We're really trying to get, and again, this sounds sort of like communications 101, but it's surprisingly rare that at the ground floor of any development, conversation, investment, or communications people are there. You know, that it's not like you run a program and programs up and running, and then you go and take a picture of it, and you tweet about it. It's actually thinking about the program and its reach, and particularly, in a context where democracy is on its back heel, and democrats and reformers are having a hard time showing that they are delivering social services and delivering economic benefit.

Any partnerships that we do also, lifting those up can be the difference between trust in the state, not that all states should be trusted at all times. But you know, those, though, that erosion of trust in the host country or in our partner countries, for their partner governments, is inherently can be just massively destabilizing and, you know, have effects that setback development far more than any particular program can offset.

MR. CUÉLLAR: Let me stick with that and highlight that another place where you went to an issue that is a challenging one, and I want to explore a little bit more is, in reminding us that we can imagine a world and began to see a world where generative AI, for example, produces really big benefits on the productivity side, expands education, access to health information, so on government services, but at the same time, risks serious labor market disruptions. And I want to highlight that because the development path for so many countries that are low and middle income runs through expanding the service sector, moving people to urban environments, and one could certainly imagine that even with its many positive possibilities, the changes we're seeing will disrupt those paths.

And I wonder how you see that playing out effectively in terms of where the U.S. can be thoughtful about this, both in terms of how we approach those issues at the design stage, working with the private sector, but also what stories we can tell to the world about what will work?

ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Well, I will admit that I think it's, it's early days, I mean, I think, again, the conversation in this country is as Carnegie's done, I think, some pretty interesting work on the future of work over the years. And I think what we need are analogs to that in each of the countries in which we are working. I mean, we hear it from our staff, I mean, I was talking about the benefits of technology, but when - three quarters of USAID staff overseas, are nationals of the countries in which we work. They work for USAID for five-ten-fifteen, in some cases, forty years, incredible public servants. And they're asking themselves, you know, what of this work can be done by these machines? And by, you know, what, with automation will help, what will hurt?

So, I think that that's where all the relationships we have across ministries and that's not true in every country. In some countries, because we are supported as a democracy and civil society, there can be more friction in those relationships, but by and large, again, the countries in which we work are now hungering for an understanding of how they embed attention to workforce displacement, and disruption into their, if not pre existing, their urgently needed job creation strategies. I alluded to debt distress and social protection, that's going to be a big part of this in, I presume, in certain places.

You mentioned migration, but we were talking before we came out here about labor pathways, seasonal labor pathways. There's such a misalignment now between workers who'd love to do the work and vacancies, and what separates the workers you'd like to do the work and the vacancies are international borders and regulations.

USAID is doing more and more work to expand lawful pathways, seasonal job opportunities for people in countries of high out illegal migration, because actually, there's a huge need in the United States for construction workers, hospitality workers, farm workers, and there are programs that enable those lawful pathways to be to be used, but there's not broad awareness in the United States that we have vetted lists of thousands of workers who will come and then return and bring back such development expertise.

In a world of disruption, where jobs are lost here, jobs are lost there, that alignment, that better alignment between skill and appetite to do the work, and you know, those jobs that aren't needed, we're going to have to reconcile that much better than we have at this point and I will say the International Organization for Migration, is thinking about this in a status quo circumstance. And, I think, Amy Pope, the relatively new head of it, is also thinking about it in terms of the future of work and the changes that AI is going to bring about. It's not as if jobs aren't going to exist, question is which jobs, and do you have the right to the workforce tailored for that, you know, very specific kind of work?

MR. CUÉLLAR: Two points in closing, just very briefly, one, it's not lost on this audience that you have managed to work through these issues against the backdrop of not only challenging and dynamic changes on the global stage, but domestically as well. It's a daunting moment, in many ways, for the American story and the degree of polarization that we have sometimes makes it hard to tell a story about what you're doing domestically, I acknowledge that.

Second, my admiration, not only for some of the hard decisions you have to make on the work side, it is also present for the management of teenage kids, which I've had to do myself and I just noticed you were talking about how you approach the tech policy issues. Family wise, I was thinking a little bit that we should have sent our kids to you and Cass - maybe sometime in the future.

Thank you for the work you do and for being here. Welcome back to Carnegie and I look forward to being in touch.

ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks, everyone.

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