Indonesia and Vietnam have both released na-tional AI strategies in the time since our 2020 index was compiled

This reflects the country’s Vision dimension score (it has a National AI Strategy), its commitment to addressing ethics in AI as shown in its Artificial Intelligence Governance Framework,

he country recently published its National AI Strategy with strategic priorities for the period 2021-2025.

In 2020, the Ethiopian Council of Min-isters established an artificial intelligence (AI) re-search and development centre.

Kenya has de-veloped an AI taskforce (consisting of 11 experts from relevant government agencies, the private sector, academia and other stakeholders)

Mauritius has developed an official National AI Strategy, which sets out a plan from 2018-2022 to guide progress in this area. Although South Africa is yet to launch a national AI strategy, it has established a Presidential Commission on Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Qatar and Saudi Arabia unveiled their National AI Strat-egies. Qatar’s National Artificial Intelligence Strat-egy focuses on six main pillars: education, data access, employment, business, research, and ethics. Additionally, the strategy aligns with the overarching Qatar National Vision 2030, which identifies artificial intelligence as a central compo-nent in the country’s transition from an oil-based economy to a knowledge-based economy. Simi-larly, Saudi Arabia released its National Data and Artificial Intelligence Strategy, with six goals

the largest range of scores

Ukraine, in fact, released its national AI strategy in Decem-ber 2021,

four new national AI strategies in Eastern Europe: Bulgaria, Slovenia, Hungary, Latvia.

he number of AI and non-AI technology unicorns rise from 43 to 62 in the region

those countries in Western Europe who are not developing national AI strategies (Iceland and Switzerland) are not EU member states.

Italy has taken a similar approach with its three-year Strategic Program for Artificial Intel-ligence, released in November 2021,

the Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Initiative led by UNESCO, which seeks to create a sub-regional strategy on the responsible, inclusive and human adoption of AI in the Caribbean

In 2020, the Colombian government launched the National Policy for Digital Transformation (AI Strategy) and recently created an AI Task Force comprising government officials and sub-ject matter experts.

the fAIr initiative led by the

the launch of national AI frameworks by the governments of Chile and Brazil has been one of the main events in the subcontinent

The top four countries in the region (in order, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay

Latin America and the Caribbean had a region-al average score of 41.26 — the third lowest globally after the Middle East & North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.

China tops the Number of research papers published in AI, and the country outperformed the USA for the first time in 2020 in terms of the number of times an academic article on AI is cited by others.

Sub-Sa-haran Africa and Central & South Asia

evident divide within re-gions, with the greatest range of scores seen in East Asia and Middle East and North Africa

The index unearths clear inter-regional and in-tra-regional inequalities.

East Asian countries make up one quarter of the top 20 ranked coun-tries.

USA tops the global rankings, in large part thanks to the unrivalled size and maturity of its technology sector. Singapore ranks sec-ond as a result of its institutional strength and government digital capacity. The other countries in the top 5 are Western European (United King-dom, Finland, and the Netherlands)

now

The NSD outline delves into the interaction between the process of developing technical standards and driving forward technological innovation.

Why is the Chinese government pulling out all the stops on its standardization program in the current political climate?

Widening digital divide between high- and low-income households with greater long-run risks of human capital depreciation and intergenerational mobility for low-income households

exacerbated the digital divide between the haves and the have-nots as telecommuting opportunities and remote education have not been equally accessible by low-income households, hurting their long-run income prospects, including intergenerational mobility. The pandemic will likely further fuel the digitalization and automation that had been underway before the pandemic and may disproportionately affect low-skilled workers. Policies fostering financial inclusion are also critical for reducing the inequality of opportunities. Policies that focus on greater accessibility of financial services to low-income households have been shown to be important for sustainable and inclusive economic growth and development

olicies to foster equal access to technology and financial inclusion. The COVID-19 pandemic has

The pandemic may accelerate a pre-existing global trend toward digitalization, automation and robotization, as firms increasingly seek to replace low-skilled workers with automated processe

The “digital divide” is exacerbated by less accessible high-speed internet and tele-commuting technologies for low-income households

side from the benefits, however, this may contribute to rising income inequality and form a long-term setback for intergenerational mobility and human capital accumulation among low-income households

the pandemic has exacerbated the digital divide as telecommuting opportunities and remote education have not been equally accessible by low-income households.

Investing in digital infrastructure and technological diffusion is also key, as it enables better access to jobs, finance, and schooling during crises. To this end, policies need to be geared to ensuring that firms can leverage the COVID-19 digital dividend, including through the provision of training for small firms and policies that support e-commerce, fintech, and business-to-business digital technologies. Enhancing regula-tory frameworks that favor innovation and competition in the telecommunications market is also important

To cement productivity gains related to the accelerated adoption of digital technologies, policy makers can foster competition among digital firms including by reducing barriers to entry.

rapid adoption of digital financial technologies could reduce financing costs and expand access to credit among small- and medium-sized firms

faster pace of technological diffusion across firms and countrie

Global growth could also benefit from a prolonged period of accelerated technological change, which may, over time, become a positive side-effect of the pandemic. Many corporations were forced to innovate in order to survive the initial pandemic shock, rapidly adopting new digital technologies and shifting some of their business activities online. If sustained, the acceleration of digitalization brought on by the pandemic could contribute to faster productivity growth (Hallward-Driemeier et al. 2020; IMF 2021a; Mischke et al. 2021). The installation of new productive capital such as telecom-munications equipment could contribute to a rise in total factor productivity, in contrast to the declines experienced after some past global recession

continued rapid adoption of digital technologies could help sustain a more robust global economic recovery than projected.

Mobileye is developing two completely independent self-driving systems—one driven by cameras and the other by a combination of lidar and radar. Once each of these systems has achieved a high level of performance separately, Mobileye will combine them into a single system. Mobileye believes this extra layer of redundancy will give the company higher confidence in the safety of its systems

far from endangering the economy, fintech lending may actually bolster its resilience.

. Hence the importance of the second point: the bedrock of data and algorithms on which it is built.

They also seem less likely to discriminate by race

First, fintech firms reach borrowers under-served by banks

fintech is good for the economy, and smothering it could limit its potential.

But there is a strong case to be made that lighter regulation would be the better approach

What would stop it from lending carelessly? China’s response includes a draft rule that would require Ant to fund 30% of its loans, which would force it to hold more capital and slow it down.

The main charge against Ant is that it offers what can be described as consumer subprime with tech characteristics

that the government needed to act because Ant threatened financial stability

The government’s unspoken objective is to ensure that foreigners exercise no control over Chinese tech firms, even if they own shares in them

News reports have suggested that the government has asked Alibaba to sell its media holdings

Tencent recently confirmed that it is working with regulators and reviewing past investm

the authorities may want to change the structure of the tech empires

The state has so far refrained from explicitly commanding the companies to share data. In China personal data belong to the individual, not companies, so laws would need to change in order for such data to be shared with the government.

Its objective is to pool data and impose more state ownership and control, which could eventually amount to a kind of nationalisation.

government’s designs for the firms’ most valuable resource—data

tech leaders should “stay in their own lane, focus on their core businesses and avoid commenting on politics or economics”.

After years of tolerating big tech’s unbridled expansion, the central government is rewriting the rules, some tacit and some explicit, for how billionaires can behave, the degree of overt state control over data, and who owns the firms’ other assets, including stakes in other businesse

Resilience comes not from autarky but from diverse sources of supply and constant private-sector adaptation to shocks.

The call for self-reliance also misconstrues the balance between the costs of interdependence, which are brief and visible, and its benefits, which trickle in month after month unheralded

Self-reliance sounds safe, but politicians and voters must remember that their meals, phones, clothes and jabs are all the product of global supply chains.

On February 24th Mr Biden ordered a 100-day security review of America’s supply chains. On March 9th the EU said it would double its share of world chipmaking by 2030, to 20%, which followed a pledge to be self-sufficient in batteries by 2025

The number of jobs in health care and education is rising fast. When somebody is sick, or needs to be taught, they expect face-to-face contact, not because people are better at it, but because they convey sympathy and fellow feeling. Something irreducible would be lost without them.

The second reason concerns levels of investment.

The first concerns trave

three further reasons to believe that the pandemic will have only a modest impact on automation

In fact, by lowering costs of production, automation can create more demand for goods and services, boosting jobs that are hard to automate.

It is striking that Japan, Singapore and South Korea all have world-beating rates of robot adoption, and yet also low unemployment. Perhaps technology allows more people, not fewer, to be employed.

automatable jobs are about as common as expected without the pandemic

Yet doom-mongers struggle to point to actual evidence of accelerating automation.

All this is causing many to update the rules

It is hard to assess the legal impact of the shift to hybrid work.