Crisis! Unknown App Developers Pose Threat to Global Society

By Asian News International

(Reporter- Shravan Verma, Photographer- Vishwam Khandelwal & Pearl Narang)

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The committee started off the session with the motion of entertainment, where they used chits to communicate anonymously. This was a fun way to start the conference with a few laughs and giggles. Delegates gave each other anonymous funny  “dares” that were to be performed, dares like Dancing, Singing, A Pushup competition and asking the chairs to make funny poses. This session lasted about 20 minutes until the committee moved on to an Unmoderated caucus where the delegates were allowed to discuss anything and didn't have to follow committee rules.

Thereafter the committee moved on to their first moderated caucus of the day, a few ideas were proposed but the topic of cyber security and AI won the most votes. The delegates continued to speak on their countries issues and their possible solutions, each delegate was given 60 seconds to speak on the topic chosen. The committee progressed to the second moderated caucus which was “How AI impacts (artificial intelligence) agriculture”. The last moderated caucus of the first session was an extension to the previous moderated caucus. However, they went further to add rebuttals in this moderated caucus where delegates rebutted the initial speaker.

The second session commenced after a short break, where there were new motions and thoughts presented. In the beginning, it was beginning to feel impossible to decide on one motion as a whopping eight motions were failed, due to not getting enough votes, and disunity within the committee. Eventually, after a long electing process, the motion was finally decided which was, “The impact of Artificial Intelligence on Climate Change.” Though not expected, the delegates had immense knowledge about their subject as well as other fields of research, which was reflected in their well thought out and intelligent replies and statements. The executive board was friendly, and there was a tinge of humour and light feelings throughout amidst the seriousness and concentration of the UNCSTD session. After a heavy discussion on the topics and different motions and caucuses, the committee session took an interesting turn.

After a small break, we progressed ahead to an extremely interesting activity, “The Crisis”. In that, each committee was given a different real- life situation for which they had to come up with a solution in two hours. The given situation for UNCSTD was that an unknown app developer pose threat to society. The aim was to give a presidential statement in the UN meeting, offering and providing solutions for the same. There was an intense discussion carried out by the delegates about how they can solve the issue at hand.  Many motions were taken up and debated as part of this event and a few caucuses, unmoderated and moderated as well. Soon after, the Executive Board (EB) declared an update in the situation, which literally caused chaos in the whole room. All the delegates started hooting wildly and thunderous clapping poured in. It took the EB a whole two minutes to just revive the decorum and bring back the silence and seriousness. So it went with increasing excitement, new updates and interesting speeches and reasoning to strong statements, until it unfortunately had to stop because of the time constraint.

The last session ended with two  presidential statements said by Japan and their allies and Google, along with their allies. In summary, the committee sessions were very thrilling as the real debate had started then. All the delegates had their knowledge and research with them, and hence it was a very successful and productive day for everyone, including me as well!