The front lawn of Youngbinkwan at the Shilla Hotel in Seoul, South Korea. It is renovated but still carries that charm of the Chosun era.

During my visit to South Korea this summer, I spoke on a panel at the Asian Leadership Conference held in Seoul from July 13-14, 2022 at the Shilla Hotel in Seoul.

Usually the ALC involves speakers that are big-shots in grand ballrooms and I enjoyed the line-up of speakers that are well known, but also sensed a political arrangement of speakers regardless of their level of fame. I didn’t find much meaning in some of the speeches by the speakers but enjoyed attending some of the panels of my interest ranging from geopolitics, geoeconomics, intel and national security, and the future of artificial intelligence.

Panel on ‘Privacy & Ethics in the Digital Era’ at the 2022 Asian Leadership Conference

In my case I was invited to speak on a panel held in a relatively private setting on ‘Privacy and Ethics in the Digital Era’ alongside fellow panelist, Dr. Jathan Sadowski, who works on emerging technologies at Monash University in Australia (he is the author of “Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World” published by MIT Press, 2020). I am grateful to have engaged in a debate and discussion with him.

On the panel with Dr. Jathan Sadowski, Senior Fellow at the Emerging Technologies Lab at Monash University, Australia.

During the debate/discussion session we went over the varieties of data governance and the South Korean case in the COVID-19 pandemic. Our debate centered on issues between goals of efficiency via tech and ethics (but not necessarily accompanied by tech drive). It was not a fierce debate, but a worthy one, given the importance of issues on data protection in the aftermath of the pandemic.

You can log into the ALC website to watch.