IVA's President: some thoughts on international perspectives

Dear IVA Friends, 

In the mid-1940s, Edy Velander, IVA’s legendary President, initiated global monitoring of technical  developments. Velander appointed a “liaison officer” in New York tasked with spotting trends and reporting back on technological progress and innovation. The world’s first “technology attaché” had been introduced. 

During the 1960s, IVA expanded the attaché programme to Moscow, Tokyo, Paris, London, Bonn, Los Angeles, Paris, and Beijing. Sweden was a pioneer in this respect: no other country had such a comprehensive and systematic system for monitoring international developments with a direct channel to government. This openness and curiosity towards the outside world have benefited us greatly. It is no coincidence that Sweden is today a global innovation powerhouse. 

Nowadays, anyone can easily access information on any subject. But obtaining information is one thing – putting it into context, analysing it, and assessing its relevance is quite another. 

This week, IVA is launching Global Outlook: Asia, a snapshot from Asia that will be published quarterly going forward. Researchers Hyejin Kim of Lund University and the National University of Singapore, and Erik Mobrand of Seoul National University, provide both trend insights and analyses of developments in Asia across various technological domains. The first report addresses the topic of AI and explores how China’s “Deep Seek” has been received by other Asian cuntries. 

Special thanks to IVA Fellows Daniel Akenine and Birgitta Bergvall-Kåreborn for your contributions as members of the editorial advisory board. 

I hope you find the report useful. I also envisage IVA developing this concept further to cover additional geographical regions in the future. I would gladly receive your comments and views. 

Last week I spoke with Professor Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University, a leading researcher on AI and its effects on economic growth and productivity. Brynjolfsson is a co-author of Stanford University’s AI Index Report, which was released last week. A very brief summary of its conclusions might be that AI is becoming more efficient, cheaper, and more accessible. This is something Kim and Mobrand also touch upon in their analysis of Deep Seek in the first edition of Global Outlook: Asia, attached to this newsletter. 

The AI Index Report highlights several areas that are not entirely unexpected, but nonetheless thought provoking: AI is becoming increasingly integrated into everyday life; private investment in AI is reaching record levels – particularly in the USA. The USA also continues to lead in the development of new AI models, while China is catching up at remarkable speed. 

Another area of interest concerns public attitudes toward AI. In China, 83% of the population have a positive view of AI products and services, while the corresponding figure in Canada, the USA and the Netherlands is between 35% and 40%. The report does not include data for Sweden, but figures from Statistics Sweden (SCB) from 2023 indicate that more Swedes are positive than negative towards AI. I have reason to believe that the share of those with a positive view has increased since then. This is far from insignificant. Public support matters for how governments act on regulation and investment. Public backing is crucial.