Maria Voropaeva: Cooperation Should Be About More Than Selling Finished Products
Moscow is hosting the third Russia–Africa Summit. Participants are focusing on the development of trade and investment ties, food and energy security, digitalization, and technological cooperation.
Maria Voropaeva, deputy chair of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, spoke to the IT Russia media platform about how artificial intelligence and digital platforms are changing everyday life, the risks posed by emerging technologies, and what cooperation between Russia and African countries should look like.
– Artificial intelligence and digital platforms are changing everyday life: we read the news, communicate, and work differently. But greater convenience also brings risks, including deepfakes, personal data breaches, and vulnerabilities in digital infrastructure. Our task is to make technology work for people rather than give them more reasons to worry.
We discussed how to achieve this at the 2nd Global Digital Forum. The international dialogue continued at the third Russia–Africa Summit. We expect the summit to help us move from sharing experience to joint projects in artificial intelligence, industry, and technology transfer.
Cooperation should not be reduced to selling finished products. It should involve joint development, specialist training, the construction of digital infrastructure, and local manufacturing in African countries themselves. The partnership should be based on equality: each side contributes and benefits, and solutions are developed to meet the needs of individual countries.
The success of digital development should not be measured by the number of systems deployed, but by the answer to a simple question: Has people’s lives become safer and more convenient? We will use the same criterion to assess the summit’s outcomes.
