Alessio Butti, Undersecretary of State to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers with responsibility for innovation. Innovation was therefore the subject of a report that greatly interested the members in attendance.
Starting from a description of the complexity of his department, which deals with technology, digitalization, and cybersecurity, he expressed his conviction that innovating means simplifying the lives of citizens and that the implementation of digitalization represents an important aspect of the geopolitical network. Von der Leyen recently declared the need to safeguard one’s “digital sovereignty,” and this applies to Europe as well as Italy, to the point that this term has been officially adopted in legislative texts. Simplifying is the imperative in the field of bureaucracy, and it is a priority to work towards a single text on digitalization (today there are 40,000 regulations!). Digitalization entails the affirmation of rights: if I want a certificate, I must obtain it in the shortest possible time. The problem is that technological innovation must be legislatively controlled: 59 countries in the world, representing 36.6% of the world’s population, live under authoritarian regimes, many others in imperfect democracies or hybrid regimes, and only 8% under a democratic regime. A country’s strength will no longer be nuclear armament but the use of digital technological solutions. In 2025, we will have 175 zettabytes (1 zettabyte = 1 sextillion bytes): these are data that will generate immense wealth as they will allow us to know all the characteristics of a population, their movements, tastes, and any performance. “If we want to resist as Italy, with respect to the world’s technological trends, we must mobilize all relevant parts of society toward a goal of national rebirth. We must preserve our data so that it does not become the property of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or other IT giants.” This is the difficult task facing the Department for Digital Transformation. Several questions concerned artificial intelligence, the metaverse project, and broadband.
L.F.
