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OECD countries gathered this week in Gran Canaria, Spain for the 2022 Digital Economy Ministerial Meeting adopted what is being billed as alandmark agreement to safeguard privacy and other human rights and freedoms by limiting law enforcement and national security agencies access to personal data. The accord is expected to build trust and ease global data flows.

Four principles aimed at increasing cybersecurity were also adopted as well as a “Declaration On A Trusted, Sustainable and Inclusive Digital Future”, which among other things, recognized that seizing the opportunities and mitigating the risks presented by accelerating digital transformation is a critical responsibility of government. To that end, the OECD announced that it is launching a Global Forum On Technology, with the stated aim of helping policy makers keep abreast of technology changes and anticipate their impact on society and business.

Decisions taken at this week’s ministerial meeting will “shape a vision for the future of the digital economy and the way we think about and act on digital policy for years to come,” OECD Deputy Secretary General Ulrik Vestergaard Knudsen said during a December 15 press conference.
Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business.

As the global energy crisis escalates there is a growing need for the grid to have a stable, clean energy source to work together with hydro, wind, solar and other renewables to deliver uninterrupted electricity.

Ramping up nuclear energy is the natural choice if governments prioritize moving to more predictable long-term electricity prices and meeting their climate targets, argues Stefano Buono, CEO and co-founder of newcleo, a startup backed with €400 million in private capital that aims to design and build the next generation of nuclear reactors. (Buono, on the far left, is pictured here with newcleo's Chief Scientific Officer Luciano Cinotti and Chief Operating Officer Elisabeth Rizzotti)

Newcleo has 13 patents on a waste-to-energy reactor technology that can be used to produce energy and, at the same time, burn radioactive nuclear waste from existing nuclear plants that would otherwise be buried underground, ushering in a circular economy for the nuclear energy industry.

“Our innovative reactors will provide the world with a safe and stable green power source and reduce volumes of radioactive waste,” says Buono, an Italian nuclear physicist who started his career working with Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia (CRS4,) in the field of accelerator driven systems and nuclear waste transmutation.

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SiQuance, a French fabless startup which launched in late November, aims to become a global leader in quantum technology by developing a quantum computer that is based on the same technological building blocks as standard silicon integrated circuits. To enable this, the company has developed a disruptive technology solution that transforms classical transistors to enable them to handle quantum bits known as qubits (the quantum equivalent of classical bits). By assembling qubits a new type of calculator can be created to solve intractable problems in fields such as as healthcare, engineering, meteorology and finance that are currently beyond the scope of classical computers.

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Number of use cases for AI in manufacturing outlined in a World Eocnomic Forum white paper released this week. The examples were collected from more than ten industries, including automotive, electronics, energy, textiles, cement, steel, food and chemicals. The applications cover six main areas: health and safety, quality, maintenance, production process, supply chains and energy management. The white paper also summarizes the six main barriers to the deployment of AI in manufacturing and presents a step-by-step process that can be used to overcome them.