The Gulf Cooperation Council, innovation frontiers, intellectual property and artificial intelligence: Technological, economic, and social revolutions

This chapter explores the notion of innovation and its impact upon the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and its respective member states, and their economies and societies. Key to this examination is the role that technological development – and its relationship with intellectual property protection and promotion regimes – can play in fostering innovation for the mutual benefit of the knowledge economies and their complex societies. In brief, innovation and emerging technologies, economic growth, intellectual property rights and their communities in which they develop are intertwined and inseparable.

With emerging technologies and artificial intelligence come new opportunities as well as new challenges for the GCC to expand its innovation capabilities and to develop knowledge-based societies. The chapter examines the initiatives of the GCC member states to plan for their futures and embrace these emerging technologies through their respective contemporary national development plans. It also examines some of the challenging aspects from a cautionary perspective, primarily within the context of management as highlighted in 2016 by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum and his “fourth industrial revolution” thesis.

The chapter also explores the dilemma of balancing the imperative of economic utilitarianism and growth with dynamic cultural and societal foundations. It does so by considering a hypothetical coexistence of society and artificial intelligence in its more physical/visible form, namely, robotics. Hence, the chapter takes note of the societal and cultural character of the Gulf and its member communities and how they might need to confront the challenging question of the application of these frontier technologies.