Image courtesy of David Rodrigo.
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Dubai is testing new ways to align technology policy with innovation. Through the Dubai Future Labs, an applied research centre for robotics and AI, the city is exploring how governments can regulate emerging technologies while maintaining space for experimentation.
During a fireside chat at the Expand North Star conference in Dubai, Khalifa Al Qama, Executive Director of Dubai Future Labs, discussed how they are fostering collaboration between regulators and the private sector, attracting global talent, and building partnerships that support the city’s long-term technology goals.
Back to basics
Al Qama said that creating regulation fit for purpose is essential for progress, noting that frameworks from the past 50 years no longer meet today’s enterprise needs.
“Some people might care about technology in itself, but most people care about how it improves their daily lives. To make technology truly impactful to us, we need environments that allow continuous feedback from the people using it,” he said.
On the other hand, regulators also need environments where they can experience emerging technologies first hand and see how these operate in practice.
“They are interfacing and interacting with so many new technologies, and they need to be given the opportunity to see them in real life, understand how they function, how they interact with other technologies in society overall, to put the right regulations in place,” Al Qama explained.
To make the process more efficient, Dubai brought its regulators together under one umbrella.
“If you think about all the technologies that affect us today, it is never one regulator that needs to regulate them. Usually it is two, three, sometimes up to four — so bringing them together, making sure that the environment is conducive for the technologists, for the potential users, and the regulators to learn over a period of time — sometimes six months, sometimes 24 months, depending on the field that you’re looking at, to come up with something useful for everyone,” he said.
Testing phase
One of Dubai Future Labs’ flagship projects involved testing drones to define future use cases and corresponding regulations.
“We knew drones would play a valuable role in society, especially here in Dubai, but we needed to create an environment where companies could test them in real conditions — flying near buildings and schools, or delivering medical supplies and other goods people rely on,” Al Qama said.
In a span of two years, the lab invited more than 10 companies from around the world to spend 18 months testing how drones should interact with people, delivery personnel, and regulators.
“Thankfully, that led to a new standard and new regulations that will help move the drones from an already existing operational environment in Dubai Silicon Oasis, and hopefully by 2027, 33% of Dubai’s airspace is going to be open for drones,” he said.
Future investments
To attract top tech talent, Al Qama said Dubai Future Foundation is investing across the innovation lifecycle, from research and development to implementation.
“Talent comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. There is talent that really wants to think about ideas at the early stages, and this is where we have started providing grants,” he said.
Soon, more grants for experimentation are planned to help frontier technologies move from concept to real-world application.
Global collaboration, Al Qama noted, remains central to Dubai’s ambitions as a technology hub. This involves both inviting international innovators to use Dubai as a landing hub and encouraging local companies to build partnerships abroad.
Meanwhile, in the not-too-distant future, Al Qama envisions closer cooperation between humans and machines, but far from the sci-fi scenarios of sentient robots replacing people altogether.
“A year or two from now, we’ll be interacting naturally with autonomous systems that remain under human supervision, ensuring they deliver practical, valuable capabilities,” he predicted.
