o liberally paraphrase Churchill’s famous saying about Russia:
Future tech is a multi-dimensional riddle, wrapped in the mystery of innovation, inside an enigma of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Future-tech is complex. It’s interconnected. It’s multi-dimensional. It’s faster than the speed of light. It’s disruptive. It’s chaotic. It’s good, bad, and ugly. All at the same time. Future tech is about diversity, equality, and inclusion. Future tech is about discrimination, inequality, exclusion. Future tech is for the rich, the famous, the privileged. Future tech is for everyone, the underserved, the underprivileged. It’s about democratization. It’s about authoritarianism, even totalitarianism. Future tech will save humankind. It may also doom us.
The Future Tech Governance Paradox
The paradox of future tech is that it is full of promise, opportunity, and potential and yet its often exponential nature can present potentially existential risk if not properly guard-railed. It also presents the paradox of rich versus poor, those with access to it and those without.
The technological contest of our times—with groundbreaking tech invented, developed and implemented at breakneck speed on many fronts and dimensions including Web3, Crypto, Metaverse, Quantum, Nano, and Biotech—to name just a few—is but the latest iteration of an eternal human conundrum: how do we put guardrails around the Wild West of invention without harming progress? How do we make sure that future tech incorporates themes of governance, risk, ethics, and impact to impede deeply negative downsides while truly empowering the development and implementation of broadly beneficial upsides for the entire world, not just the privileged few?
Applying Four “Old” Principles to “New” Tech
With the right balance of age-old but actualized and customized principles of governance, ethics, risk, and impact, future tech can move in a mostly positive direction. This balancing act is one that must happen at every level—at the enterprise level (from start-ups to tech giants); at the community and NGO level; and at all governmental levels (local, national, and international).
The UN Sustainable Development Goals Report of 2022 offers examples of how tech innovation must be part of this interconnected ecosystem at every level, especially under SDG9—Build Resilient Infrastructure, Promote Inclusive and Sustainable Industrialization and Foster Innovation.
Here are some examples of how new tech is deploying these four time-tested principles positively.
- Responsible Governance – Being a Conscientious Crypto Company
Responsible governance is about management and a board of directors that understand the technology, bring in the right people to risk manage its development, consider the interests and expectations of key stakeholders, and build guardrails from inception.
While there seem to be only a few of what might be called “conscientious” crypto companies, Circle seems to be one of them. While we must wait for the long game to unfold, Circle seems to be an early-stage tech company with much Web3 future tech development ahead of it that has established an early-stage governance, risk, ethics, and impact ethos. And they have explicitly made the accessibility by the billions of financially underserved people on the planet a central corporate objective.
- Integrated Ethics – Integrating Ethics into AI
Integrated ethics entails a system of ethical review at every stage of the conception and development of tech where interdisciplinary teams, including tech ethicists, work shoulder to shoulder with engineers and scientists. One area in which certain companies and associations of companies have made a mark is to talk about AI ethics in everything they do. Society as a whole, and many think tanks, communal entities, and governmental bodies have also pressured companies to do this.
For example, below are the 10 principles developed by the Business Roundtable, an industry association.
At the company level, Microsoft has been a pioneer in acknowledging the importance of integrating ethics into AI through six principles (see graphic below) which they have updated as recently as June 2022 through their “Microsoft Responsible AI Standard v2”.
- Intelligent Risk – Disinformation Risk Management
The misinformation, disinformation and “malinformation” Pandora’s box of our times is only just beginning to open. While some require intent and others don’t, all three forms are part of the pervasive “information disorder” that marks our times, according to Crisp.
The bottom line is that information—the good, the bad and the ugly—continues to explode exponentially without enough barriers, filters, and governors to help control its exponential growth and with damaging impacts all over the world. The business, public and social sectors need to combine early risk management techniques deploying tech and human intelligence to fortify and improve their overall enterprise risk management.
- Sustainable Impact – The Stakeholder Take
Thanks to the valuable analytical work of Just Capital, we can compare how U.S.-listed publicly traded companies are doing with five key stakeholder groups—workers, communities, shareholders, customers, and the environment. In Just Capital’s 2022 list of most trusted companies Alphabet was listed #1 and Meta was listed #712. The starkest differences between the two companies appear in the treatment of customers and shareholders. Of which would you rather be a customer? Which company would you rather own shares of?
In the age of stakeholder capitalism, stakeholders everywhere are pressuring business and government to mind the store of their many environmental, social, governance and technological issues. See here for a deeper exploration of ESGT Megatrends.
Future Tech Based on Governance and Impact is More Resilient
Just because it’s the most disruptive time ever for humanity doesn’t mean that we cannot develop responsible governance, intelligent risk management, ethical standards, and sustainable impact. Indeed, it means we should double down on doing so.
And there are additional benefits to doing so. This important finding from the 2022 UN SDG Report with respect to SDG #9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure) underscores this fact: it appears that higher tech companies have proven far more durable in building resilience and sustainability in the face of a crisis than their lower tech counterparts.
It would seem from this evidence that it pays to embrace future tech responsibly.
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Future-Tech Success Depends on Governance and Impact
Photo by Midjourney.
September 21, 2022
The paradox of future tech is that it is full of promise and potential while exponential nature can present existential risk if not properly guard-railed. While finding the right balance on these guard rails is tricky, some older, proved principles can offer guidance, writes Andrea Bonime-Blanc.
T
o liberally paraphrase Churchill’s famous saying about Russia:
Future tech is a multi-dimensional riddle, wrapped in the mystery of innovation, inside an enigma of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Future-tech is complex. It’s interconnected. It’s multi-dimensional. It’s faster than the speed of light. It’s disruptive. It’s chaotic. It’s good, bad, and ugly. All at the same time. Future tech is about diversity, equality, and inclusion. Future tech is about discrimination, inequality, exclusion. Future tech is for the rich, the famous, the privileged. Future tech is for everyone, the underserved, the underprivileged. It’s about democratization. It’s about authoritarianism, even totalitarianism. Future tech will save humankind. It may also doom us.
The Future Tech Governance Paradox
The paradox of future tech is that it is full of promise, opportunity, and potential and yet its often exponential nature can present potentially existential risk if not properly guard-railed. It also presents the paradox of rich versus poor, those with access to it and those without.
The technological contest of our times—with groundbreaking tech invented, developed and implemented at breakneck speed on many fronts and dimensions including Web3, Crypto, Metaverse, Quantum, Nano, and Biotech—to name just a few—is but the latest iteration of an eternal human conundrum: how do we put guardrails around the Wild West of invention without harming progress? How do we make sure that future tech incorporates themes of governance, risk, ethics, and impact to impede deeply negative downsides while truly empowering the development and implementation of broadly beneficial upsides for the entire world, not just the privileged few?
Applying Four “Old” Principles to “New” Tech
With the right balance of age-old but actualized and customized principles of governance, ethics, risk, and impact, future tech can move in a mostly positive direction. This balancing act is one that must happen at every level—at the enterprise level (from start-ups to tech giants); at the community and NGO level; and at all governmental levels (local, national, and international).
The UN Sustainable Development Goals Report of 2022 offers examples of how tech innovation must be part of this interconnected ecosystem at every level, especially under SDG9—Build Resilient Infrastructure, Promote Inclusive and Sustainable Industrialization and Foster Innovation.
Here are some examples of how new tech is deploying these four time-tested principles positively.
- Responsible Governance – Being a Conscientious Crypto Company
Responsible governance is about management and a board of directors that understand the technology, bring in the right people to risk manage its development, consider the interests and expectations of key stakeholders, and build guardrails from inception.
While there seem to be only a few of what might be called “conscientious” crypto companies, Circle seems to be one of them. While we must wait for the long game to unfold, Circle seems to be an early-stage tech company with much Web3 future tech development ahead of it that has established an early-stage governance, risk, ethics, and impact ethos. And they have explicitly made the accessibility by the billions of financially underserved people on the planet a central corporate objective.
- Integrated Ethics – Integrating Ethics into AI
Integrated ethics entails a system of ethical review at every stage of the conception and development of tech where interdisciplinary teams, including tech ethicists, work shoulder to shoulder with engineers and scientists. One area in which certain companies and associations of companies have made a mark is to talk about AI ethics in everything they do. Society as a whole, and many think tanks, communal entities, and governmental bodies have also pressured companies to do this.
For example, below are the 10 principles developed by the Business Roundtable, an industry association.
At the company level, Microsoft has been a pioneer in acknowledging the importance of integrating ethics into AI through six principles (see graphic below) which they have updated as recently as June 2022 through their “Microsoft Responsible AI Standard v2”.
- Intelligent Risk – Disinformation Risk Management
The misinformation, disinformation and “malinformation” Pandora’s box of our times is only just beginning to open. While some require intent and others don’t, all three forms are part of the pervasive “information disorder” that marks our times, according to Crisp.
The bottom line is that information—the good, the bad and the ugly—continues to explode exponentially without enough barriers, filters, and governors to help control its exponential growth and with damaging impacts all over the world. The business, public and social sectors need to combine early risk management techniques deploying tech and human intelligence to fortify and improve their overall enterprise risk management.
- Sustainable Impact – The Stakeholder Take
Thanks to the valuable analytical work of Just Capital, we can compare how U.S.-listed publicly traded companies are doing with five key stakeholder groups—workers, communities, shareholders, customers, and the environment. In Just Capital’s 2022 list of most trusted companies Alphabet was listed #1 and Meta was listed #712. The starkest differences between the two companies appear in the treatment of customers and shareholders. Of which would you rather be a customer? Which company would you rather own shares of?
In the age of stakeholder capitalism, stakeholders everywhere are pressuring business and government to mind the store of their many environmental, social, governance and technological issues. See here for a deeper exploration of ESGT Megatrends.
Future Tech Based on Governance and Impact is More Resilient
Just because it’s the most disruptive time ever for humanity doesn’t mean that we cannot develop responsible governance, intelligent risk management, ethical standards, and sustainable impact. Indeed, it means we should double down on doing so.
And there are additional benefits to doing so. This important finding from the 2022 UN SDG Report with respect to SDG #9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure) underscores this fact: it appears that higher tech companies have proven far more durable in building resilience and sustainability in the face of a crisis than their lower tech counterparts.
It would seem from this evidence that it pays to embrace future tech responsibly.
