Our afternoon session begins with a conversation on the topic, "Can Technology Policy be Democratic?" Participants are
Neal Stephenson, author of
Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, and other top-selling novels, and
Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University.
Jacob Weisberg is the moderator.
Asked by Weisberg to explain the value of literature in understanding the impact of technology, Stephenson responds that science fiction in particular can help people who know something about one area of science or technology, or indeed society, in seeing how everything might fit together in one or many possible futures.
Crow describes his job as being, partly at least, an "architect of the future." He says science fiction has guided his thinking about the predictive ability of literature in discerning the kinds of tomorrows that are preferable, and others that are better prevented.
Weisberg asks if democracy is well-suited to guiding the development of cutting-edge technology, both in realizing its promises and in avoiding its pitfalls. Crow says that the American democracy, in particular, is a winner-takes-all system that in its current form may not be ideal, but nevertheless seems to work better than other known alternatives. Stephenson believes that our democracy seems to be most productive technologically when responding to a perceived existential threat -- such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia -- but "when that goes away, we lose momentum pretty fast."
Crow notes that the problems of the health care system in the US are well-known, and that they reflect the lack of a sophisticated dialogue in where we are going and where we
want to go as a society. He is concerned that scientists themselves are not focused enough on -- or well informed enough about -- the potential social outcomes of the work they do. Crow also says that we are using the wrong indicators to measure the success of governmental investments in science and technology; instead of counting how many patents we are getting, or how many papers we're producing, we should look at the overall health, well-being, and sustainability of our society. The constant emphasis on just getting more money for science without paying attention to broader outcomes is not the way to go.
Stephenson is concerned that the new role of billionaire angels in funding sci-tech startups may run counter to the proper democratic oversight in setting the direction of development. Picking up on that, Crow worries that some entrepreneurs in the United States, especially in emerging tech fields, may not be as cognizant as they should be that they live in a democracy where public participation in choosing broad objectives is a necessity. "The more elitist and separatist" that those people get, Crow says, the more the gap between sci-tech development and public response will grow, until eventually a correction will come, and the developers may not like the results.
Crow says that Europeans seem to be better at focusing on investment vs. outcome questions in a more sophisticated way than the United States.
A couple of questioners in the audience asked about the challenge for the US or other western democracies in keeping up with China in terms of investment, when the economies are growing at different rates. Crow said the US still has plenty of money, but we've chosen to spend most of it in areas other than infrastructure or clean energy. Stephenson says the US would benefit from undertaking large-scale big-picture projects as opposed to only making incremental steps.
Next item on the agenda looks like it might be fun.
Brian Malow, a -science comedian', and author
Robert Sawyer are presenting something called "Bio, the Hollywood Treatment."
They started by showing a delightful collage of clips from various science fiction movies from 1931's
Frankenstein up to the present.
Sawyer says the "law of unintended consequences" is one of the most important things we can learn from such movies and books. He also says that the people who most enthusiastically want to do risky things are the ones least qualified to decide whether or not they should be done.
Malow and Sawyer agree that these SF/horror movies tend to restate the Pandora's Box idea, that once we open up a new area of knowledge, we can never prevent the bad effects that may be unloosed. Hollywood, of course, makes millions by pandering to the fears of their audience, and by always setting up a winner/loser scenario. But in reality science often can work as a win-win situation.
Now we have a panel discussion on "Can Washington Keep Up With the Next Big Thing?"
The panelists are
Gary Marchant, professor of Emerging Technologies, Law and Ethics at Arizona State University;
Larry Downes, the author of
The Laws of Disruption: Harnessing the New Forces that Govern Business and Life in the Digital Age;
Jim Thomas, research program manager and writer, ETC Group; and the moderator is
Brink Lindsey, senior scholar in research and policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
Marchant says his answer to the basic question posed to the panel is: No, the government is currently not able to keep up. Thomas says that in some areas governments are good at keeping up, but in other areas they fall behind. It's not a simple Yes/No issue.
Downes says that governments are appropriately concerned about disruptive technologies, but that institutionally they are not always well-designed to do so.
He also says that often the efforts made by governments to manage things are not decisive, that outcomes determine themselves beyond the ability of government to control them.
Marchant offers two examples, one of over-regulation and the other of under-regulation. The first case is genetic engineering, such as GMO crops, where the perhaps well-intended efforts of governments have created a mess that benefits mostly just big corporations. On the other side is nanotechnology, where today there essentially is no oversight, and yet thousands of companies are working in the field, without clear guidelines and unsure about potential future regulations.
Thomas disagrees that biotech is over-regulated, but Marchant responds that the effect of government intervention has been to drive too many small innovators out of the field, while in contrast, a lack of oversight in nanotech is leaving consumers and the environment exposed to unknown risks.
Challenged by Lindsey about the benefits to society of science and technology over the last half-century or more, Thomas says those benefits have not generally been equally distributed. People in the global south tend to get less of the positive outcome while paying more of the cost, in both environmental and lifestyle terms.
Downes says the current case of how the FCC and Congress are dealing with the issue of Net Neutrality is almost a textbook example of doing things the wrong way. Marchant adds that Congress itself may not be nimble enough to keep up with the fast pace of change in new technologies. He likes, in contrast, the way that DuPont and Environmental Defense are collaborating on a framework for the responsible development of nanotechnology-based products. There may be other opportunities to bring in NGOs to do some of the work better than government can.
This should be interesting - "The Curious Case of Wikileaks" - a discussion between
Bruce Sterling, author of many popular SF novels, including
Holy Fire, Schismatrix, Distraction, and
The Caryatids;
Rebecca MacKinnon"¨a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and co-founder of Global Voices Online; and
Don Kash, professor emeritus in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. The moderator is
Robert Wright.
Wright begins by asking: Is Wikileaks a more or less natural outgrowth of technological developments, especially IT, in moving toward transparency? Would something like it have happened with or without Julian Assange?
Sterling says Wikileaks is the result of six guys, six very hard-working and talented hackers who should be credited for what they've accomplished and not just seen as an artifact of a movement within which they are mere players.MacKinnon agrees, and adds that it is far too early to say the secrecy is dead, or even to say that secrecy should be dead, while at the same time recognizing that a move toward more responsible governments can only be a good thing.
She made a perceptive comment, quoting someone else, that "I'm not quite sure how I feel about Wikileaks yet, but I know I am anti-anti-Wikileaks."
Wright keeps going back to his thesis (reminiscent of his books) that technology itself is driving events as much as or even more than the people involved in them. Kash proposes that Wikileaks is a predictable manifestation of the evolution of a complex system, in this case, the Internet.He says that when a system is as complex as the Net, trying to prevent anything is particular from happening there is virtually impossible.
Sterling admits to "a certain sense of melancholy" that what he wrote about decades ago, as one of the creators of cyberpunk, has taken so long to have a major impact on world events. However, he says, now that it has started, it won't stop but will only grow.
MacKinnon goes back to a point that Sterling made (about Assange seeing himself in historical terms as a Solzhenitsyn or a Havel) and says that the Wikileaks phenomenon should be seen as a potentially serious challenge to the primacy of the nation-state. She rejects Wright's technologically determinist view. Kash says we have to question how we think about governance in a time of accelerating technological growth. If we were starting from scratch, what kind of governing systems might we create?
Kash and MacKinnon argue that new forms of global governance may be needed. Sterling wonders about the potential for a "network model" of city-state governance as opposed to the traditional nation-state approach. Sterling claims that what's happening today in Cairo, Egypt is the first Net war.
Kash proposes (facetiously, he admits) a new government commission, fully funded, to financially support whatever new technologies they choose and to regulate or even kill those technologies as desired -- an organization that would be free to provide whatever rapid response is needed. Facetious or not, the panel likes his idea.
Sterling says he is waiting for the next shoe to drop, and he suspects that what it might be is a government-against-government leak of previously withheld secrets, having seen the mayhem that Wikileaks has caused. The leaking will become weaponized.
That wraps it up for today. See you again tomorrow morning for more live-blogging!