Author Archives: Nigel Cameron

Unknown's avatar

About Nigel Cameron

Writer, conference chair, former think tank director “Asking Tomorrow’s Questions” Speaking managed by ATG│Chartwell US: ellis@americantalentgroup.com, Global: alexh@chartwellpartners.co.uk Nigel Cameron has extensive experience as a keynote speaker and in facilitating high-level conversations focused on the future – crossing disciplinary lines and bringing together participants with diverse opinions and backgrounds. His emphasis is on reframing issues, welcoming outlier opinions, and pressing for a positive sum outcome that recognizes differences and engages them. A citizen of the United States and the UK, he has worked on both sides of the Atlantic and travels widely. He recently chaired GITEX 2015 in Dubai and will be chair of the Future Technology 2016. In one year he addressed conferences on all five continents, including the biennial innovation festival hosted by Australian finance giant AMP in Sydney, and Nanomedicine 2010 Beijing. He was the sole US-based plenary speaker at “the world’s leading conference on content marketing,” the 2011 Content Summit. Other recent engagements include the UN-affiliated Rio+ 20 Planet under Pressure event (London), and the opening keynote at the European Identity and Cloud Conference (Munich, Germany). His unusually wide experience includes serving on U.S delegations to the UN General Assembly and UNESCO; three periods as an executive-in-residence at UBS Wolfsberg (Switzerland); testimony on technology policy and values issues before the U.S House and Senate, the European Parliament, the European Commission’s advisory Group on Ethics, the German Bundestag, and the UK Parliament; and co-chairing a nonpartisan panel that advised the UK Conservative Party on emerging technologies and health policy. In the early 2000s, he was an invited non-federal participant in the Department of State-led Project Horizon, 3-year scenario-based strategic planning process. He has appeared on network media in several countries, including in the U.S. ABC Nightline and PBS Frontline; and in the UK the BBC flagship shows Newsnight and Breakfast with Frost. With a strong academic background together with an M.B.A. he has developed projects focusing integrative approaches to new technologies both in the academic/business context (at the Illinois Institute of Technology) and in the policy community (Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies in Washington, DC). He hosted a succession of annual policy conferences on nanotechnology at the National Press Club, which led to the publication of Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives for the Nano Century (Wiley). Among Washington events in 2011 he hosted a series of roundtables on impacts of new technologies (risk, intellectual property, change), co-sponsored by the Intel-led Task Force on American Innovation; and was invited to moderate panels on the security implications of the “Arab spring” for weapons (WMD) control. He regularly hosts teleconferences with thought leaders such as Wired Magazine founder Kevin Kelly, former Lockheed-Martin chairman Norman Augustine, CEA president Gary Shapiro, innovation leader Vivek Wadhwa and White House technology policy lead Tom Kalil. Other teleconferences have focused emerging issues in cybersecurity, and the future of on internet governance with Ambassador Philip Verveer and others. In Silicon Valley he hosted a breakfast for the venture community to discuss his provocative commentary on the innovation gap between the west coast and Washington, How to Bridge the Continental Divide. Other recent commentaries that have generated thoughtful interest in Washington and further afield: on NASA, and Washington’s core problem thinking about the future. He has written a monthly column for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the latest issues in corporate social responsibility and his op-eds include several for the San Francisco Chronicle on emerging issues in technology and policy. In 2015-16 he is Fulbright Visiting Research Professor in Science and Society in the University of Ottawa, Canada.

My Take: The Future of Biotechnology

Posted on by
Reply

C-PET’s November 5 roundtable

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Washington, DC

Our roundtable on the future of the biotech industry drew together some of its smartest participants.

Jennie Hunter-Cevera, Executive VP at RTI, was until recently president of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. Gregory Stock, co-founder of Signum Biosciences, had an earlier and distinguished career writing on bioethics. Robert Friedman, director of the J. Craig Venter Institute’s San Diego facility, once worked in DC at the sadly defunct congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Rachel Levinson, Director of National Research Initiatives for Arizona State University – who was once biotechnology lead for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. That said, some further 60 participants sat round the table and crammed the seats around the walls, including senior representatives from various agencies including the departments of State and Defense, science attaches and at least one ambassador from nearly a dozen embassies and missions, and assorted leaders from the think tank and wider policy communities. In a town that tends to cope with events like this by sending the most junior person in the office along to take notes, so far as I’m aware there was only one intern in the entire group. Maybe that’s because we serve such great sandwiches and coffee.

And there was a corresponding buzz to the occasion. “Welcome to our latest mash-up,” I said to greet the crowd, noting that perhaps half of them would have been well qualified to be part of the panel – including some distinguished voices who are becoming regulars at our roundtables and made substantive contributions again this time. Martin Apple, President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. Tom Donlan, editorial page editor at Baron’s. Garland McCoy, a founder of the Technology Policy Institute. John Palafoutas from the Task Force for American Innovation. Simon Berkovich from George Washington University. Robert McCreight, after a long career at State, now at George Mason. Jaydee Hanson, formerly with the United Methodist Church and now the Center for Technology Assessment. Mike Nelson from Georgetown, who like me was tweeting (go to #c-pet if you want some epigrammatic gems from @mikenelson and @nigelcameron) though Twitter seems barely have arrived this far east – if needed, there’s a DC tech policy parable. Jim DeLong of the Convergence Law Institute. On it goes.

After pithy perspectives from the panelists the conversation ranged from IP to investment to hope and hype and back. And here’s a thought someone shared: would new synbio organisms fall under the Endangered Species Act? A major point of focus was the recent announcement that the Department of Justice had reversed the policy of administrations of both parties by taking the view that the isolation of individual genes was not patentable. Opinions were expressed pro and con, with concern expressed as to the potential impact of this news on investment – introducing a fresh element of uncertainty into an already less than robust situation. But it was also noted that solid opposition to the concept of gene patents was articulated by conservative and liberal religious leaders in an unusual act of public agreement some time ago.

There are also a focus on the big picture of bioscience. Has it been wrongly focused? The complexity that has unfolded since the beginnings of modern genetics seems to keep on going. A fundamental focus on epigenetics is needed. Interdisciplinary approaches are crucial, and some raised whether the set-up of NIH and other research funding agencies should be reconfigured.

Another special focus was on risk. One strand of discussion: our systems are much too risk averse; the FDA would not now approve either aspirin or penicillin; what of the risks we take by failing to embrace new therapeutic options? Another strand: we need to find a consensus that is cautionary in exploring these new frontiers – in contrast to the European “precautionary” principle that many see as unduly negative, yet very alive to the detection of risk in parallel with new developments. Another strand: how do we assess and handle the risk inherent in synthetic biology and other developments with dangerous pathogens – which unlike even nuclear material have a capacity for indefinitely scaled harm? Focus here from some highly-expert participants was on the need for the right people to be doing the work and handling the materials, as other kinds of controls cannot be adequate (my comment: a trusted traveler approach). A further reminder that the asymmetric century is an inherently unstable and scary place to be; but it’s where we are.

From my moderator’s perch I tried to press the question of how things are trending, what the industry will look like in 10 years, and was waiting and hoping for some forthright declarations of confidence and vision. But I think it’s fair to say they were not to be had. Shall we in 10 years we shall still be facing the doubts and investment problems and controversial disruptions we do now?

Permission granted to reproduce in full and with acknowledgement.

Leadership in the Exaclasm

Posted on by
Reply

Nigel M. de S. Cameron
Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies
Washington, DC

When teens say TMI it means they don’t want embarrassing details. But Eric Schmidt, Mr. Google, has the ultimate TMI facts: until 2003, he states with customary Delphic authority, the world had created 5 exabytes of data. By 2010, we do it every two days.

This does not of course mean we have suddenly become vastly more productive; half of that data comes not from Wall Street and CERN and China People’s Daily, but my kids’ photos on Facebook. Point is: the explosion in data, and data capture, are partnered with the speed of change as drivers of complexity. How to know what matters when it comes to the future? To put it another way, what’s leadership in Millennium 3?

Back in 1998, an elderly gentleman was asked by a television reporter how he was going to vote. “If God had intended us to vote,” he responded, “he would have given us candidates.” Of course, there were two respectable candidates running that year for the presidency. But I took his point then and I take it even more strongly now. We are facing a crisis of leadership. At a time of deep geopolitical unease, with a seismic shift underway in power relations around the globe and fresh emerging asymmetries, and technological changes zipping up a curve that gets only steeper, leadership is faltering.

So what’s leadership in 2010? Well, we know about management. It was management – from Fordism on – that defined and exemplified the 20th century. In corporate and government life, we got ourselves organized. Management theorists don’t all agree with each other, but they tend to be speaking about the same thing. You can study “management” and write papers about it. Yet not so with leadership. Leadership books, like leaders, are quirky, guru-esque. Approaches succeed that look wildly different. Last month, I was speaking at a conference on leadership for emerging corporate leaders from around the globe. Two presenters who were among the top corporate leaders were asked to speak about leadership and change. One was modest, orderly, and made much of his walking past five of his executives in first class to take his seat in economy with the cheapest ticket he could buy; leadership by example. The other, flamboyant head of one of the largest automakers, was asked what car he drove: there’s a Maserati outside, he said, and I have Ferraris in my garage. What’s more – speaking of quirky – he has one hundred direct reports, and runs his company with three Blackberries and three cellphones. And in politics? There too, we’ve had consensus-builders and consensus-breakers. A recent writer said of Churchill that in 1939-40, he “defined leadership for the rest of time.” Point is: leadership is not the kind of thing that leads to uniformity, good practice, rules to be learned.

The medievals, as usual, knew a thing or two. When you can’t define something, you can get a long way by clarifying what it is not. Hence (in their case, with God), the via negativa. We know (well, we do, but plenty of putative leaders do not!) that leadership is not management. And neither is it emulation of your favorite leader. Yet there are things we can say. Leadership is always about change. It’s therefore about the future; about knowledge – and in the context of TMI and the petaclasm, knowing what you need to know. It’s about relationships, building the network you need- so you can locate yourself at the heart of the unique knowledge network that will drive your decision-making and make you the best-informed person on the planet for your particular role. It’s about the constant interrogation of ends and goals in the interests of clarity and fidelity; and utter, ruthless flexibility when it comes to means.

To put it another way: the leader is the bridge-builder. Since we were talking about the medievals, pontifex is the Latin word – inherited from the pagan Roman priesthood. But while the pontiff (pontifex maximus, chief bridge-builder) builds a vertical bridge to God, the merely human leader builds horizontal bridges of several kinds. The bridge between her/himself and the led. This is what we know best, and it lies at the core of our politics. If you can’t build that bridge, you just don’t get to be the leader. But – note well, politicos great and small – this is a mere necessary condition of leadership. On its own it is far from sufficient. Two others, at least, set the leader in play to lead, in the flux of the exaclasm, the shifting tectonic plates of global power, the asymmetric threats that chink like Ruskin’s dreadful geologists’ hammers.

First, a bridge to the future. And the faster change takes place, the more central this becomes. That is to say, leadership that is both innovative and constantly embracing of innovation.

Second, a bridge across the silos, disciplines, communities; a networking that draws on ever more diverse sources in the midst of the data deluge and the growing inter-connectedness. Leadership through innovation through networks of knowledge.

Without these two, no leader will succeed in the 21st century. Hence my semi-serious suggestion that all elected representatives be required every year to attend a series of conferences on technology and the future. Hence my serious suggestion that all political appointees should be screened, without exception, for their innovation-mindedness, alertness to the demands of the future, engagement in the knowledge network. Because what this analysis underlines is that we need the right kind of people in leadership. Unless they are knowledge leaders and innovation leaders, whatever their skills and virtues, their capacity to lead America in Millennium 3 is fatally compromised. They need to be the right kind of people, and they need to be operating within the right kind – of “corporate culture,” in which innovative future-mindedness, and knowledge networking, are prized. There’s no question that America shaped the global 20th century. If it is to be more than a bit player in the 21st, we need, well, change.

But back to the via negativa. Two things that I’m not saying. First, that in all its branches the USG lacks extraordinarily smart people who are innovative, future-oriented knowledge networkers. They are there. But who would claim that they set the pace? The general presumptions of Washington’s political culture and its priorities lie elsewhere, in the political short term. Second, that our global competitors (I’m drafting this on my way back from a trip to China) will have it all their own way. I think there is everything to play for. But other players seem, shall we say, rather more evidently aware of the fact there is a game afoot.

The genius of America’s global dominance in the 20th has lain precisely in its capacity to capture the imagination of peoples as they have strained forward into freedom, and to twin this visionary leadership with the potency of an educational/industrial economy capable of developing and delivering technologies to satisfy consumer markets – and in the late 20th century, the tools of change that have granted global access to the digital vectors of tomorrow. America’s challenge is now to continue to build comparative advantage at the meeting-point of freedom and technological empowerment; to demonstrate future-oriented leadership in the global knowledge economy. At the point at which high-value, creative efforts are now in the grasp of our competitors.


Stasis all over again?

Shall we? That raises another set of questions about leadership and change. I’m feeling for a category here. As we know well, there’s a tendency for stasis, or at least its expectation, to follow bursts of revolutionary change. Future fatigue? The change plateau? It’s as if once the exponential curve has delivered some game-changing shift, the players need a rest. They stop thinking about exploding the assumptions around them, and start thinking about their stock options. Yet the curve keeps on going up. To move beyond the middle ages into the Reformation of the 16th century, a favored tag was ecclesia reformata semper reformanda: the reformed church must go on being reformed. Listen up, Redmond and Palo Alto. My other gig in Switzerland was to lead a workshop at UBS on investment and emerging technologies. Who seriously believes that in 5-7 years the two uber-brands of the web, Google and Facebook, will still be as dominant as they are now, pressing ahead, and – crucial to their current valuations – generating economic profit? One reason the naïve statements and creepy actions of both these splendid efforts on the question of privacy are so interesting lies precisely in their assumption that their ways of doing business are here to stay, and we shall need to get used to the fact. 5-7 years? Expect both search and the kind of “social networking” embodied in Facebook to be well on their way to commodity status, prematurely ageing companies in a world in which everything – including the classic company life-cycle matrix – moves faster every day. (If that’s not a lesson to learn from the great AOL-Time Warner debacle, back in the 90s when things moved a lot slower, I don’t know what is; someone paid what – $100bn? more? – to teach us a classic biz school case.)

Key point here: Moore’s Law, globalization, and much else have created a situation in which it is not technology that is characteristic of the future, but change (and change in the context of growing asymmetry). This point seems to me to have been spectacularly ungrasped by major tech leaders. It isn’t that we shan’t need search or won’t wish to share pics and news with our friends. It’s that the ageing of these branded behemoths, with their hubristic tendencies, and the smartness that drives scores of start-ups year by year, will have moved our focus elsewhere. They will feel about as hip as the telecoms do now. (And this just in: who noticed the “Fear Award” delivered to Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook’s threats to privacy at the Stewart/Colbert “rally for sanity”? That should send shivers down many spines.)

From the Edge

So leadership, always the most daunting of human tasks, in the 21st century is intimately correlated with the two great facts of the age: the petaflood of data, and the instantiation of exponential change. The development and engagement of knowledge networks, and fundamental flexibility that grasps the change principle, have always been components in leadership, but they emerge now as the key qualifiers. The clock will not turn back. TMI will always define our data; a tempting stasis will frame our engagement with the latest change and the latest emerging technologies. We must now learn to lead not from the front but the edge.

Permission granted to reproduce in full and with acknowledgement.

Innovating our innovation talk: how do we raise the game in DC?

Posted on by
Reply

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, Washington, DC

The most difficult issues are always those closely connected with many more. So it is with innovation. We don’t have a simple definition, though we have parameters. We know it doesn’t just refer to technology. We know the smartest inventors may not be the innovators. We know that somehow the United States has been lead innovation nation for some time. We fear the loss of this complex, potent capacity.

We should expect that something as complex would require subtlety to address. Yet like most things in Washington, it follows a pattern: smart people feel obliged to dumb down their conversation to get the attention of other smart people who have felt obliged to dumb down their receptivity. So whether you are on the inside or the outside of the vast machine of government, there’s a big element of (can we say it?) roleplay. It’s just another of the problems.

This is the context into which Intel’s Paul Otellini, among others, has been firing salvoes. The time is running out, “Washington” has to change, U.S. competitiveness is at issue; and, ultimately, the vibrancy of the economy and our children’s future depend on it.

One thing that interests us at C-PET is the connections. Between technology, values, risk, policy – and innovation. Between an innovative mindset and future-oriented decision-making. Between cognizance of the future, and competence for today. So our recent roundtable, co-sponsored by the Task Force on American Innovation, asked “What’s Washington’s Problem?” Here is the planet’s technology leader by a long, long way. But a nation whose tech leaders are consumed by unease about what lies ahead.

An issue we did not discuss, but that is surely pertinent, is the geography of U.S. technology, so much of which is based on the west coast. How do the drivers of west coast innovation see Washington? I think in two ways. First, it is a long way away. Curious the impact that geographic distance still has on power and decisions. Second, some time back a VC in Menlo Park told me that when he looks out of his window, he sees the Pacific; in Washington, they see the Atlantic. If the Valley had taken the Beltway seriously all along things could already be rather different.

Back to complexity. Our roundtable underlined the fact by the variety of its presenters and the themes they took up. And when I pressed them – as I do on these occasions – for the lead strategic issues that must be addressed, the answer was not clear. Or, it was that there are many. Which amounts to my mind to the same thing.

Here are some highlights; video will soon be on c-pet.org:

  • FCC’s Phoebe Yang set out the process behind the broadband plan, which is plainly key to technology success; and made a fundamental C-PET argument – that innovation thrives when rules are clear!
  • Marty Apple, president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, spoke about the conditions for sustainable innovation, including a more candid inclusion in the 21st century of the externalities, environmental and other, that our capitalist system had managed in the 20th to avoid. He called for a new social contract between the public, private sector, and the research community, which focused on minimizing harms and maximizing benefits – long-term. And for a new Education Advanced Projects Agency on the DARPA model to fast-track the best reforms to U.S. education.
  • John Palafoutas of the Inventors Hall of Fame and Task Force for American Innovation, set out some basic problems: 2-year Congress, few politicians have a science and technology background, and ultimately a handful of lead political figures actually make the decisions
  • Stephen Ezell, ITIF: we are in denial, politics has failed us; leaders don’t believe we can fall behind
  • Kent Hughes, Woodrow Wilson Center: remember the “sputnik moment” and how it woke up America, and our response the Japanese dominance of tech markets ; we need global bench-marking
  • Garland McCoy, TPI: maybe we should focus more on quality; India could give us a run for our money

It’s plain that there are some key policy issues – taxes and visas – on which everyone seems to agree we face pressures that are making us increasingly uncompetitive. But are these the core innovation issues? As Marty Apple and others pointed out, much of the fruit of our innovation is now going overseas for manufacture; the trend may grow.

Here are what I see as the key underlying issues:

We need long-term thinking, scanning, planning on the part of leaders in government. There is plenty of it in many locations in Washington, but they are all lower down the scale. Where we need it is at the pinnacle of decision-making, in the executive and legislative branches. Politicians need to be much better at fighting short-term political campaigns while not disprivileging long-term issues that are nonpartisan in character. Otherwise democracy will surely strangle its own future. The electoral cycle cannot be our decision-making cycle. And as change comes faster, our horizons must extend further.

So we need a disposition toward innovation and an embrace of new possibilities at all levels of government. Hence my (at least half-serious) suggestion elsewhere of an innovation-mindedness test for political appointees.

And how do we get there? It will involve a culture shift in the Washington thinks, not simply how it works. But we have to get to it. And soon.

The Ultimate Mash-up: Innovation in Washington?

Posted on by
Reply

In Aspen with Tom Lehrer on my Mind

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Once a Tom Lehrer fan, always one; at least, you can’t keep him out of your head. So I was sitting in Aspen at the TPI innovation conference a week or two back, and this time it was his Vatican Rag. But the tagline now: “innovate, innovate, innovate.”

Of course, in tech circles innovation is the talk of the town (as in, Washington), even though it is often twinned with a sense of resignation. The problem is that politics was never designed for a society in which the rate of technology’s development is exploding at ever more rapid rates. Remember Thomas Malthus, 18th century English clergyman and statistician, and his half-true theory of demographics? (It was resurrected for a time in the semi-hoax of the “population bomb” in the 60s.) Malthus said population grows geometrically, food resources arithmetically; ergo famine, disease, large-scale death. So here: technology’s progress is as exponential as it comes, Moore’s Law as far as the eye can see. And politics? Our system of governance? Well, it’s arithmetical in every sense. Big Bang versus Steady State. Which did not much matter when the curve was a lot flatter. We saw the future in gradualist terms, and we got away with it. No longer. We’re facing a crisis, potentially deadly, for the nation that has been fated to be top dog as the exponential tech revolution heads skyward. How is steady-state politics to fathom, let alone frame, the fissile material that is 21st century technology?

Intel’s Paul Otellini has been hammering his theme. American needs innovation; it needs an innovation-focused Washington; the nation’s losing its edge. Earlier in the year he teamed up with the Aspen Institute to host a crisis summit at the Ronald Reagan Building in downdown DC. Otellini emceed corporate leaders, innovation gurus like John Kao, and the Obama administration’s Larry Summers and Arne Duncan. What’s innovation? Why is it in crisis? What can be done? It was impressive, an A-list event that kept the A-listers on task for 24 hours.

Then as summer came we circled around, and Otellini again was center-stage in Aspen – Aspen the place, this time, not the Institute. A glittering occasion. As well as Otellini, the Technology Policy Institute hosted CEO-turned-politico Carly Fiorina, VC and LinkedIn pioneer Reid Hoffman, Intuit’s folksy CEO Brad Smith, and Valley entrepreneur and writer Andrew Keen. And its program asked the question, over and over: is America losing its edge? (Answer does not require a trip to Aspen. It’s yes. And you can see the video online. Techpolicyinstitute.org)

My point is that the questions go deep. How shall government of the people, by the people, for the people, guided by members of Congress who dutifully ride their horses to Washington for two-year stints per the Constitution, and an administration whose decisional timeline is rarely longer, address what is best seen as a slow but quickening and essentially uncontrolled explosion? Today’s key resource that creates both wealth and security is something quite novel: information, data. Perhaps the most disruptive invention in our generation has been something which simply didn’t exist a generation ago: search. Most people think the “digital revolution” is now mainly behind us. It has barely, barely begun. And you don’t have to be a disciple of Kurzweil to believe that the curve is set to start going close to vertical in our lifetimes. One a counter-intuitive principle of living with change: the faster it goes, the more important to look ahead. We just can’t make good decisions for today without spending time in tomorrow.

Back in the early 2000s, the National Science Foundation, brainchild of that practical genius Vannevar Bush (who famously foresaw an analog version of the web using that handy but clunky old-time invention, the microfiche), convened a series of conferences on what they called “converging technologies” – nano, bio, info, cogno, the “NBIC” mantra. I presented at one, attended others, and have written of them in critical terms as they were too much influenced by a naïve “transhumanism” (which blunted, rather than sharpened, their impact) and not enough focused on engaging the policy implications of the very remarkable developments they considered. But they were right to throw the future in the mix and ask hard questions about where current tech trends are leading.

And where is there now to meet the future in Washington? It’s future-mindedness that we need more than anything other single thing. A visionary, open, reflective, awareness that science and technology are framing every emerging question. That there is no area of policy or social and personal life unaffected. That change gets faster every day. That every elected and appointed official, while they may not be technologists, must be a futurist. Must have the keenest interest in what lies ahead, in the pace of change, how things are trending, in the impacts good and bad of every shift in the power and price of the chip – and every creative thought that determines what those chips deliver. And the chips are driving it all. Synthetic biology applies engineering to genetics. Artificial intelligence and robotics are moving far beyond the production lines of Detroit. One thing we know as we look ahead: this will not be your grandmother’s future. I won’t say all bets are off, because some things are pretty clear. Two of them are the sheer extraordinary pace of change, and its pervasive, disruptive impacts.

Yet out political culture continues pretty much as it has. We fund S and T. The genome project was for a time center-stage. Now it is the $1.5 bn National Nanotechnology Initiative (on which C-PET has a half-day Roundtable discussion on 9/17; come join us). And of course the Space Program. And NIH. We all agree all these things are important, vital. Researchers, and tech business leaders, want more funding for research and development. They want a tax regime that would make the United States the most competitive, start-up friendly nation in the world. We may well think that is a no-brainer. (Why are no-brainers so hard in DC?)

But the issue goes deeper. The problem in Washington lies not just in the short-term nature of politics, but also in the privileging of issues of disagreement that often gives them more importance than they deserve, in our binary political environment; and disprivileging, as it were, of issues that don’t fit the conventional divides. Then add that few of our leaders are attuned to the future. We know there are exceptions. But we know the default. And while democracy strenuously needs principled disagreement, no nation will thrive in the 21st century that cannot place the impact of technology – and its implications, good and bad – at the center of its view of things, and do so in manner that is both highly informed and multi-disciplinary.

Of course, no-one in Washington is actually against innovation. It sounds odd to be asking the question, when every year huge sums in federal dollars are doled out to the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health; when the Department of Defense is a vast consumer and patron of the highest tech around; when the current administration came in trailing a cloud of appointees and rhetoric from Silicon Valley and Seattle. And of course the United States dominates the global emerging technology landscape in ways that many do not quite grasp. Perhaps 75%. Yet this extraordinary dominance is not our birthright, and U.S. companies are busy globalizing – not least to hedge their bets.

One of the stars of the Intel/Aspen conference was John Kao, whose brilliantly perceptive book on innovation lays out an anatomy of the problem. He wants innovation-specific roles in DC, an innovation council, an “innovation czar” approach. That might be useful. I’m not convinced. It might also let everyone else off the hook, and in the process ensure the failure of the “innovation” appointees. And it assumes a model of government as problem-solver that many of us question, especially in the 21st century and in the area most open-textured and dependent on initiative. Yes, by all means let’s have the most innovation-friendly tax (and immigration) regimes in the world. But that is government removing obstacles rather than trying itself to solve problems. The issue is pervasive and needs a pervasive solution. How about this? We all read the news stories about the vast questionnaire required of potential Obama appointees. What about adding a smart instrument to test engagement, aptitude, awareness of innovation and its future? – an innovation/futurist litmus-test for every political appointee? That’s the kind of thing a seriously integrated, pro-innovation government would take forward.

As a congressional newspaper put it recently, Digital Nation, Analog Hill. And the issue is not simply the Hill (which, for the record, has full-function email, although remains one of the few places on earth where faxes are still in routine use). It’s appointees to thousands of offices and hundreds of boards. It’s the think tanks. Washington has (literally) hundreds of them. There are half a dozen big ones with wide-ranging portfolios and the intellectual firepower of universities. Where is technology, innovation, on their agendas? The issue is one of pervasive corporate culture.

And what about the west coast, the Valley, the tech heavyweights? Well when they get into town, they tend to do what people in town do: focus on the next year, focus on language issues, lobby the FCC, work on tax breaks for R and D. Which at one level is fine. Yet their cynicism about policymakers and their focus on immediate issues go hand in hand. All very logical, especially when they have been assured by their policy people that there is no chance of influencing the culture, game-changing, paradigm-shifting. Washington’s time-horizon is if anything shorter than before. Get over it, and get in there and lobby. Big, big mistake. We gotta change the culture. How? I have ideas, we all have ideas. We have to work at it. Keep working at it. America needs our efforts, and if we keep at it, year in year out, on a corporate and social rather than a political timescale, we may succeed. If we don’t, one thing we can be sure of is that we won’t.

Fortune 100 corporations work with 5, 10-year plans and in the tech sector are constantly scoping beyond the next decade. And that’s what they need to do in DC, side by side with what they do now; lobby for the short term, work for change in the long. The corporate culture of our political establishment is sick, it is antithetical to the interests of the nation as well as its technology companies, and it is failing to face the radical implications that emerging developments will have for its own agenda. Employment. Healthcare. Security. Education. Technology policy has long since ceased to be chiefly about technology – but, as Michael Caine would say, not many people know that.

And the next big thing? We listened in Aspen while Otellini warned that unless Washington changes, it will not come from Silicon Valley. The world is flat, and getting flatter.

Much flatter than back in the 60s, when globalized threats were of another kind and Tom Lehrer sang his satire on the loyalties of the famous German rocket scientist whose skills had laid the foundation of the space program. But Lehrer’s caustic humor is as relevant now on a very different competitive stage. “And I’m learning Chinese, says Wernher von Braun.”

Lehrer lyrics at http://www.lyricsfreak.com/t/tom+lehrer/

Join us for C-PET’s Emerging Technologies Roundtable on Innovation in Washington over lunch on October 13 in our G Street offices. Register at c-pet.org.

Permission to reproduce/circulate if unedited and with attribution.

A Week in Tomorrow to Address Today’s Risk

Posted on by
Reply

Quite the eventful time for me, this past week, immersing myself in tomorrow.

First up, our C-PET Roundtable on Synthetic Biology last Friday. Biology isn’t what it used to be. As the engineering approach to living systems moves beyond theory to practice (as J. Craig Venter has recently reminded us), side by side with extraordinary possibilities for good lie options for the weird – and the scary. Scary, not least, in the Asymmetric Century. In tandem with concerns lest we “play God” lie anxieties at least as great that someone will play the Devil. Smallpox, anyone? Not your grandmother’s WMDs.

Then a quick shuttle over to San Francisco on Friday afternoon. Once again an instant reminder of the Bay Area’s reputation as a technology hub. My cab driver explained she had taken a sabbatical (her word) from running her second tech start-up (I’m not making this up). I was in town for the annual “summit” (that’s catching on as an edgy name for what we just used to call a conference) of the Singularity Institute, widely seen as inspired by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. And she was driving me, Friday evening (this was a long day), to an opening party in the home of investor and guru Peter Thiel. And a fun party it was, all the way through to some time in the small hours of Saturday morning when a dozen of us were left huddled outside trying to find another cab and the fun had subsided.

The two days that followed were nonstop candy for the (still biological) brains of the devotees, and also for the scattered handful of participants who like me are more quizzical. I had protested the way an earlier “summit” had been opened, with the greeting “Welcome Singularitarians.” This time we were all included, I suppose. “Welcome, Singularitarians – and Concerned Citizens.” Kurzweil’s is the most famous name among a group of futurist thinkers who have inspired the Singularity Institute, and its sibling Singularity University (a summer school for the very smart, hosted by NASA Ames, that was recently given a prominent write-up in the New York Times). But key summiteers are eager to point out that the Institute is not directly affiliated with Kurzweil. Which was, perhaps curiously, illustrated by the fact he addressed the 620 or so enthusiasts, to their chagrin, on a screen; and actually told them he was on vacation (shades of BP’s mastery of public relations).

One reason I have become a reg at these events is the extraordinary quality and range of the presenters. There really is nothing quite like it – for sheer fat sticks of intellectual cordite. Aspen, of course, attracts the most distinguished names in any Who’s Who. Burning Man and South by Southwest, offer hip context for techies and fellow-travelers. Yet for all the sometimes cultic feel, the Singularity efforts are singular in their commitment to the brainpower they keep suggesting is about to migrate to the chip, when (as RK stated this time around) we merge with our tools. Corvids and parrots, we learned, have intelligence on a par with the great apes; who have intelligence on a par with six-year-old children (the video of a crow bending wire, unbidden and untrained, to make a fishing hook – in the city where Hitchcock filmed part of The Birds – sent shivers down my mammalian spine). Cooling the recently heart-attacked as if they had fallen under ice could markedly improve our ability to bring them round, but it’s held up by red tape. Hour after hour of it; two tight-packed days, rounded off by magician, debunker, humorist, and – as he pointed out – Darwin lookalike, James Randi. Of course, as usual the drum-beat was of accelerating artificial intelligence. Yet the dialectic was perhaps more evident this time than in the past – between those who have confidence in the shape of the curve and sense we are close to going vertical, and those, especially from the biosciences, who keep saying we understand so remarkably little of our wetware (or even that of the animals), that the effort to duplicate it is faintly ridiculous.

As in the past, there was a brief staged debate, though the debaters spent most of their time falling over each other with pleasantries and agreements, so as an effort to ventilate the huge issues before the summit it failed. More generally, if there is a criticism to be made aside from (to use a handy Briticism that Americans could do with knowing) the general over-egging of the pudding (too much, too many, an embarras de richesse), it would lie here: in the need to discuss, to absorb, to hear fewer speeches, lectures, or perorations, and get the uber-brains round some tables to engage – and answer for themselves to their intellectual peers. This of course is what Aspen does; and Davos. It’s what we do at C-PET. It’s what helps build collaborative knowledge networks and reaches for a positive sum outcome for all parties.

So as I sat there at the back, being hit by flying half-bricks of intellect for hour after hour and tweeting to keep myself focused, what I craved most was a 10-15 minute limit to speechifying and a heavy dose of moderated engagement. What would the parrot lady say to the surgeon and the engineer? What would the robotics gurus say to each other, with or without the intermediation of their machines, which all seemed to be called Zeno? What would anyone have to say about the policy implications of the enterprise?Where are the National Academies? Where is OSTP? Where are the AI guys from Sandia, with whom I spent two days some years ago at ASU on the implications of enhanced human intelligence, and where is the spirit of that smart but self-critical gathering?

I’m quite a Kurzweil fan. As I told him at the San Jose summit, and as I have not ceased to tell the Singularity Institute leaders whom I admire, he has raised fundamental questions that have ramifications for everyone and everything – and that are being widely ignored. The SI people are not all Kurzweil clones in their optimism and notions of timescale. I was interested in Peter Thiel’s speech at the last event, in New York City, where he was criticized for taking a more generic view of the “singularity” and hit back that the movement includes people who take many views (as we were told this time, he is the major financial backer of the Institute). And in Vernor Vinge’s comment (he’s the computer expert and sci-fi writer whose early use of the term “singularity” has made him a godfather to the movement) at another, that “the longer we have our hand on the tiller, the better.” But the discussion has to go mainstream. There are ways to make that happen, and ways to make it harder to achieve.

The next stop on my trip was Seattle, for the pii2010 conference on privacy and identity of which C-PET is a co-sponsor. Quite the humdinger. Privacy experts from corporate and non-profit sectors, all-round IT gurus, and some outspoken commentators, produced the perfect mix. And the first evening offered a party and a tangent: pitch slam for a dozen start-ups looking for funding – basically speed-dating from the front of the room; 1-5 minute sales pitches for some highly creative efforts. A handy reminder of how things work in techland, among the small-scale practitioners rather than the large-scale theoreticians. There was also, interestingly, a lot more tweeting going on than at the Singularity, as some dozens of us kept up a parallel conversation and fed in questions in realtime. The matrix of online identity, online and offline privacy, and the future, lies at the heart of our culture – and some of the most profound questions Homo sapiens has yet faced.

The coincidental launch of Facebook’s Places feature tracking and sharing users’ locations, added a little salsa to the conversation. The vast quantities of data we are spewing onto the web have become the raw material for an evolving, global industry. Who owns all this stuff? Read the terms of online services (some of which run to dozens of pages of legalese, so take your lawyer with you and/or a nice bottle of red wine) and you find you have gaily signed away an ocean of rights you assumed were yours, or would have had you thought about them (example from me: Amazon! Go read what they can do with your book reviews). Privacy has yet to emerge as a money-making value proposition for the world of the internet. Yet it may. And my main takeaway from pii2010, aside from the sheer intellect and creativity of the participants (good news for us, or since most of them are corporate players, scarily bad?), was the notion that we should see this as our “banking” our own data, make it portable, find tech solutions to the fact that it is scattered across the web, some on our hard drives and much in the cloud – and encourage the emergence of business models within which we choose to sell what we choose to sell. Yet the current context, of playing ducks and drakes with ever-changing “privacy” rules, is not encouraging. As someone said, and I recall tweeting, every internet service has stayed true to its privacy commitments – until it has decided to change them. And the most chilling moment of pii2010? A panelist asked who we the audience would most trust to take care of our online data. He read a list of options, which ended with government. Hardly anyone voted for any of them. And these are the professionals. My comment: like transplant surgeons who don’t carry donor cards.

So as I return from my week in tomorrow, how do things look? My conviction that Washington, DC is mired in yesterday is clearer than ever; my sense of the urgency and opportunity we confront starker. We’re already a decade into the Asymmetry Century that opened with 9/11; synthetic biology, which carries the seeds of vast benefit, by accident or malicious design could deliver quite ghastly surprises; a technology with a malicious black swan built-in. We are shooting, at a rapid speed though we do not know how fast, up a curve into a world in which AI and robotics have a far larger footprint, and may yet stamp us out. In the meantime, our notions of identity are up for grabs, as we spew data online by the petabyte and think little of the consequences.

Yet how, as conversation after conversation has run, can Washington, DC be changed? Here’s one idea, totally practical and easy to implement. The U.S. Politicians’ Exposure to Technology Act, which could for all I care be known as Eric (Schmidt)’s Law (sounds better than PETA). It would require every politico elected to national office, from POTUS down, and every administration political appointee (the Plum List), to attend in their first year in office a minimum of 4 technology conferences to be selected from a list to be compiled by a committee consisting of the CEOs of the three largest NASDAQ companies and the six newest Valley tech start-ups of the previous year; and 2 in all subsequent years in office. Believe me, aside from doing wonders to registrations at tech events (if perhaps shifting the feel of the conversation a little), it would revolutionize the DC policy community – and do more for U.S. innovation than a myriad initiatives, breast-beating, commissions, and the valiant efforts of the several tech think-tanks.

The point I go around making is that unless you visit tomorrow you are fundamentally unqualified for decision-making today. I just spent a week there. I’m exhausted. Looking forward to getting back to now. But does anyone really disagree? And if Eric’s Law is not the answer, what is? This nation remains the greatest can-do society, at least since Rome. Let’s get onto it.

Permission given to forward and cross-post unedited and with full attribution.

singinst.org

pii2010.com

nigel.cameron@c-pet.org

SynBio round 1

Posted on by
Reply

My Take

C-PET’s Synthetic Biology Roundtable, first round

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

I’ve had a couple of encounters with synthetic biology before. The National Science Foundation invited me to join a site visit to the main federally funded synbio research project, with a mandate to review all the non-technical aspects (ethics, security, law, and so on); and Nature Biotechnology asked me along with the University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Caplan, doyen of contemporary bioethicists, to write commentaries for a special number back in 2009. So I’ve thought about what’s going on, and was very pleased to host and moderate round 1 of C-PET’s synbio process.

As those who were there (from think tanks, universities, a slew of embassies, federal agencies, the House science committee, and elsewhere) will recall, the discussion took off in some fascinating directions. C-PET is, of course, a think tank. But think tanks come in various shapes and sizes. Unlike most, we are non-partisan. We like process. We see ourselves as helping build a collaborative knowledge network. We don’t believe naively in win-win, but we do work for outcomes with a net benefit to everyone in the room. And our roundtables are designed to engage. Short presentations, not least as many in the room could readily be on the panel and probably everyone has relevant expertise. Short presentations, because engagement in the knowledge network is the key. And while some of our longer events have formal keynotes, our roundtable panels are designed for process. No PowerPoint. Plenty of exchanges, as the knowledge network builds and deepens. Not so much Q and A as participation. Having a large conference table at the center of things certainly helps. It may not be circular, like King Arthur’s (and, as it happens, the cabinet table of 19th century British leader Benjamin Disraeli, around which I recently dined in the basement of a London club), but it is rounder than most Washington tables.

We decided to take at least two bites at this cherry. Next up is November 5. Round 1 was a scoping exercise. And the scope of synbio is hard to grasp. It ranges from industrial process and a concern about over-regulation (Rina Singh from the trade group BIO’s focus) to the ethics of “playing God” (raised by Penn’s Jonathan Moreno) to security scenarios of unimaginable scariness (“what if the Unabomber had been a biologist?” asked security expert Jonathan Tucker from the Monterey Institute, after stating that the #1 synbio anxiety of security experts is that smallpox could become the WMD of choice). From that we got into the problem of silo-ing individual technologies (and is “bioethics” becoming yet another silo, I asked?), the deep lack of long-term tech policy interest in the DC community, and the problem of policy driven by press release – as happened back in 1997 with Dolly the Sheep. Craig Venter’s latest announcement of his work in synthetic biology led to a presidential letter to the current bioethics commission to come up with a quick report and recommendations (though Penn’s Amy Gutmann, chair of the Obama commission, has six months for hers; back in 1997, Bill Clinton demanded that Dolly’s implications be clarified within three).

From around the table, perhaps the most perceptive of many shrewd observations came from Martin Apple, President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. As technologies develop, he averred, we need to ensure that, in parallel, we see the negatives and threats even as we focus on the benefits. When I pressed him, he distinguished this approach from the common European “precautionary principle,” which is more cautious in its method and would hog-tie (my term!) innovation and the development of tomorrow’s technologies. Jonathan Tucker’s emphatic statement of the scary possibilities that could flow from synbio (scary is also my term, though was synbio guru Drew Endy’s word in the New Yorker piece a year ago that brought this stuff to the attention of the cognoscenti) led to reflection on the emergence of asymmetric threats, and the fact that (as he noted) a smart teen will soon be able to go bio rogue. How are we to contain such a situation? Moreno set context by drawing us back to Plato and the eugenics of Sparta and the relations of politics and biology in every age. Yet the terms of trade have changed, the stakes are raised: what is the emerging biopolitics of tomorrow? The discussion also focused on the international arena. One of BIO’s concerns is that the strong US focus on biosecurity is not matched by equivalent approaches from Europe, and especially not Asia. Regulatory regimes can have the effect of curtailing U.S. competitiveness.

I pressed the issue of asymmetry. While the 21st century tends to be defined in tech terms (“Biotech Century,” as Jeremy Rifkin titles one of his books; “Nano Century,” as I did one of mine), it might make more sense to see it as the asymmetric century. We don’t need to wait for biosmart rogue teens. Competence in QWERTY, that 19th century skill, recently enabled Wikileaks to publish tens of thousands of secret files, and a hacker to share 200 million sets of Facebook info. I shared a recent book purchase, a new study of the Battle of Cannae (perhaps Imperial Rome’s greatest defeat). Rome raised a huge army to bring Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, to his knees. Hannibal, the man who wrote his name in history by bring elephants over the impassable Alps in winter, was a master of asymmetric tactics, like bin Laden in our day. He trapped this great army and killed probably half its men. My point: today, all he would have needed was a keyboard. The 21st century has given asymmetry its head. Synbio offers asymmetric tools that lie far beyond the imagining of former generations.

There is of course disagreement among the most expert of experts as to the real significance of Venter’s latest move. But our panel was unanimous that while press releases are given to exaggeration, what Venter has accomplished is a big deal, and has handily set in motion a serious engagement with its implications.

C-PET’s round 2 will, we hope, bring us nearer some sort of conclusion. We look forward to being joined by Venter’s colleague Robert Friedman. By then perhaps the President’s bioethics commission will have written a draft report. My personal hope is that they will venture far beyond bioethics, assess synbio in its wider possibilities, and perhaps even urge our short-term, technology-unfocused Washington culture into a far wider engagement with the 21st-century implications of these explosive developments.

Back in the early 2000’s, the National Science Foundation hosted a series of events under the banner “Converging Technologies.” They (conferences and books) had something of a “transhumanist” flavor (“enhancing human performance”), which seemed to me unfortunate as it distracted from what they were really saying: that, as it were, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Driven by extraordinary advances in science, technology is set to reshape the human experience over and over. The digital revolution has hardly begun. And what awaits us in nano, bio, IT and cognitive science (NBIC, the NSF watchword for these events) – and, perhaps especially, the development of Artificial Intelligence – is vast, if impossible to predict. The marriage of engineering and biology which is synbio is set to cut a vast swathe through the experience of the human community, for good and for ill. In parallel, the AI/robotics discussion takes a different but no less potentially transformative approach.

Meanwhile, the prophets of risk continue in their labor. Stephen Hawking, who some claim is Newton’s equal, tells us to evacuate the earth within 100 years. Martin Rees, cosmologist and top UK scientist (president of the Royal Society which essentially founded modern science in the 18th century) tells us in his book Our Final Century (ridiculous and demeaning U.S. title, Our Final Hour) that the odds are against our survival on planet Earth. And Bill Joy, uber-technologist and guru at Sun in its heyday, famously told us back in 2000 “Why the Future doesn’t need us.” (Answer for those too young to be reading Wired 10 years ago: because we make a ghastly mistake, or (more subtly) because we make seemingly sensible choices that add up to the voluntary extinction of Homo sapiens sapiens.)

In his presentation, Moreno had suggested that he would not be alive in 100 years’ time to see what might eventuate. I reminded him that Ray Kurzweil, prophet of an AI-driven future and for all his (perhaps undue) optimism respected as thinker and inventer by some of the smartest minds on the planet, not only believes he has a shot at living for ever but is a year or two older than both Moreno and me.

My take? I’m concerned about “bioethics” as yet another silo, but hopeful that Amy Gutmann will take on a wider range of issues and be heard. Concerned that because “playing God” language doesn’t play with the cognoscenti that over-reaching claims of some bioscientists will go unchallenged (I’ve never liked the “playing God” way of playing, though probably all of us know what it means and find its implications intuitively disturbing). Concerned that asymmetry could doom us to an either/or between an Orwellian/Kafkan state and a situation of constant and dire threat from smart sociopath teens and QWERTY-certified Mullahs.

But come join us at 10, G Street NE (tucked away behind the Post Office for those who know DC) on November 5. Perhaps all will be resolved, as the C-PET knowledge network brings yet more smart minds into collaborative engagement and takes forward this global conversation.

The Privacy Agenda

Posted on by
Reply

My Take

C-PET’s latest Roundtable: Privacy and Emerging Technologies

Nigel M. de S. Cameron, President and CEO

Questions raised at the interface of privacy and emerging technologies go far beyond recent controversies over the way Google, Facebook and other social media giants use our information. (As the saying goes, we ain’t seen nothing yet: what about nanodust tracking? And long before that problem may come along, what about the security uses of our info?) But it’s here in our near-universal embrace of social networking and search that the most problematic questions have been raised for general discussion.

It’s problematic for many reasons – for starters, it really isn’t clear whether and how much most people are particularly concerned about privacy. Companies grasping for business models are loathe to limit their options. And because the apps can be so complicated that setting out privacy options that do indeed permit the user to control what is and is not revealed and to whom can prove terminally complex. When experts confess to confusion as to their choices (as plenty of them do), the choice mechanisms (well-intended or not) are plainly shown to be fake. Just as communication is all about your audience actually getting the message, not just your delivering it and hoping for the best; so consent must be informed and its mechanisms as easy to work through as the typical less-smart and less-techie user. That much is simple.

One reason these discussions matter so much lies precisely in the way in which social networking has got under our skin. It’s helped to integrate the internet in our lives with almost the character of a utility (interesting note: Finland just made broadband access a legal right). Our being so used to online social engagement has helped blind users to the question of what’s happening to their information. Do they care? Would they if they thought about it? It’s also providing a context in which we can road test what privacy means in a world of high digital penetration – in which, for example, Facebook alone claims nearly 10% of the species among its regular users. And more than two-thirds of Homo sapiens have mobile “telephones,” as we still call these exponentially multi-purpose handheld devices. (Another note: thinking of them as phones has helped habituate us to them and at the same time made us less aware of their revolutionary significance.) Facebook’s stewardship of our info, and our capacity to hold such companies to account and work their “privacy settings,” will prove potent shapers of the assumptions of the next generation of networking technologies.

Our panel noted that there had been progress in the efforts of these companies, though these settings remain “still barely usable.” It’s not clear, at least to the companies, how sensitive their market really is to the privacy question. The development of the Internet of Things will greatly raise the stakes as vastly more of our planet will end up interconnected. The trend to the consolidation of online identities, and the move away from pseudonymity, has taken place partly deliberately and for good reasons, but has had the effect of worsening the privacy situation as distinct areas of our online lives become conflated and accessible to others. The gap between what we think we have in the way of privacy, and what we actually have, is getting bigger.

I raised my own questions at the end. Will privacy become the most costly commodity of the 21st century? Will it take the collapse of one of the great internet brands in a privacy controversy – their equivalent of Deepwater, but without the oil reserves to mitigate the collapse of public confidence and stock price – to shift the gears of the industry and make privacy protection into its central value? Why not a TQM (total quality management) approach to privacy from top to bottom? One thing seemed clear: these issues are far from resolved, and as technology evolves and business and social patterns morph the nature of the issues will keep shifting.

We are planning more Roundtables on privacy, moving from social media into issues of biometrics and security.

Privacy Panel

Posted on by
Reply

Preparations for our Roundtable on privacy and emerging technologies are now complete: tomorrow’s event will be fascinating as it brings together industry and civil society perspectives. My suspicion is that privacy, in its many aspects, is emerging as perhaps the single biggest issue of the 21st century. Yet the said 21st century has yet to wake up to the fact.

Here’s the program:

You are invited to an

Emerging Technologies Roundtable:

July 9, 2010 – Privacy and Emerging Technologies

Privacy is emerging as one of the hottest topics of the 21st century, as emerging technologies revolutionize our experience of communication, security, business, and ever other aspect of our lives. Recent controversies have focused on Facebook and Google. Do these technologies inherently challenge our notions of privacy? Are we ready for lives that involve far more public disclosure? Eric Schmidt’s much-quoted statement “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” set off a firestorm of comment. The Electronic Frontier Foundation responded: “Google, governments, and technologists need to understand more broadly that ignoring privacy protections in the innovations we incorporate into our lives not only invites invasions of our personal space and comfort, but opens the door to future abuses of power.” It might have added: it also invites consumer rejection and fundamental challenges to the acceptance and success of our technologies.

This is the first of a series of C-PET Emerging Technologies Roundtable events to focus the privacy debate. Space is limited: please RSVP promptly to secure your seat. There is no charge for participation, and lunch will be provided.

The Emerging Technologies Roundtable brings together diverse stakeholders to focus key issues and look ahead to their long-term impact.
Quick Links

Friday, July 9, 2010
Privacy and Emerging Technologies

at the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies
10 G Street NE, Suite 710
11:45AM – 1:30PM (Lunch provided, please RSVP)

Register for this event »

Speakers include:

Jules Polonetsky – “Privacy Innovations and Privacy Gaps 2010“
Co-chair and Director of the Future of Privacy Forum; former Chief Privacy Officer, AOL

Daniel W. Caprio
Managing Director, McKenna, Long and Aldridge; former Chief Privacy Officer, Department of Commerce

Erica Newland
Policy Analyst, Center for Democracy and Technology

Jay Stanley
Senior Policy Analyst, Speech, Privacy, and Technology, ACLU

Moderator: Nigel M. Cameron
President and CEO, Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET)

The UEA Climate Mess

Posted on by
Reply

News that the third committee looking into the scandal that lately enveloped the UK’s lead climate center at the University of East Anglia (UEA) has finally delivered its report, and while clearing the top scientist involve of dishonesty chastised him for much else, raises all kinds of issues.

As is widely recognized, the hacking of a large number of emails from UEA handed an advantage to those critical of the position of the International Panel on Climate Change (as had several other discrete events, especially the exposure of the scary Himalayan glacier scenario as some kind of muddled error based on a popular publication) – in the crucial run-up to the Copenhagen summit. While it is hard to establish cause and effect, the failure of the summit to achieve what many had hoped for and expected was certainly not helped by the errors – and the whiff of hubris that lay behind them.
The point here is that the climate change debate runs from science and technology through social values and civil society to governments and the global community; it’s a phenomenon which offers a highly unusual case study. What led to the tipping point turning particular views among many science experts into a global movement is hard to explain. Many factors came together. By the same token, what led the movement to tip backwards at Copenhagen is also obscure. We can identify factors; it is hard to suggest causality.
What is of interest is the manner in which technical views (contested by some serious experts, but widely held) turned into a global crusade and then suddenly, when the key global policy event was convened, faltered. Without prejudice to the significance of this set of issues, there are many more with global moment that have barely reached the consciousness of a small, indeed tiny, minority. Yet they could. It may be they are of vast consequence; it may be they are not. But they would take on consequence if they experienced the kind of viral spread that climate change has. For example, what about the impact of humanoid robotics on employment? In x years’ time, it could be profound, essentially extinguishing either (the optimistic view) the need for menial, repetitive, unskilled labor; or (perhaps more realistically) the job opportunities of billions of unskilled and not well-educated persons. Or what about disastrous damage from asteroid or comet collisions? Or the escape or malicious manufacture of a dangerous pathogen? Or . . . . There is a very long list, much of which is tabulated in the illuminating short book by Martin (Lord) Rees, currently president of the UK’s Royal Society and a leading astrophysicist, Our Final Century. (American readers note: the silly title stateside is Our Final Hour. Rees is making an argument about the 21st century.)
Point is: the crossover from informed smart S and T opinion to, as it were, the public domain, is not a simple, logical progression. It occurs (cf. Thomas Kuhn and his evergreen prescience) in a jump. Just like the question, why did Europe decide to say no thank you to GMO food? The interface of heavy science research and widespread public sentiment is no easy thing to predict or manage. Next week I shall be at a conference of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative on “stakeholder” attitudes to nano and the NNI’s latest strategic plan. People in general know and care little about these things. Then, all of a sudden, they care a good deal, whether they know or not.
Whatever other lessons we learn, the road from An Inconvenient Truth to Copenhagen went by way of some seriously short-sighted decision-making at the University of East Anglia. That may or may not have been where the wheels came loose. But as the 21st century presses ahead, the risk implications of public and political disinterest in science and emerging technologies get only greater.

What Technology itself is up to

Posted on by
Reply

I’m interested in the way in which the mainstream media have begun to pick up on developments and ideas in the technosphere. Of course, they have a very long way to go. But they are on their way. Which is good for technology and, indeed, the rest of us. Is “technology” to be considered, as it were, one of us? Well, that’s the question raised obliquely by the title of Kevin Kelly’s much-awaited book “What Technology Wants,” previewed in this healthily quizzical NY Times blog by Robert Wright.

Wright’s blog is titled obliquely enough itself – “Building one big brain.” And as Wright notes, “Kelly does say in ‘What Technology Wants’ that technology is increasingly like ‘a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.'” Hmmm. After the selfish gene, the selfish chip?