SNS: SUPER CHANGE AND GOOD GOVERNANCE
 

SUPER CHANGE AND GOOD GOVERNANCE

By Berit Anderson

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First, the "FiRe Box": The Future in Review 2025 Agenda is online, and the conference is right around the corner. Check out the schedule to see why you need to be there, then sign up before it's too late!

This is your personal invitation to join me for FiRe 2025 at the Qualcomm Institute in San Diego, CA, June 8-11. If you've participated in past years, you know why
The Economist calls Future in Review "the best technology conference in the world." This year, we've improved FiRe again. We understand that participants want focus and results, and our ongoing mission is for FiRe participants to acquire a business and/or a technology and finance-driven understanding of global markets for the next five years. And you'll meet the people who can help you and your company achieve your goals.

In addition to a general view, selected FiRe themes this year include tariff effects on the global economy; the role embodied carbon in construction can play in climate issues; the microbiome and discoveries in inter-special collaboration and cooperation; the newest discoveries in brain structure and function; the key role "Beyond AI" machine learning can play in healthcare; the use of digital twins and VR in preserving global coral colonies; bringing AI and phenome-driven medicine into longevity and radical healthcare improvements; the future of the US / China / CRINK vs. West relations, from economic to military issues; and more.

As usual, all participants will have the chance to meet and make plans at multiple receptions and events during our time together in San Diego.

Register now at
www.futureinreview.com or email Emma for details at emma@stratnews.com.

I hope you'll decide to join us for the best Future in Review yet.


Mark Anderson

Chair, FiRe 2025

 

SUPER CHANGE AND GOOD GOVERNANCE

By Berit Anderson

Why Read: The confluence of technology and authoritarianism are driving us into a global period of Super Change. This week's Global Report demonstrates how current regulatory frameworks and approaches are insufficient to meet this moment and how to reinvent our relationship with governance and tech.

 

There is an extreme misalignment playing out between the modern world as it is evolving and its governance.

On the one hand, technology adoption by both good and bad actors is driving super change - vast paradigm shifts in the ways many of us live, work, create, and play. Across the globe, sweeping authoritarianism and the global economy's shift to techno feudalism (an economy built on freely given uncompensated data) - and defense against its spread - is accelerating this, funding the deployment of widespread surveillance, data mining, and products designed to make use of that data.

We understand our technology and the scale of its impacts less and less.

  • As Mark Anderson wrote in last week's Global Report (SNS: Technology's Hidden Hand), the economy is now tied up and enshrined in technology and practices  - crypto, the dark web, hacking - that the average person does not understand and has no visibility into.

  • As I wrote the week before (SNS: The Messy, Antisocial Future of Agentic AI), the errors in agentic LLM technology are little understood - not even by those building it - but are nonetheless being added into every work- and information-sorting technology we rely on for human decision making and cooperation.

  • And as we've written many times in these pages, modern warfare is now multi-pronged, all-fronts warfare: a complex web of cyberattacks, economic undercutting, and manipulation of education and populace blocs to undermine national unity.

  • Even kinetic warfare has become disconnected from real actors, as drones and surveillance reinvent the modern battlefield.

  • The populace of a country without information borders (as opposed to, say, China) can be controlled through weaponized propaganda more easily than ever - organizing political opinions, impacting elections, fomenting protests, elevating frustration, and diverting the attention of individual citizens from the real drivers shaping the modern world.

All these factors compound on one another, creating an increasingly fragile and chaotic ecosystem in which trust on both sides of the aisle has been eroded and politicized, small technical errors can take down an entire planeload of people or misdirect a drone strike, and virtually all news and information is now suspect.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, we are still relying on humans who make most of their re-election money by killing or crafting ineffective regulation of these systems to, well, regulate these systems.

So it's not surprising that legal systems lag at least five years behind developing technology, creating a regulatory no-man's-land in which breakthrough innovations either stagnate or develop in regulatory gray areas that create massive downstream risks.

For entrepreneurs, this means longer runway requirements, higher uncertainty premiums from investors, and the constant threat that regulatory decisions made without technical understanding will invalidate entire business models overnight.

In these environs, those who act first and apologize later will continue to amass power and influence, as we now see happening across the agentic AI space. It's worth noting, as well, that those who can most afford the risk of acting first and apologizing later are often companies and individuals who already have power and influence.

There are a number of international frameworks for regulation entering this new era. Let's take a look at a few:

  • Government-accelerated technical innovation, no IP laws, closed information borders (China)

  • Open but decelerated technical innovation, IP laws, open information borders (US)

  • Regulated technical innovation, IP laws, open information borders (EU)