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SUPER CHANGE AND GOOD GOVERNANCE By Berit Anderson ________ 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! 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.
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.
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:
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