Post-pandemic Tech

What will the next decade's geopolitics look like? What are the most important emerging technologies right now? How are they impacted by COVID-19?

In my (1h 8 min) interview, Post-pandemic Tech, with David A. Bray, inaugural Director of the GeoTech Center at the Atlantic Council, the esteemed Washington DC-based think tank, we talk about jazz improv, geopolitics, technology, privacy, openness, human dignity, data trusts, quantum computing as well as post-pandemic tech opportunities and constraints.

The takeaway is that the world now needs to ensure that new technologies not only contribute to innovation but also simultaneously empower people, increase prosperity and secure peace. One way we talked about is to develop data trusts to secure that exchanges of data are mutually beneficial and provide ethical and governance support.  

In this post, you'll find some key quotes from that interview, which you can listen to in a podcast player of your choice. The interview transcript will be posted six days from now.

You are/were young and promising. That’s a lot of pressure, or no? (00:01:26)

My biggest fear was that the most exciting part of my life was going to be as a teenager. I did some science fair projects early on, in Middle School and High School, back in the 1980s and 1990s. That was still when government was still the biggest benefactor of scouting for talent in science and technology through scouting for talent through science fairs around the country. I was approached by the US government when I was 15 to do a US Navy project in the Sea of Cortez working with Robert Ballard who found the Titanic.

How are new technologies and data changing geopolitics? (00:07:43)

We’ve been seeing this build for a while. We are now, in two years of less, looking at 80 billion network devices relative to 7 billion people on the planet. The amount of data, it might be upwards of a 120 zetabytes, that is 120 billion terabytes of data, which some say is three times the amounts of conversations we have ever had as a species. So, if we are not drowning in data now, which I think we are, we are going to continue to drown in data and need to make sense of it.

China is obviously the biggest elephant in the room. But even if you think of a US company like 3M, with the pandemic, there was a controversy, 3M said to the US government, we are a global company, we have factories in Europe and other places, we are going to produce our masks and we have clients and allegiances beyond the United States. These things are getting murkier but also, at the same time, more transparent. These companies don’t have one, singular national agenda.

In 2003, after 9/11, I got involved with SARS response, and after it was over I was asked to brief the National Security Council, I was asked for my takeaways from having done those two events. I came with two points, one, I’m not sure organizing as a nation state past 2030 makes sense. Partly because, a packet on the internet has a sent by and received by, and we are seeing this with GDPR, which is an attempt to say, anybody who is a member of the EU, regardless of where you travel, you treat them as if they are in the EU with regards to their data, which really comes head first with the treaty of Westphalia. The second point I made was that companies will increasingly be transnational in nature, and when that happens, how do you reconcile what they are doing as a company with what a country is doing? 

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris @joshrh19 (Instagram) on Unsplash

This is pretty explosive. You don’t think the nation state is the correct to organize post-2030…which is less than a decade away? 

Yes. I think we either upgrade it or we find a different way. We need to think of how we act more like networks and less like nations. One example I would give to you is how Estonia fairly recently said, you could become an e-resident of Estonia without having to reside in Estonia. You might ask why they did it? One, because they are a small nation with about 1.1 million people. But it’s also recognizing that if a large nation state next to Estonia, decides to compromise the Estonian infrastructure, and it’s only Estonians’ data, then only Estonia really cares. But if they are involving people from around the world, that are choosing to have an e-residency, and have a proof of identity with Estonia, now you’ve got the entire world upset. 

So, it’s an effective form of diplomacy, and a deterrence, by operating like a network and not just a nation state. 

Who owns my data? (00:30:20) Should you own your own data and sell it or rent it to somebody who is using it? Is it possible to have this very extreme notion that you own your own data? Isn’t it also fair that if you collect it, you own it? There’s a finder’s fee to data, too, right?

I think the word own gets very murky in data. Let’s say somebody take a photo of you with three other people. Who owns the photo? Instead, how to you make sure you have agency and choice about how the data is used? 

Unlike a physical thing, where there is one painting by Picasso, you can make copies, so trying to apply the notion of ownership gets murky. Consent of use is the point. Most people, if you try to set your privacy settings, you get a 40-page legal agreement. 

What I really want to see is a natural language conversation with an agent on your behalf who goes out and negotiates with intermediaries and says, “David gives consent for his health data to be used, to the extent that he is unconscious and not revivable. He gives consent if he is in an accident. Otherwise, you cannot use his health data”. That should be a conversation with the agent. Perhaps there should be three choices, you could pick middle of the road, you could pick extreme on one side or the other, e.g. very privacy conscious or share data in exchange for getting things for free, and over time it gets more refined. We’ve got to figure out how to make this more of a conversation with people. 

Which specific technologies are in your scope at the moment and why? 

The reason why we are created is, we were working on making the Internet more inclusive. In mid-2018, we got to the point where about half the world had Internet. What could we do to make sure the other half at least had a choice of having the internet being accessible? What could we learn from the last 25 years in making the internet more diverse, inclusive and participatory? Also, I was working with [US] Special Command tackling misinformation disinformation, which seems to be a growing challenge, not just for the US but for any country around the world. 

This is: congratulations, there’s personalized medicine, we can tailor medications to your body—oh, wait, that can also be used for personalized poison. This is: congrats, we can use 3D printing and we can produce things anywhere—oh wait, we can produce things anywhere. This is: with quantum computing, we’ll be able to do very impressive gains in quantum cycles, once that occurs—wait, we can start to break encryption. So what that means, is recognizing that there is a series of technologies on the horizon: in the bio space, in the manufacturing space, in the computational space, that are all coming out at the same time.

Usually, it’s been shown it takes about 15-25 years for societies to figure out the good, the bad, and what they consider to be ethical and not ethical with new technology. If you’ve got these waves coming out at once, I don’t think you have 25 years to figure out what’s ethical and not ethical, we have to sort it out fairly soon, so we have to get ahead of it. Usually, when technologies come out, initially, there’s usually widespread inequities, if you think about the railroads in the United States, but also in England and Europe. When railroad technology came out, there were some extremely rich people and others who were not. That’s what technology does. Initially, it’s not democratized, so it’s not accessible to everybody. There’s those who know how to use it and who know how to make the capitalization of it. (00:40:21)

Do you think post-pandemic tech will be different? 

Technology itself doesn’t solve any problem. It’s the choices we make that determine whether it solves the problem or it makes more problems. And there will always be more problems. For example: we’ve rolled out the internet to the world—oh wait, now we’ve rolled out the internet to the world, we’ve got cybercrime, we’ve got identity, we’ve got misinformation. So now we have new things to address. Should we have not rolled out internet to the world? No. We did. It’s a good thing. But now we have to figure out the next round. It’s like Charles Dickens said: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. We will always be in that cusp of really great and really bad things being there. 

What I would hope for this pandemic, and I’m not seeing it from the United States right now, which is very disappointing, is that what can we do to put aside what I would call squabbles on the sidelines, and say, we are truly connected, we all relate. 

Listen to the whole interview on Post-pandemic Tech at the Futurized podcast or drop this RSS feed into a podcast player of your choice: https://www.futurized.co/feed.xml

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