The Age of Disruption: Risks and Opportunities

A hundred and fifty years ago, the economy was based on agriculture and manufacturing whose technologies changed on a generational time scale. These days the economy is based directly on technologies—digital, algorithmic, military, logistical—that change almost annually, so that technology disrupts and re-orders the economy and society continually at all levels. This poses problems for firms and governments.

Companies increasingly compete not by cutting costs but by designing, launching and dominating new technologies—think of the scramble at the moment to launch AI technologies. There are large risks in doing this. Will the new technology offering work? If so, how well? Which rivals will enter the market? How will the tech be received by consumers? Often in technology, if a company—Google, Nvidia, Apple— captures a large user base, it can go on to dominate the market and shut out its rivals. This magnifies the risks to launching a new technology product.

In the past nations competed on the basis of their military prowess and their exports and imports. Now national standing depends very much on what technologies a nation commands and excels in. This sets up a competition for nations to dominate certain technologies and for them to see these as national assets to be closely guarded. What are the risks in this new era of national competition in technology, and how should they be managed?

Technologies often create large downstream problems, which are then solved by further technologies. Fossil fuel causes global warming, air transport causes the swift international transmission of epidemics, nuclear energy brings the problem of nuclear waste disposal. Solutions cause problems which call for further solutions. How are such problems to be managed and resolved?

We are entering an era, commercially and nationally, where we increasingly face problems we cannot foresee. We simply do not know which technologies will come next, which policies will disrupt next, which consequences will happen next. We are entering a period of fundamental uncertainty where outcomes are not foreseeable and not well defined. In these circumstances rational—logic-based—planning and decision-making fails. We need new approaches to handling fundamental uncertainty moving forward.

This meeting will use complexity science as a lingua franca to discuss these issues with scholars and practitioners from diverse fields and disciplines.