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A comprehensive study of technological change

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The societal impacts of technological change can be seen in many domains, from messenger RNA vaccines and automation to drones and climate change. The pace of that technological change can affect its impact, and how quickly a technology improves in performance can be an indicator of its future importance. For decision-makers like investors, entrepreneurs, and policymakers, predicting which technologies are fast improving (and which are overhyped) can mean the difference between success and failure.

New research from MIT aims to assist in the prediction of technology performance improvement using U.S. patents as a dataset. The study describes 97 percent of the U.S. patent system as a set of 1,757 discrete technology domains, and quantitatively assesses each domain for its improvement potential.

“The rate of improvement can only be empirically estimated when substantial performance measurements are made over long time periods,” says Anuraag Singh SM ’20, lead author of the paper. “In some large technological fields, including software and clinical medicine, such measures have rarely, if ever, been made.”

A previous MIT study provided empirical measures for 30 technological domains, but the patent sets identified for those technologies cover less than 15 percent of the patents in the U.S. patent system. The major purpose of this new study is to provide predictions of the performance improvement rates for the thousands of domains not accessed by empirical measurement. To accomplish this, the researchers developed a method using a new probability-based algorithm, machine learning, natural language processing, and patent network analytics.

Overlap and centrality

A technology domain, as the researchers define it, consists of sets of artifacts fulfilling a specific function using a specific branch of scientific knowledge. To find the patents that best represent a domain, the team built on previous research conducted by co-author Chris Magee, a professor of the practice of engineering systems within the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Magee and his colleagues found that by looking for patent overlap between the U.S. and international patent-classification systems, they could quickly identify patents that best represent a technology. The researchers ultimately created a correspondence of all patents within the U.S. patent system to a set of 1,757 technology domains.

To estimate performance improvement, Singh employed a method refined by co-authors Magee and Giorgio Triulzi, a researcher with the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC) within IDSS and an assistant professor at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. Their method is based on the average “centrality” of patents in the patent citation network. Centrality refers to multiple criteria for determining the ranking or importance of nodes within a network.

“Our method provides predictions of performance improvement rates for nearly all definable technologies for the first time,” says Singh.

Those rates vary — from a low of 2 percent per year for the “Mechanical skin treatment — Hair removal and wrinkles” domain to a high of 216 percent per year for the “Dynamic information exchange and support systems integrating multiple channels” domain. The researchers found that most technologies improve slowly; more than 80 percent of technologies improve at less than 25 percent per year. Notably, the number of patents in a technological area was not a strong indicator of a higher improvement rate.

“Fast-improving domains are concentrated in a few technological areas,” says Magee. “The domains that show improvement rates greater than the predicted rate for integrated chips — 42 percent, from Moore’s law — are predominantly based upon software and algorithms.”

TechNext Inc.

The researchers built an online interactive system where domains corresponding to technology-related keywords can be found along with their improvement rates. Users can input a keyword describing a technology and the system returns a prediction of improvement for the technological domain, an automated measure of the quality of the match between the keyword and the domain, and patent sets so that the reader can judge the semantic quality of the match.

Moving forward, the researchers have founded a new MIT spinoff called TechNext Inc. to further refine this technology and use it to help leaders make better decisions, from budgets to investment priorities to technology policy. Like any inventors, Magee and his colleagues want to protect their intellectual property rights. To that end, they have applied for a patent for their novel system and its unique methodology.

“Technologies that improve faster win the market,” says Singh. “Our search system enables technology managers, investors, policymakers, and entrepreneurs to quickly look up predictions of improvement rates for specific technologies.”

Adds Magee: “Our goal is to bring greater accuracy, precision, and repeatability to the as-yet fuzzy art of technology forecasting.”

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Technology over the long run: zoom out to see how dramatically the world can change within a lifetime

It is easy to underestimate how much the world can change within a lifetime. considering how dramatically the world has changed can help us see how different the world could be in a few years or decades..

Technology can change the world in ways that are unimaginable until they happen. Switching on an electric light would have been unimaginable for our medieval ancestors. In their childhood, our grandparents would have struggled to imagine a world connected by smartphones and the Internet.

Similarly, it is hard for us to imagine the arrival of all those technologies that will fundamentally change the world we are used to.

We can remind ourselves that our own future might look very different from the world today by looking back at how rapidly technology has changed our world in the past. That’s what this article is about.

One insight I take away from this long-term perspective is how unusual our time is. Technological change was extremely slow in the past – the technologies that our ancestors got used to in their childhood were still central to their lives in their old age. In stark contrast to those days, we live in a time of extraordinarily fast technological change. For recent generations, it was common for technologies that were unimaginable in their youth to become common later in life.

The long-run perspective on technological change

The big visualization offers a long-term perspective on the history of technology. 1

The timeline begins at the center of the spiral. The first use of stone tools, 3.4 million years ago, marks the beginning of this history of technology. 2 Each turn of the spiral represents 200,000 years of history. It took 2.4 million years – 12 turns of the spiral – for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking. 3

To be able to visualize the inventions in the more recent past – the last 12,000 years – I had to unroll the spiral. I needed more space to be able to show when agriculture, writing, and the wheel were invented. During this period, technological change was faster, but it was still relatively slow: several thousand years passed between each of these three inventions.

From 1800 onwards, I stretched out the timeline even further to show the many major inventions that rapidly followed one after the other.

The long-term perspective that this chart provides makes it clear just how unusually fast technological change is in our time.

You can use this visualization to see how technology developed in particular domains. Follow, for example, the history of communication: from writing to paper, to the printing press, to the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, all the way to the Internet and smartphones.

Or follow the rapid development of human flight. In 1903, the Wright brothers took the first flight in human history (they were in the air for less than a minute), and just 66 years later, we landed on the moon. Many people saw both within their lifetimes: the first plane and the moon landing.

This large visualization also highlights the wide range of technology’s impact on our lives. It includes extraordinarily beneficial innovations, such as the vaccine that allowed humanity to eradicate smallpox , and it includes terrible innovations, like the nuclear bombs that endanger the lives of all of us .

What will the next decades bring?

The red timeline reaches up to the present and then continues in green into the future. Many children born today, even without further increases in life expectancy, will live well into the 22nd century.

New vaccines, progress in clean, low-carbon energy, better cancer treatments – a range of future innovations could very much improve our living conditions and the environment around us. But, as I argue in a series of articles , there is one technology that could even more profoundly change our world: artificial intelligence (AI).

One reason why artificial intelligence is such an important innovation is that intelligence is the main driver of innovation itself. This fast-paced technological change could speed up even more if it’s driven not only by humanity’s intelligence but also by artificial intelligence. If this happens, the change currently stretched out over decades might happen within a very brief time span of just a year. Possibly even faster. 4

I think AI technology could have a fundamentally transformative impact on our world. In many ways, it is already changing our world, as I documented in this companion article . As this technology becomes more capable in the years and decades to come, it can give immense power to those who control it (and it poses the risk that it could escape our control entirely).

Such systems might seem hard to imagine today, but AI technology is advancing quickly. Many AI experts believe there is a real chance that human-level artificial intelligence will be developed within the next decades, as I documented in this article .

Technology will continue to change the world – we should all make sure that it changes it for the better

What is familiar to us today – photography, the radio, antibiotics, the Internet, or the International Space Station circling our planet – was unimaginable to our ancestors just a few generations ago. If your great-great-great grandparents could spend a week with you, they would be blown away by your everyday life.

What I take away from this history is that I will likely see technologies in my lifetime that appear unimaginable to me today.

In addition to this trend towards increasingly rapid innovation, there is a second long-run trend. Technology has become increasingly powerful. While our ancestors wielded stone tools, we are building globe-spanning AI systems and technologies that can edit our genes.

Because of the immense power that technology gives those who control it, there is little that is as important as the question of which technologies get developed during our lifetimes. Therefore, I think it is a mistake to leave the question about the future of technology to the technologists. Which technologies are controlled by whom is one of the most important political questions of our time because of the enormous power these technologies convey to those who control them.

We all should strive to gain the knowledge we need to contribute to an intelligent debate about the world we want to live in. To a large part, this means gaining knowledge and wisdom on the question of which technologies we want.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank my colleagues Hannah Ritchie, Bastian Herre, Natasha Ahuja, Edouard Mathieu, Daniel Bachler, Charlie Giattino, and Pablo Rosado for their helpful comments on drafts of this essay and the visualization. Thanks also to Lizka Vaintrob and Ben Clifford for the conversation that initiated this visualization.

Appendix: About the choice of visualization in this article

The recent speed of technological change makes it difficult to picture the history of technology in one visualization. When you visualize this development on a linear timeline, then most of the timeline is almost empty, while all the action is crammed into the right corner:

In my large visualization here, I tried to avoid this problem and instead show the long history of technology in a way that lets you see when each technological breakthrough happened and how, within the last millennia, there was a continuous acceleration of technological change.

The recent speed of technological change makes it difficult to picture the history of technology in one visualization. In the appendix, I show how this would look if it were linear.

It is, of course, difficult to assess when exactly the first stone tools were used.

The research by McPherron et al. (2010) suggested that it was at least 3.39 million years ago. This is based on two fossilized bones found in Dikika in Ethiopia, which showed “stone-tool cut marks for flesh removal and percussion marks for marrow access”. These marks were interpreted as being caused by meat consumption and provide the first evidence that one of our ancestors, Australopithecus afarensis, used stone tools.

The research by Harmand et al. (2015) provided evidence for stone tool use in today’s Kenya 3.3 million years ago.

References:

McPherron et al. (2010) – Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia . Published in Nature.

Harmand et al. (2015) – 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya . Published in Nature.

Evidence for controlled fire use approximately 1 million years ago is provided by Berna et al. (2012) Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa , published in PNAS.

The authors write: “The ability to control fire was a crucial turning point in human evolution, but the question of when hominins first developed this ability still remains. Here we show that micromorphological and Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (mFTIR) analyses of intact sediments at the site of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa, provide unambiguous evidence—in the form of burned bone and ashed plant remains—that burning took place in the cave during the early Acheulean occupation, approximately 1.0 Ma. To the best of our knowledge, this is the earliest secure evidence for burning in an archaeological context.”

This is what authors like Holden Karnofsky called ‘Process for Automating Scientific and Technological Advancement’ or PASTA. Some recent developments go in this direction: DeepMind’s AlphaFold helped to make progress on one of the large problems in biology, and they have also developed an AI system that finds new algorithms that are relevant to building a more powerful AI.

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Technology and the future of growth: Challenges of change

Subscribe to global connection, zia qureshi zia qureshi senior fellow - global economy and development.

February 25, 2020

This blog is part of a project  exploring how the agenda for economic growth is being reshaped by forces of change, particularly technological change.

Economic growth has been lackluster for more than a decade now. This has occurred at a time when economies have faced much unfolding change. What are the forces of change, how are they affecting the growth dynamics, and what are the implications for policy? A recently published book, “ Growth in a Time of Change, ” addresses these questions.

Three basic ingredients drive economic growth—productivity, capital, and labor. All three are facing new challenges in a changing context. Foremost among the drivers of change has been technology, spearheaded by digital transformation.

Slowdown in productivity and investment

Productivity is the main long-term propeller of economic growth. Technology-enabled innovation is the major spur to productivity growth. Yet, paradoxically, productivity growth has slowed as digital technologies have boomed. Among advanced economies over the past 15 years or so, it has averaged less than half of the pace of the previous 15 years. Firms at the technological frontier have reaped major productivity gains, but the impact on productivity more widely across firms has been weak. The new technologies have tended to produce winners-take-most outcomes. Dominant firms have acquired more market power, market structures have become less competitive, and business dynamism has declined.

Investment also has been weak in most major economies. The persistent weakness of investment despite historically low interest rates has prompted concerns about the risk of “secular stagnation.” Weak productivity growth and investment have reinforced each other and are linked by similar shifts in market structures and dynamics.

Shifts in labor markets

Technology is having profound effects on labor markets. Automation and digital advances are shifting labor demand away from routine low- to middle-level skills to higher-level and more sophisticated analytical, technical, and managerial skills. On the supply side, however, equipping workers with skills that complement the new technologies has lagged, hindering the broader diffusion of innovation within economies. Education and training have been losing the race with technology.

Most major economies face the challenge of aging populations. Many of them are also seeing a leveling off of gains in labor force participation rates and basic education attainments of the population. These trends put an even greater focus on productivity—and technological innovations that drive it—to deliver economic growth.

Rising inequality

Growth has also become less inclusive. Income inequality has been rising in most major economies, and the increase has been particularly pronounced in some of them, such as the United States. The new technologies favoring capital and higher-level skills have contributed to a decline in labor’s share of income and to increased wage inequality. They have also been associated with more concentrated industry structures and high economic rents enjoyed by dominant firms. Income has shifted from labor to capital and the distribution of both labor and capital income has become more unequal.

Rising inequality and mounting anxiety about jobs have contributed to increased social tensions and political divisiveness. Populism has surged in many countries. Nationalist and protectionist sentiment has been on the rise, with a backlash against international trade that, alongside technological change, is seen to have increased inequality with job losses and wage stagnation for low-skilled workers.

Changing growth pathways

While income inequality has been rising within many countries, inequality between countries has been falling as faster-growing emerging economies narrow the income gap with advanced economies. Technology poses new challenges for this economic convergence. Manufacturing-led growth in emerging economies has been the dominant driver of convergence, fueled by their comparative advantage in labor-intensive production based on their large pools of low-skill, low-wage workers. Such comparative advantage is eroding with automation of low-skill work, creating the need to develop alternative pathways to growth aligned with technological change.

AI, robotics, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Technological change reshaping growth will only intensify as artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and cyber-physical systems take the digital revolution to another level. We may be on the cusp of what has been termed the “Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).” And globalization is going increasingly digital, a transformation that, analogous to 4IR, has been termed “Globalization 4.0.”

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Technological change recently has not delivered its full potential in boosting productivity and economic growth. It has pushed income inequality higher and generated fears about a “robocalypse”—massive job losses from automation. This should not cause despair, however.

Advances in digital technologies hold considerable potential to lift the trajectory of productivity and economic growth, and to create new and better jobs to replace old ones. As much as two-thirds of potential productivity growth in major economies over the next decade could be related to the new digital technologies. But technological change is inherently disruptive and entails difficult transitions. It also inevitably creates winners and losers—as does globalization. Policies have a crucial role to play. Unfortunately, they have been slow to adapt to the challenges of change. With improved and more responsive policies, better outcomes are possible.

An agenda to harness the potential of new technology

The core of the forward policy agenda is to better harness the potential of the new technologies. Reforms must seek to improve the enabling environment for firms and workers—to broaden access to opportunities that come from technological change and to enhance capabilities to adjust to the new challenges.

• Policies and institutions governing markets must keep pace as technological change transforms the world of business. Competition policies should be revamped for the digital age to ensure that markets continue to provide an open and level playing field for firms, keep competition strong, and check the growth of monopolistic structures. New regulatory issues revolving around data, the lifeblood of the digital economy, must be addressed. Flexibility in markets will be key to facilitating adjustments to disruptions and structural shifts from digital transformation.
• The innovation ecosystem should keep pushing the technological frontier but also foster wider economic impacts from the new advances. With the intangible asset of knowledge becoming an increasingly important driver of economic success, research and development systems and patent regimes should be improved to promote broader diffusion of technologies embodying new knowledge.
• The foundation of digital infrastructure and digital literacy must be strengthened. The digital divide is narrowing but wide gaps remain.
• Investment in education and training must be boosted and reoriented to emphasize the skills for the jobs of the future. With the old career path of “learn-work-retire” giving way to one of continuous learning, programs for worker upskilling and reskilling and lifelong learning must the scaled up. The key to winning the race with technology is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines.
• Labor market policies should become more forward-looking, shifting the focus from seeking to protect existing jobs to improving workers’ ability to change jobs. Social protection systems, traditionally based on formal long-term employer-employee relationships, should be adapted to a more dynamic job market. Social contracts need to realign with the changing nature of work.
• Tax systems should be reviewed in light of the new tax challenges of the digital economy, including the implications of the transformations occurring in business and work and the new income distribution dynamics. The potential tax reform agenda spans taxes on labor, capital, and wealth.

Reforms are needed at the international level as well, although the dominant part of the agenda to make technology—and globalization—work better and for all rests with policies at the national level. Not only must past gains in establishing a rules-based international trading system be shielded from protectionist headwinds, but new disciplines must be devised for the next phase of globalization led by digital flows to ensure open access and fair competition. Sensible policies on migration can complement national policies, such as pension reform and lifelong learning, in mitigating the effects of population aging.

The era of smart machines holds much promise. With smart policies, the future could be one of stronger and more inclusive growth.

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July 19, 2017

Making Sense of Rapid Technological Change

By: Paul Scharre

Technology is changing our world at an astonishing pace. In the span of a few short years, the internet, mobile devices, and social media have transformed how we communicate and get information about the world. This has opened up new vectors for the spread of information, real and fake, and added new voices to society’s collective discourse. The colonization of the physical world by the internet, with billions of devices coming online and joining the “Internet of Things,” similarly has created new opportunities for productivity and entertainment, as well as new vectors for attack against cyber-physical systems. Even as we adapt to a world that is more interconnected and transparent than ever before, we also must anticipate changes that technology may bring. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence foreshadow a world in which purpose-built machines can accomplish a wide range of human tasks, displacing some forms of human labor. The result could be tremendous gains in productivity, but also major economic and societal disruption. Improvements in genomics and synthetic biology hold the promise of even more radical transformations, with advances in human performance, the eradication of diseases, and even human life extension.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence foreshadow a world in which purpose-built machines can accomplish a wide range of human tasks, displacing some forms of human labor.

How should we think about the future? Amidst such dizzying changes, anything can seem possible. On one level, this awareness of the array of possible futures can be valuable, freeing us from pre-existing assumptions about what the future may hold and allowing us to think more creatively. Opening our minds to new ideas can allow us to seize opportunities or notice trends we might have missed, and prepare us mentally for the surprises that are sure to come. On another level, however, the sheer vastness of possible futures can be paralyzing. How can we discern which futures are likely? How should we hedge against a set of possibilities that seem infinite? 

This challenge is particularly acute in the defense field, where militaries make billion-dollar investments on decades-long time horizons and therefore must think critically about the future. The U.S. Navy is currently building the USS  John F.   Kennedy  aircraft carrier, which will be commissioned in 2020 and will stay in the force until 2070. How will warfare evolve over this carrier’s half-century lifespan? The scale of these investments ($13 billion for a new carrier) means the question of what the future will look like has very real consequences for decisions today. 

Beyond “Game-Changers” 

Informed by the knowledge that warfare can sometimes change in profound and disruptive ways that upend traditional ways of fighting, the defense futures field is awash in imagining “game-changers,” but almost anything can be a game-changer under the right circumstances. As an intellectual exercise, pondering how warfare might change can be incredibly valuable, but defense planners need to be able to weigh the likelihood of these possible futures to inform investments today. It is of course true that no one can predict the future, but every year the United States government makes a bet on the future of warfare to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in defense investments. Buying an aircraft carrier, a fighter jet, or some other item constitutes an implicit prediction about the future of warfare.

Three years ago, then-CNAS CEO Bob Work (now Deputy Secretary of Defense) launched a project at CNAS to examine how technology could change the future of warfare. There are three perspectives, or lenses, we can apply when looking at the future. While none are crystal balls, they can help planners think through possible futures in a more rigorous way.

1. Proliferation of the Now

William Gibson, the science fiction author who coined the term “cyberspace,” has said, “the future is here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Some of the most important changes in the future will come not from a new technology, but from a larger number of people having access to something that already exists.

Imagine looking at an early automobile at the turn of the 20th century. The immediate implication was clear: faster transit. One could travel to a neighboring town for lunch and be back in the same day! But it would have been harder to predict the second and third order effects that would come from everyone having automobiles: superhighways, suburbs, gridlock, smog, road rage, and climate change. Similarly, there can be great value in trying to anticipate the complications that will ensue when everyone has access to a technology. In some cases, like nuclear weapons, anticipating these risks can help motivate efforts to stem proliferation. In other cases, such as drones, the technology may be too diffuse to halt proliferation , but anticipating these challenges can help prepare for the changes that are coming.

Over the next several decades, billions more people will come online, gaining access to the sprawling, evolving, raucous social experiment that is the internet and social media. The inclusion of the rest of humanity into the digital age will have profound economic and political consequences, empowering individuals and accelerating productivity and innovation. Medical treatments will also become available to a wider segment of the population as costs decrease over time. Some technologies benefit from scale in a way that can lead to qualitatively different effects when deployed en masse. Social media is of little value, for example, if only a few people have it. Data, in particular, has tremendous value when aggregated and analyzed. Sequencing a patient’s genome has medical benefits today, but as the price drops the number of human genomes sequenced will rise , creating an unparalleled dataset on human genetics that can be analyzed for broad patterns of disease and health. These are just a few examples of ways in which the proliferation of existing technology can lead to significant societal changes. 

The pace of change matters a great deal. Looking at underlying trends in technology, demographics, resources, climate change, and other areas can help inform the likelihood of certain futures. Surprises can and will occur, but trends can point to which possible futures are consistent with the path we are on and which futures would require a discontinuity.

The most rapid technology changes today are happening in areas based on information technology. While the exponential pace of computer chip advancement (Moore’s Law) has begun to taper off , new computing techniques like deep neural networks have shown rapid gains, and engineers are experimenting with a range of new approaches to chip design to go beyond Moore’s Law . There are similar exponential growth curves seen in internet bandwidth and data creation and storage .

There is value in investing in a diverse array of technologies to hedge against surprise.

Other technology areas are advancing, but not at the same rate.  Battery energy density , for example, is improving but gains are incremental, not exponential – there is no Moore’s Law for batteries. (This is why your phone and laptop are vastly more powerful than a decade ago, but you still need to plug them in every night.) Similarly,  laser technology  is improving, but slowly. Looking at trends can help planners discern which technological leaps are likely to pan out and which are likely to remain outside our grasp decades from now. Swarming robots, directed energy, hypersonics, and cyber weapons might all be “game-changers,” but they are not all equally likely to occur.

There is value in investing in a diverse array of technologies to hedge against surprise, but when planners bet big on how the future of conflict is likely to unfold, they should pay attention to underlying technology trends. Current trends point a world of  increasingly intelligent and networked machines , but machines that are still limited in their physical attributes such as speed, range, and power. The most disruptive changes are likely to occur in areas driven by information technology – robotics, networking, artificial intelligence, data analytics, cyber operations, and electronic warfare. 

3. What If?

The downside to looking at trends is that they can blind us to disruptive surprises that inevitable occur. Mid-20th century science fiction like  The Jetsons  and  Star Trek  are amusing today precisely because they naively extrapolated trends in space travel but missed the surprise of the internet. The  Star Wars  universe has faster-than-light travel, but no decent way to store data.

Examining “what if” certain developments were to occur, even if their timing cannot be predicted now, has tremendous value in hedging against surprise. What if military exoskeletons had sufficient power to be operationally viable? What if quantum computers suddenly undermined existing encryption methods? What if synthetic pathogens could be cheaply developed? What if artificial intelligence was capable of general-purpose problem solving? These tools are most valuable, however, when placed in the context of other trends, possible reactions to these developments, and an understanding of the technological leaps required to make this disruptive shift occur.

How Society Adapts

One of the biggest pitfalls in exploring future scenarios is assuming that the political, economic, and social institutions that will cope with future challenges are the same as today. People and institutions adapt. They may not always be quick to change, but pressures will inevitably drive adaptation – perhaps in good ways, perhaps in bad ways. Much of the uncertainty about the future is not about the technology itself, but how we respond to it. How will we react to fatalities from autonomous vehicles? How will we respond to climate change? How will we cope with a world rife with disinformation and propaganda?

Understanding the incentives that shape how people and institutions adapt requires a multi-disciplinary approach, connecting engineers, policymakers, ethicists, lawyers, and other experts. The key variable in understanding the future is rarely technology alone, but how humans use it, perceive it, and adapt to it. This is why bringing together a diverse array of stakeholders to anticipate change and create solutions is so essential. It takes a range of communities across society working together to cope with the changes to come.

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The Impact of Rapid Technological Change on the SDGs

At the start of this decade of action to achieve the SDGs, we already seeing many examples of how rapid technological change & frontier technologies are helping address the COVID-19 pandemic:

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are being used for the detection, diagnosis and development of treatments for COVID-19. Artificial Intelligence is also slowing the virus spread through “big data” surveillance and contact tracing. 3D printing and additive manufacturing are rapidly producing medical equipment . In some parts of the world, digitalization of work, commerce, and social relations has dramatically accelerated to respect social distancing and lockdowns .

Facing the current global pandemic, these technologies demonstrate the difference they make to people’s lives, but also how far many people are being left behind due to widening digital gaps . Such as: The winner-takes-all logic of digitalization increases inequality through market concentration , with new technologies concentrated in a few countries and controlled by few companies, the design of technology can perpetuate deep seated racial and gender inequalities . When AI uses biased data to learn how to make decisions, or when the profile of the designers is too different from the society where AI is used, then AI just replicates existing gender and racial discrimination. Frontier technologies and innovation are increasing the technological gap between countries . Technologies are applied first and more intensely in industries, services and segments of value chains in which more industrialized economies have a comparative advantage.

To overcome unequal gains from frontier technologies, we must not simply narrowly apply these technologies to individual SDGs, but broadly embrace wide-scale STI programmes to transform national approaches to technological breakthroughs. At today’s virtual CSTD session in Geneva, ministers from all regions are sharing examples of strategies they are using:

Creating an enabling environment, including infrastructure, regulation and cost reduction.

Skills development, including entrepreneurship skills & full engagement of women and girls.

Scaling up businesses through financing and collaboration between researchers and private sector.

Employing technological foresight to understand future impacts and inform STI policy.

And – as COVID-19 has shown us – we cannot ignore the importance of improving global cooperation for scientific advancement. We need to ensure that the international STI cooperation and solidarity we have witnessed in response to the pandemic remains beyond this period and is formalized in ways that ensure longevity. This coronavirus pandemic has illustrated that there is strength in numbers. We learn more, and faster, together. There is also a valuable development dimension to sharing knowledge and research. International scientific collaboration is particularly important considering the gaps in research capabilities within developing countries, and the limited ability of many countries to undertake technological horizon scanning, foresight, and risk assessment. We saw during the Ebola outbreak in 2014-15, that strengthening research capacity in developing countries is vital for preventing, responding to, and ending an epidemic.

We also must ensure that funding and resource mobilization for STI should not become a victim of budget cuts in the looming economic downturn . STI-related activities should be incorporated in all recovery packages. Not only can this spur economic activity, but it can also ensure the resilience of countries to cope with future crises. Already, some regional organizations have set targets for R&D expenditure as % of GDP, such as the European Union’s 3% and the African Union’s 1%. Commitments such as these signal the continuity and predictability of government R&D support.

As recently as 2017, less than 4% the Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitments to developing countries were reported under sectors associated with STI. These levels must increase for developing countries and particularly LDCs to build the STI capacities for achieving the SDGs.

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• Lessons For Today From Past Periods of Rapid Technological Change

Lessons for Today from Past Periods of Rapid Technological Change

We provide a history of past periods of rapid technological change starting from the Industrial Revolution continuing up to today. We find that it takes decades for technological breakthroughs to make a difference to the aggregate economy. The reason for this delay is that to realize the value of these breakthroughs requires complementary investments. Second, for good or for bad, government has played an important role in facilitating these transitions through both investments in physical infrastructure and legal reforms. We also emphasize that because technological breakthroughs are difficult to predict, the responses of governments are necessarily improvisational.

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Home — Essay Samples — Economics — Commerce — Digital Vulnerability and rapid technological change

Digital Vulnerability and Rapid Technological Change

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Published: Mar 14, 2019

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The Impact of Rapid Technological Change on the Sustainable Development Goals and Targets

11-jun-2020.

Virtual High Level Thematic Debate on the Impact of Rapid Technological Change on the Sustainable Development Goals and Targets

10:00-13:00 hours, 11 June 2020

Introduction and Background

The General Assembly has been mindful of the challenges and opportunities brought by technological change for many decades. In 2015 the Addis Ababa Agenda for Action and the 2030 Agenda for sustainable Development established and launched the Technology Facilitation Mechanism in order to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In resolutions 72/242 and 73/17 the General Assembly specifically addressed the issues related to rapid technological change and the impact it poses on the SDGs and targets.

The spread of information and communications technology and global interconnectedness has great potential to accelerate human progress, to bridge the digital divide and to develop knowledge societies, as does scientific and technological innovation across areas as diverse as medicine, energy, and environmental conservation on land and at sea. It also has enormous potential to support the advancement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by providing them with opportunities to obtain and share information, gain access to educational and health services, generate income, engage in networking and have their voices heard. However, there are also unintended negative consequences, labour displacement, concerns about privacy and respect for human rights are part of the concerns as is the possibility that harnessing technologies to advance towards achieving one of the SDGs would have negative effects on other goals and targets.

While the effects of new technologies transform the world, access to the internet remains a reality for only about half of the population in the developing world. For many, the quality and cost of mobile data remains one of the starkest obstacles to harness the benefits of connectivity. The risk that advances in digital technology shall benefit those who are already online and contribute to greater inequality within and among countries needs to be addressed by effective policies that advance the shared goal of leaving no one behind. The United Nations system has responded to the challenges posed by new technologies through numerous initiatives and mandates conferred by Member States. Most recently, the Secretary General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation presented recommendations to optimize the use of digital technologies and mitigate its risks. In this regard, governments, the private sector, international organizations, civil society, the technical and academic communities and other stakeholders need to be aware of the impact of the latest developments in rapid technological change on achieving the SDGs and targets. Multi-stakeholder cooperation is crucial in order to benefit from the opportunities and address the challenges in this topic.

The Global Sustainable Development Report 2019, launched at the SDG Summit, recognized technology as one of four key levers for transformational pathways to development, including a focus to assessing the holistic impacts of new technologies to reduce trade-offs across all goals and targets; and deploying new technology to reduce inequalities.

Roundtable discussions followed the report of the High-level Panel and will lead to the presentation of the Secretary General’s Roadmap on Digital Cooperation that will address key issues such as digital connectivity, digital human rights and trust and security.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way of life of our societies and forced to rethink how we work and learn and to find new methods for our peoples to cope with the social and economic fallout.  This pandemic, and the consequences of the measures needed to stem its spread, have starkly illustrated the digital divide’s inequalities. While many jobs can be done entirely remotely, and children in digitally connected families continue their schooling virtually, manual labourers and service workers are in many instances forced to risk their lives to earn a living, and the education of digitally unconnected children is suddenly halted, further entrenching existing inequalities.

The current circumstances demand that policy makers focus on addressing COVID-19’s immediate socio-economic toll. Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the commitments made to achieve the 2030 Agenda, which must remain our guiding principle from the multilateral arena, particularly as we take the first steps in the decade of action and delivery for sustainable development. Devising policies that incorporate new technologies and align with SDG implementation will be critical to ‘build back better’, and increase the global sustainability and resilience needed to weather any future systemic-shocks.

Following on the invitation made by the General Assembly on resolution 73/17 the thematic debate aims to highlight the efforts made by the UN system, other multilateral institutions, the private sector and stakeholders to achieve the SDGs while taking in consideration the impact of rapid technological changes, such as artificial intelligence, among others.

Format and level of participation

All Member States and observers are invited to participate in the thematic meeting at the highest possible level. The event, to be held on a virtual platform, will consist of an opening segment chaired by the President of the General Assembly with the participation of the President of the Economic and Social Council, the Secretary General and a keynote speaker. It will be followed by a high-level panel discussion that will comprise presentations by leaders of multilateral agencies and youth and civil society representatives. After the presentations Member States, Observer States and Observers of the General Assembly are invited to deliver statements on the topic.

A list of speakers will be made available in accordance with the established practices of the Assembly and will be open for inscriptions in due course. Due to time constraints Member States are strongly encouraged to deliver statements on behalf of a group of States and to limit their statements to three minutes for individual delegations and five minutes for groups. Delegations that do not have the opportunity to speak may upload their statements in the PaperSmart portal. The event will be webcast. Technical information to access the meeting will be communicated in due course.

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Letter dated 1 June 2020 regarding the High-level Thematic Debate on The Impact of Rapid Technological Change on the Sustainable Development Goals and Targets to be held on 11 June 2020

Letter dated 5 June 2020 regarding theHigh-level Thematic Debate on the Impact of Rapid Technological Change on the Sustainable Development Goals and Targets, scheduled to take place on 11 June 2020, enclosing the provisional programme for the event.

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IELTS Writing Task 2

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Rapid technological change has shaped the world we live in today. Far from having a positive influence, living in the high-tech world dependent on computers and mobile devices has distracted us from what is really important in life. How far do you agree or disagree with this statement? Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Write at least 250 words.

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Model essay #1:, rapid technological change has shaped the world we live in today. far from having a positive influence, living in the high-tech world dependent on computers and mobile devices has distracted us from what is really important in life. how far do you agree or disagree with this statement.

In today's rapidly changing world, technology has significantly impacted our lives. Some argue that living in a high-tech world, reliant on computers and mobile devices, has distracted us from what truly matters. However, I disagree with this view.

Firstly, technology has made our lives more convenient and efficient. For instance, the invention of smartphones has allowed people to stay connected with family and friends regardless of geographical barriers. Additionally, the internet has provided access to a wealth of knowledge and information, enabling individuals to learn and grow in ways that were not possible in the past.

Furthermore, technological advancements have revolutionized various industries, leading to improved healthcare, transportation, and communication. For example, medical breakthroughs have enhanced treatment options and increased life expectancy. Moreover, the development of electric vehicles has contributed to reducing environmental pollution, thus preserving the planet for future generations.

While it is true that excessive use of technology can lead to distractions and detachment from real-life interactions, it ultimately depends on how individuals choose to utilize these tools. It is essential to strike a balance between technology and personal well-being, ensuring that it enhances rather than hinders our lives.

In conclusion, I believe that technological advancements have brought about numerous benefits that have enriched our lives in various ways. While it is important to be mindful of the potential distractions posed by technology, its overall impact has been largely positive, shaping a world that is more interconnected and efficient.

Model Essay #2:

Some argue that the rapid technological changes in today's world, particularly the dependence on computers and mobile devices, have led to distractions from what truly matters in life. I agree with this viewpoint to a certain extent.

Firstly, the prevalence of technology has led to a decrease in face-to-face interactions and meaningful human connections. Many individuals spend a significant amount of time on their devices, leading to a lack of real-life social interactions and communication. This can result in feelings of isolation and detachment from the world around us.

Secondly, the constant use of technology has been linked to decreased attention spans and an inability to focus on important tasks. The ease of access to entertainment and information through devices has led to a culture of instant gratification, making it challenging for individuals to dedicate time and effort to meaningful activities and relationships.

Additionally, the reliance on technology has led to a decrease in physical activity and outdoor experiences. Many people, particularly the younger generation, spend a large portion of their time indoors, engaging in sedentary activities such as gaming and social media browsing, which can have negative implications for their physical and mental well-being.

In conclusion, while technology has undoubtedly brought about numerous advancements and benefits, it is important to recognize its potential to distract us from what is truly important in life. It is crucial for individuals to consciously limit their screen time, prioritize real-life interactions, and find a balance between the conveniences of technology and the meaningful experiences that make life fulfilling.

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