presentation about technology and human progress

How has technology changed - and changed us - in the past 20 years?

Remember this? Image:  REUTERS/Stephen Hird

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Madeleine Hillyer

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Stay up to date:, technological transformation.

• Since the dotcom bubble burst back in 2000, technology has radically transformed our societies and our daily lives.
• From smartphones to social media and healthcare, here's a brief history of the 21st century's technological revolution.

Just over 20 years ago, the dotcom bubble burst , causing the stocks of many tech firms to tumble. Some companies, like Amazon, quickly recovered their value – but many others were left in ruins. In the two decades since this crash, technology has advanced in many ways.

Many more people are online today than they were at the start of the millennium. Looking at broadband access, in 2000, just half of Americans had broadband access at home. Today, that number sits at more than 90% .

This broadband expansion was certainly not just an American phenomenon. Similar growth can be seen on a global scale; while less than 7% of the world was online in 2000, today over half the global population has access to the internet.

Similar trends can be seen in cellphone use. At the start of the 2000s, there were 740 million cell phone subscriptions worldwide. Two decades later, that number has surpassed 8 billion, meaning there are now more cellphones in the world than people

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At the same time, technology was also becoming more personal and portable. Apple sold its first iPod in 2001, and six years later it introduced the iPhone, which ushered in a new era of personal technology. These changes led to a world in which technology touches nearly everything we do.

Technology has changed major sectors over the past 20 years, including media, climate action and healthcare. The World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers , which just celebrated its 20th anniversary, gives us insight how emerging tech leaders have influenced and responded to these changes.

Media and media consumption

The past 20 years have greatly shaped how and where we consume media. In the early 2000s, many tech firms were still focused on expanding communication for work through advanced bandwidth for video streaming and other media consumption that is common today.

Others followed the path of expanding media options beyond traditional outlets. Early Tech Pioneers such as PlanetOut did this by providing an outlet and alternative media source for LGBTQIA communities as more people got online.

Following on from these first new media options, new communities and alternative media came the massive growth of social media. In 2004 , fewer than 1 million people were on Myspace; Facebook had not even launched. By 2018, Facebook had more 2.26 billion users with other sites also growing to hundreds of millions of users.

While these new online communities and communication channels have offered great spaces for alternative voices, their increased use has also brought issues of increased disinformation and polarization.

Today, many tech start-ups are focused on preserving these online media spaces while also mitigating the disinformation which can come with them. Recently, some Tech Pioneers have also approached this issue, including TruePic – which focuses on photo identification – and Two Hat , which is developing AI-powered content moderation for social media.

Climate change and green tech

Many scientists today are looking to technology to lead us towards a carbon-neutral world. Though renewed attention is being given to climate change today, these efforts to find a solution through technology is not new. In 2001, green tech offered a new investment opportunity for tech investors after the crash, leading to a boom of investing in renewable energy start-ups including Bloom Energy , a Technology Pioneer in 2010.

In the past two decades, tech start-ups have only expanded their climate focus. Many today are focuses on initiatives far beyond clean energy to slow the impact of climate change.

Different start-ups, including Carbon Engineering and Climeworks from this year’s Technology Pioneers, have started to roll out carbon capture technology. These technologies remove CO2 from the air directly, enabling scientists to alleviate some of the damage from fossil fuels which have already been burned.

Another expanding area for young tech firms today is food systems innovation. Many firms, like Aleph Farms and Air Protein, are creating innovative meat and dairy alternatives that are much greener than their traditional counterparts.

Biotech and healthcare

The early 2000s also saw the culmination of a biotech boom that had started in the mid-1990s. Many firms focused on advancing biotechnologies through enhanced tech research.

An early Technology Pioneer, Actelion Pharmaceuticals was one of these companies. Actelion’s tech researched the single layer of cells separating every blood vessel from the blood stream. Like many other biotech firms at the time, their focus was on precise disease and treatment research.

While many tech firms today still focus on disease and treatment research, many others have been focusing on healthcare delivery. Telehealth has been on the rise in recent years , with many young tech expanding virtual healthcare options. New technologies such as virtual visits, chatbots are being used to delivery healthcare to individuals, especially during Covid-19.

Many companies are also focusing their healthcare tech on patients, rather than doctors. For example Ada, a symptom checker app, used to be designed for doctor’s use but has now shifted its language and interface to prioritize giving patients information on their symptoms. Other companies, like 7 cups, are focused are offering mental healthcare support directly to their users without through their app instead of going through existing offices.

The past two decades have seen healthcare tech get much more personal and use tech for care delivery, not just advancing medical research.

The World Economic Forum was the first to draw the world’s attention to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the current period of unprecedented change driven by rapid technological advances. Policies, norms and regulations have not been able to keep up with the pace of innovation, creating a growing need to fill this gap.

The Forum established the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network in 2017 to ensure that new and emerging technologies will help—not harm—humanity in the future. Headquartered in San Francisco, the network launched centres in China, India and Japan in 2018 and is rapidly establishing locally-run Affiliate Centres in many countries around the world.

The global network is working closely with partners from government, business, academia and civil society to co-design and pilot agile frameworks for governing new and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) , autonomous vehicles , blockchain , data policy , digital trade , drones , internet of things (IoT) , precision medicine and environmental innovations .

Learn more about the groundbreaking work that the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Network is doing to prepare us for the future.

Want to help us shape the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Contact us to find out how you can become a member or partner.

In the early 2000s, many companies were at the start of their recovery from the bursting dotcom bubble. Since then, we’ve seen a large expansion in the way tech innovators approach areas such as new media, climate change, healthcare delivery and more.

At the same time, we have also seen tech companies rise to the occasion of trying to combat issues which arose from the first group such as internet content moderation, expanding climate change solutions.

The Technology Pioneers' 2020 cohort marks the 20th anniversary of this community - and looking at the latest awardees can give us a snapshot of where the next two decades of tech may be heading.

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10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024

Every year, we look for promising technologies poised to have a real impact on the world. Here are the advances that we think matter most right now.

AI for everything

We now live in the age of AI. Hundreds of millions of people have interacted directly with generative tools like ChatGPT that produce text, images, videos, and more from prompts. Their popularity has reshaped the tech industry, making OpenAI a household name and compelling Google, Meta, and Microsoft to invest heavily in the technology.

Super-efficient solar cells

Solar power is being rapidly deployed around the world, and it’s key to global efforts to reduce carbon emissions. But most of the sunlight that hits today’s panels isn’t being converted into electricity. Adding a layer of tiny crystals could make solar panels more efficient.

Apple Vision Pro

Apple will start shipping its first mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro, this year. Its killer feature is the highest-resolution display ever made for such a device. Will there be a killer app? It’s early, but the world’s most valuable company has made a bold bet that the answer is yes.

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Weight-loss drugs.

The global rise in obesity has been called an epidemic by the World Health Organization. Medications like Mounjaro and Wegovy are now among the most powerful tools that patients and physicians have to treat it. Evidence suggests they can even protect against heart attacks and strokes.

Enhanced geothermal systems

Geothermal energy is clean, always available, and virtually limitless. However, because of engineering challenges, we have barely scratched the surface of what it can offer. New drilling techniques, which dig deeper and in places where we couldn’t before, are unleashing more of Earth’s heat to produce clean energy.

It’s getting devilishly hard to make transistors smaller—the trend that defines Moore’s Law and has driven progress in computing for decades. Engineers must now find new ways to make computers faster and more efficient. Chiplets are small, specialized chips that can be linked together to do everything a conventional chip does, and more.

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Something went wrong, try again., the first gene-editing treatment.

New treatments based on CRISPR have been in the works for years. In the final weeks of 2023, one from Vertex became the first to earn regulatory approval in both the UK and the US for its ability to cure sickle-cell disease, a life-threatening condition. It won’t be the last.

Exascale computers

The world’s fastest supercomputers can now perform more than an exaflop’s worth of calculations (that’s a 1 followed by 18 zeros). New machines that can crunch scientific data at these speeds will enable scientists to perform more sophisticated simulations of the climate, nuclear fission, turbulence, and more.

Don’t let the name fool you. Heat pumps are electric appliances that can both cool and heat buildings, and wider adoption could substantially reduce emissions. Sales have increased around the world; in the US, they have surpassed gas furnaces for the first time. New types that run at higher temperatures could help decarbonize industry, too.

Twitter killers

Elon Musk bought the site now known as X in 2022, and virtually nothing about it has been the same since. He fired most of the staff and dispensed with content moderation, scaring off advertisers and users alike. Now, as alternatives like Bluesky, Threads, and others gain ground, the central town square has given way to private rooms.

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10 Breakthrough Technologies

Every year, the reporters and editors at MIT Technology Review survey the tech landscape and pick 10 technologies that we think have the greatest potential to change our lives in the years ahead. We consider advances in every field, from biotechnology and artificial intelligence to computing, robotics, and climate tech. This is the 23rd year we’ve published this list. Here’s what didn’t make the cut .

Editorial Special projects editor: Amy Nordrum Editing: Rachel Courtland, Niall Firth, Mary Beth Griggs, Mat Honan, Amy Nordrum Copy editing: Linda Lowenthal Engagement: Juliet Beauchamp, Abby Ivory-Ganja Fact checking: Helen Li Art Art direction: Stephanie Arnett Illustration: Simoul Alva, Jennifer Dionisio, Simon Landrein Technology Lead developer: Andre Vitorio Design: Vichhika Tep, Mariya Sitnova Product: Mariya Sitnova, Allison Chase CTO: Drake Martinet

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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Keeping Pace with an Accelerated World: Bringing Rapid Technological Change to the United Nations Agenda

About the author, juan josé gómez camacho.

December 2018, Nos. 3 & 4 Vol. LV, "New Technologies: Where To?"

H umanity is at a crossroads: we face both the opportunities and challenges of a range of powerful and emerging technologies that will drive radical shifts in the way we live. The accelerated pace at which technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, automation, advanced materials and quantum computing are developing, is already transforming the systems that we take for granted today. From how we produce and transport goods and services to the way we communicate, collaborate or even elect our governments, rapid technological change—which often happens at an exponential pace—is reshaping how we experience the world around us.

The good news is that this period of rapid technological change is in its early stages and is still under our control. Standing at this crossroads means that we bear a huge responsibility, since new technologies can increase inequality among and within countries, replace obsolete labour forces, affect vulnerable groups, foster a concentration of critical knowledge and wealth, and pose significant ethical questions. However, such technologies can also be used positively to accelerate achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their 169 targets.

According to the World Bank, the proportion of jobs at risk of automation is higher in developing countries than in developed countries. From a purely technological standpoint, two thirds of jobs in developing countries are susceptible to automation in the coming decades. However, the effects of that process could be moderated by lower wages and slower adoption of technology 1  in those countries. Using an adjusted measure based on technological feasibility, the share of employment that is susceptible to automation by country ranges from 55 per cent in Uzbekistan to 85 per cent in Ethiopia, 2  while the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development average is 57 per cent.

On the other hand, using smart grids, big data and the Internet of things can help reduce energy consumption, balance energy demand and supply, and ensure and improve the management of energy distribution, while increasing the role of renewable sources by allowing households to feed surplus energy from solar panels or wind turbines into the grid. The cost of solar cells has dropped by a factor of more than 100 in the last 40 years, from $76.67 per watt in 1977 to $0.029 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in 2017. Solar energy is now the cheapest generation technology in many parts of the world. 3

National and international institutions are challenged to keep pace with the economic and social consequences of new technologies, which is why there is a growing need for a discussion on this issue. The United Nations, valued for its normative and impartial standard-setting role, provides a unique platform for important orientation on this phenomenon. To achieve the 2030 Agenda and ensure that no one is left behind, Member States, along with the private sector, academia, civil society and other relevant stakeholders, must develop international frameworks to promote and ensure that the benefits of this revolution are evenly shared.

General Assembly Resolution 72/242 on Rapid Technological Change and The Third STI Forum

In 2017, in the light of the aforementioned transformations, Mexico organized and launched the core group on exponential technological change, which, by December 2018, comprised 34 countries from different regions. The idea was to bring together a group of Member States interested in this topic and introduce it to the United Nations based on interaction with relevant actors, such as the private sector and academia. In October 2017, following internal deliberations, Mexico presented a resolution on the “Impact of rapid technological change on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals”. It was adopted as resolution 72/242 by the General Assembly in December 2017.

The resolution recognized the impacts of rapid technological change. It emphasized that a multi-stakeholder approach was necessary to allow States to benefit from opportunities presented by such change and address challenges derived from it. Areas in which science, technology and innovation play a role were identified, including food security and nutrition, agriculture, energy efficiency, health, education, productivity and competitiveness. Resolution 72/242 further recognizes that growing digital divides remain between developed and developing countries, as well as along gender lines.

Using current United Nations structures, resolution 72/242 serves as a foundation to start a collective reflection that could help us understand the phenomenon of rapid technological change.  For this reason, special mandates were given to the Technology Facilitation Mechanism (TFM) established by the 2030 Agenda, as well as the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD), a subsidiary body of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) based in Geneva.

TFM comprises the Inter-Agency Task Team on Science, Technology and Innovation for the SDGs (IATT), which includes a group of 10 representatives from civil society, the private sector and the scientific community; the Multi-stakeholder Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (STI Forum); and an online platform that provides access to information, knowledge and experience, as well as best practices and lessons learned on science, technology and innovation facilitation initiatives and policies.

The resolution requested TFM and CSTD to consider the impact of rapid technological change on the achievement of the SDGs. It asked IATT to present its findings in this regard in a special session of the 2018 STI Forum. Furthermore, it opened the possibility of retaining this topic on the agenda of the General Assembly, thus establishing the foundations of the discussion on rapid technological change.

Mexico, along with Japan, was appointed by the ECOSOC President to co-chair the Third STI Forum. For Mexico, this represented a recognition of its leadership in bringing the topic of rapid technological change to the General Assembly agenda in 2017. The STI Forum, held from 5 to 6 June 2018, addressed for the first time the impact of rapid technological change on the achievement of the SDGs as a follow-up to the mandate contained in the 2017 resolution promoted by Mexico.

During the Forum, the initial findings of TFM were presented, concluding that countries need to act proactively towards the goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda. The United Nations should assess and help countries in identifying and facilitating the implementation of good practices and public policy responses related to the SDGs, so as to mitigate the possible negative effects and harness the potential of rapid technological change.

The Fourth STI Forum in 2019, closing the four-year cycle of the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), will also address the impact of rapid technological change on the achievement of the SDGs with updated findings by TFM.

The 2018 General Assembly debate and resolution 73/17

On 18 October 2018, the President of the General Assembly convened a session to discuss rapid technological change in order to take stock of the developments and progress generated throughout the year. Mexico argued that the debate on the topic might be the most important of our time because it permeates every aspect of life in every corner of the world. The twenty countries that participated identified increased cooperation as essential to harnessing technological advances for the betterment of humanity and for understanding the impact of those advances on the implementation of the SDGs.

The meeting was also an opportunity to hear from United Nations agencies about the work that they have already done. As a normative compass, the Secretary-General’s Strategy on New Technologies defined the principles and commitments that will guide United Nations system efforts to align these technologies with the values enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the norms and standards of international law.

After a year of researching technological change, Mexico presented another resolution—73/17—which was adopted by the General Assembly on 26 November 2018. The main objective of the resolution is to recognize the evolution of the topic and strengthen intergovernmental cooperation to continue the discussion. It also further incorporates the 2030 Agenda into the process by including its targets, and not only its goals, as the basis to proceed with the analysis. Additionally, it makes a specific reference to AI, which is one of the key technologies transforming our lives and societies.

The resolution reflects the most important developments in 2018 regarding technological change. For instance, it recognizes the findings presented by TFM and CSTD; takes into account the role that new technologies can play in achieving the SDGs, as expressed in the HLPF Ministerial Declaration; and refers to the work of the Panel on Digital Cooperation established by the Secretary-General, as well as the operationalization of the Technology Bank for Least Developed Countries in Turkey. It mentions the fact that the High-level segment of ECOSOC has been mandated to consider future trends and scenarios, such as the contribution of new technologies on the realization of the 2030 Agenda, and emphasizes the need for a multi-stakeholder approach.

Looking forward, the resolution requests TFM and CSTD to present their updated findings on rapid technological change. It reiterates the mandate of the STI Forum and invites Member States to consider science and technology as a cross-cutting issue in the upcoming review of the next cycle of HLPF. Furthermore, it requests the STI Forum and CSTD to coordinate their work and suggests that the Secretary-General incorporate the dimension of new technologies into the work of the Secretariat. Probably the most important dimension of the resolution, however, is that it invites the President of the General Assembly to convene a high-level thematic debate on rapid technological change during the seventy-fourth  session of the General Assembly, and to include the topic in the agenda of the seventy-fifth session. With this latter decision, Member States have accepted that rapid technological change should continue to be addressed by the General Assembly.

There is no doubt that rapid technological change is here to stay. Against this backdrop, Mexico has promoted various initiatives to include rapid technological change as a priority in the United Nations agenda. In 2017, we presented the groundbreaking General Assembly resolution on the “Impact of rapid technological change on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals”. In 2018, Mexico co-chaired with Japan the Third STI Forum and presented a second resolution on the topic, which built a new way to deal with the rapid technological change inside the United Nations system in a well-coordinated and forward-looking approach.

While these efforts have increased the awareness of the international community, there is still much to do. Yet the lessons that we have learned point to the fact that, through multilateral cooperation, we can minimize the challenges and foster the vast opportunities of rapid technological change. Keeping pace in an accelerated world is the only way for institutions to remain relevant. For this reason, Mexico was audacious in bringing to the agenda of the United Nations an issue of absolute relevance. Some would say it was even daring, as shaking up Turtle Bay is not an easy task. It has required a great deal of time spent learning more about science, technology and innovation, but so far, we strongly believe it has been worth every minute.

Phil Fersht and others, “Automation will trim 1.4 million global services jobs by 2021”,  HFS Research , 4 July 2016.  Available at www.hfsresearch.com/pointsofview/automation-will-trim-14-million-global-services-jobs-2021 (accessed 16 March 2018).

James Manyika and others, "Harnessing automation for a future that works", McKinsey Global Institute (New York, McKinsey & Company, 2017).

Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever, T he Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future  (Oakland, California, Berret-Koehler Publishers, 2017).

1 World Bank,  World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends . (Washington, D.C., 2016), p. 23. Available at: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/896971468194972881/pdf/102725-PUB-Replacement-PUBLIC.pdf .

3 Pilita Clark, "The Big Green Bang: how renewable energy became unstoppable",  Financial Times , 18 May 2017. Available at  https://www.ft.com/content/44ed7e90-3960-11e7-ac89-b01cc67cfeec .

The UN Chronicle  is not an official record. It is privileged to host senior United Nations officials as well as distinguished contributors from outside the United Nations system whose views are not necessarily those of the United Nations. Similarly, the boundaries and names shown, and the designations used, in maps or articles do not necessarily imply endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations.

Digital Innovation—Key to Unlocking Sustainable Development 

Digital tools have the potential to accelerate human progress, but those who are not online are most at risk of being left behind.

Thirty Years On, Leaders Need to Recommit to the International Conference on Population and Development Agenda

With the gains from the Cairo conference now in peril, the population and development framework is more relevant than ever. At the end of April 2024, countries will convene to review the progress made on the ICPD agenda during the annual session of the Commission on Population and Development.

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How technological progress is making it likelier than ever that humans will destroy ourselves

The “vulnerable world hypothesis,” explained.

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Technological progress has eradicated diseases, helped double life expectancy, reduced starvation and extreme poverty, enabled flight and global communications, and made this generation the richest one in history.

It has also made it easier than ever to cause destruction on a massive scale. And because it’s easier for a few destructive actors to use technology to wreak catastrophic damage, humanity may be in trouble.

This is the argument made by Oxford professor Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute, in a new working paper, “ The Vulnerable World Hypothesis .” The paper explores whether it’s possible for truly destructive technologies to be cheap and simple — and therefore exceptionally difficult to control. Bostrom looks at historical developments to imagine how the proliferation of some of those technologies might have gone differently if they’d been less expensive, and describes some reasons to think such dangerous future technologies might be ahead.

In general, progress has brought about unprecedented prosperity while also making it easier to do harm. But between two kinds of outcomes — gains in well-being and gains in destructive capacity — the beneficial ones have largely won out. We have much better guns than we had in the 1700s, but it is estimated that we have a much lower homicide rate , because prosperity, cultural changes, and better institutions have combined to decrease violence by more than improvements in technology have increased it.

But what if there’s an invention out there — something no scientist has thought of yet — that has catastrophic destructive power, on the scale of the atom bomb, but simpler and less expensive to make? What if it’s something that could be made in somebody’s basement? If there are inventions like that in the future of human progress, then we’re all in a lot of trouble — because it’d only take a few people and resources to cause catastrophic damage.

That’s the problem that Bostrom wrestles with in his new paper. A “vulnerable world,” he argues, is one where “there is some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default.” The paper doesn’t prove (and doesn’t try to prove) that we live in such a vulnerable world, but makes a compelling case that the possibility is worth considering.

Progress has largely been highly beneficial. Will it stay that way?

Bostrom is among the most prominent philosophers and researchers in the field of global catastrophic risks and the future of human civilization. He co-founded the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford and authored Superintelligence , a book about the risks and potential of advanced artificial intelligence. His research is typically concerned with how humanity can solve the problems we’re creating for ourselves and see our way through to a stable future.

When we invent a new technology, we often do so in ignorance of all of its side effects. We first determine whether it works, and we learn later, sometimes much later, what other effects it has. CFCs, for example, made refrigeration cheaper, which was great news for consumers — until we realized CFCs were destroying the ozone layer, and the global community united to ban them.

On other occasions, worries about side effects aren’t borne out. GMOs sounded to many consumers like they could pose health risks, but there’s now a sizable body of research suggesting they are safe.

Bostrom proposes a simplified analogy for new inventions:

One way of looking at human creativity is as a process of pulling balls out of a giant urn. The balls represent possible ideas, discoveries, technological inventions. Over the course of history, we have extracted a great many balls—mostly white (beneficial) but also various shades of grey (moderately harmful ones and mixed blessings). The cumulative effect on the human condition has so far been overwhelmingly positive, and may be much better still in the future. The global population has grown about three orders of magnitude over the last ten thousand years, and in the last two centuries per capita income, standards of living, and life expectancy have also risen. What we haven’t extracted, so far, is a black ball—a technology that invariably or by default destroys the civilization that invents it. The reason is not that we have been particularly careful or wise in our technology policy. We have just been lucky.

That terrifying final claim is the focus of the rest of the paper.

A hard look at the history of nuclear weapon development

One might think it unfair to say “we have just been lucky” that no technology we’ve invented has had destructive consequences we didn’t anticipate. After all, we’ve also been careful, and tried to calculate the potential risks of things like nuclear tests before we conducted them.

Bostrom, looking at the history of nuclear weapons development, concludes we weren’t careful enough.

In 1942, it occurred to Edward Teller, one of the Manhattan scientists, that a nuclear explosion would create a temperature unprecedented in Earth’s history, producing conditions similar to those in the center of the sun, and that this could conceivably trigger a self-sustaining thermonuclear reaction in the surrounding air or water. The importance of Teller’s concern was immediately recognized by Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Los Alamos lab. Oppenheimer notified his superior and ordered further calculations to investigate the possibility. These calculations indicated that atmospheric ignition would not occur. This prediction was confirmed in 1945 by the Trinity test, which involved the detonation of the world’s first nuclear explosive.

That might sound like a reassuring story — we considered the possibility, did a calculation, concluded we didn’t need to worry, and went ahead.

The report that Robert Oppenheimer commissioned, though, sounds fairly shaky, for something that was used as reason to proceed with a dangerous new experiment. It ends: “One may conclude that the arguments of this paper make it unreasonable to expect that the N + N reaction could propagate. An unlimited propagation is even less likely. However, the complexity of the argument and the absence of satisfactory experimental foundation makes further work on the subject highly desirable.” That was our state of understanding of the risk of atmospheric ignition when we proceeded with the first nuclear test.

A few years later, we badly miscalculated in a different risk assessment about nuclear weapons. Bostrom writes:

In 1954, the U.S. carried out another nuclear test, the Castle Bravo test, which was planned as a secret experiment with an early lithium-based thermonuclear bomb design. Lithium, like uranium, has two important isotopes: lithium-6 and lithium-7. Ahead of the test, the nuclear scientists calculated the yield to be 6 megatons (with an uncertainty range of 4-8 megatons). They assumed that only the lithium-6 would contribute to the reaction, but they were wrong. The lithium-7 contributed more energy than the lithium-6, and the bomb detonated with a yield of 15 megaton—more than double of what they had calculated (and equivalent to about 1,000 Hiroshimas). The unexpectedly powerful blast destroyed much of the test equipment. Radioactive fallout poisoned the inhabitants of downwind islands and the crew of a Japanese fishing boat, causing an international incident.

Bostrom concludes that “we may regard it as lucky that it was the Castle Bravo calculation that was incorrect, and not the calculation of whether the Trinity test would ignite the atmosphere.”

Nuclear reactions happen not to ignite the atmosphere. But Bostrom believes that we weren’t sufficiently careful, in advance of the first tests, to be totally certain of this. There were big holes in our understanding of how nuclear weapons worked when we rushed to first test them. It could be that the next time we deploy a new, powerful technology, with big holes in our understanding of how it works, we won’t be so lucky.

Destructive technologies up to this point have been extremely complex. Future ones could be simple.

We haven’t done a great job of managing nuclear nonproliferation . But most countries still don’t have nuclear weapons — and no individuals do — because of how nuclear weapons must be developed. Building nuclear weapons takes years, costs billions of dollars, and requires the expertise of top scientists. As a result, it’s possible to tell when a country is pursuing nuclear weapons.

Bostrom invites us to imagine how things would have gone if nuclear weaponry had required abundant elements, rather than rare ones.

Investigations showed that making an atomic weapon requires several kilograms of plutonium or highly enriched uranium, both of which are very difficult and expensive to produce. However, suppose it had turned out otherwise: that there had been some really easy way to unleash the energy of the atom—say, by sending an electric current through a metal object placed between two sheets of glass.

In that case, the weapon would proliferate as quickly as the knowledge that it was possible. We might react by trying to ban the study of nuclear physics, but it’s hard to ban a whole field of knowledge and it’s not clear the political will would materialize. It’d be even harder to try to ban glass or electric circuitry — probably impossible.

In some respects, we were remarkably fortunate with nuclear weapons. The fact that they rely on extremely rare materials and are so complex and expensive to build makes it far more tractable to keep them from being used than it would be if the materials for them had happened to be abundant.

If future technological discoveries — not in nuclear physics, which we now understand very well, but in other less-understood, speculative fields — are easier to build, Bostrom warns, they may proliferate widely.

Would some people use weapons of mass destruction, if they could?

We might think that the existence of simple destructive weapons shouldn’t, in itself, be enough to worry us. Most people don’t engage in acts of terroristic violence, even though technically it wouldn’t be very hard. Similarly, most people would never use dangerous technologies even if they could be assembled in their garage.

Bostrom observes, though, that it doesn’t take very many people who would act destructively. Even if only one in a million people were interested in using an invention violently, that could lead to disaster. And he argues that there will be at least some such people: “Given the diversity of human character and circumstance, for any ever so imprudent, immoral, or self-defeating action, there is some residual fraction of humans who would choose to take that action.”

That means, he argues, that anything as destructive as a nuclear weapon, and straightforward enough that most people can build it with widely available technology, will almost certainly be repeatedly used, anywhere in the world.

These aren’t the only scenarios of interest. Bostrom also examines technologies that would drive nation-states to war. “A technology that ‘democratizes’ mass destruction is not the only kind of black ball that could be hoisted out of the urn. Another kind would be a technology that strongly incentivizes powerful actors to use their powers to cause mass destruction,” he writes.

Again, he looks to the history of nuclear war for examples. He argues that the most dangerous period in history was the period between the start of the nuclear arms race and the invention of second-strike capabilities such as nuclear submarines. With the introduction of second-strike capabilities, nuclear risk may have decreased.

It is widely believed among nuclear strategists that the development of a reasonably secure second-strike capability by both superpowers by the mid-1960s created the conditions for “strategic stability.” Prior to this period, American war plans reflected a much greater inclination, in any crisis situation, to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. The introduction of nuclear submarine-based ICBMs was thought to be particularly helpful for ensuring second-strike capabilities (and thus “mutually assured destruction”) since it was widely believed to be practically impossible for an aggressor to eliminate the adversary’s boomer [sic] fleet in the initial attack.

In this case, one technology brought us into a dangerous situation with great powers highly motivated to use their weapons. Another technology — the capacity to retaliate — brought us out of that terrible situation and into a stabler one. If nuclear submarines hadn’t developed, nuclear weapons might have been used in the past half-century or so.

The solutions for a vulnerable world are unappealing — and perhaps ineffective

Bostrom devotes the second half of the paper to examining our options for preserving stability if there turn out to be dangerous technologies ahead for us.

None of them are appealing.

Halting the progress of technology could save us from confronting any of these problems. Bostrom considers it and discards it as impossible — some countries or actors would continue their research, in secrecy if necessary, and the outrage and backlash associated with a ban on a field of science might draw more attention to the ban.

A limited variant, which Bostrom calls differential technological development, might be more workable: “Retard the development of dangerous and harmful technologies, especially ones that raise the level of existential risk; and accelerate the development of beneficial technologies, especially those that reduce the existential risks posed by nature or by other technologies.”

To the extent we can identify which technologies will be stabilizing (like nuclear submarines) and work to build them faster than building dangerous technologies (like nuclear weapons), we can manage some risks in that fashion. Despite the frightening tone and implications of the paper, Bostrom writes that “[the vulnerable world hypothesis] does not imply that civilization is doomed.” But differential technological development won’t manage every risk, and might fail to be sufficient for many categories of risk.

The other options Bostrom puts forward are less appealing.

If the criminal use of a destructive technology can kill millions of people, then crime prevention becomes essential — and total crime prevention would require a massive surveillance state. If international arms races are likely to be even more dangerous than the nuclear brinksmanship of the Cold War, Bostrom argues we might need a single global government with the power to enforce demands on member states.

For some vulnerabilities, he argues further, we might actually need both:

Extremely effective preventive policing would be required because individuals can engage in hard-to-regulate activities that must nevertheless be effectively regulated, and strong global governance would be required because states may have incentives not to effectively regulate those activities even if they have the capability to do so. In combination, however, ubiquitous-surveillance-powered preventive policing and effective global governance would be sufficient to stabilize most vulnerabilities, making it safe to continue scientific and technological development even if [the vulnerable world hypothesis] is true.

It’s here, where the conversation turns from philosophy to policy, that it seems to me Bostrom’s argument gets weaker.

While he’s aware of the abuses of power that such a universal surveillance state would make possible, his overall take on it is more optimistic than seems warranted; he writes, for example, “If the system works as advertised, many forms of crime could be nearly eliminated, with concomitant reductions in costs of policing, courts, prisons, and other security systems. It might also generate growth in many beneficial cultural practices that are currently inhibited by a lack of social trust.”

But it’s hard to imagine that universal surveillance would in fact produce universal and uniform law enforcement, especially in a country like the US. Surveillance wouldn’t solve prosecutorial discretion or the criminalization of things that shouldn’t be illegal in the first place. Most of the world’s population lives under governments without strong protections for political or religious freedom. Bostrom’s optimism here feels out of touch.

Furthermore, most countries in the world simply do not have the governance capacity to run a surveillance state, and it’s unclear that the U.S. or another superpower has the ability to impose such capacity externally (to say nothing of whether it would be desirable).

If the continued survival of humanity depended on successfully imposing worldwide surveillance, I would expect the effort to lead to disastrous unintended consequences — as efforts at “nation-building” historically have. Even in the places where such a system was successfully imposed, I would expect an overtaxed law enforcement apparatus that engaged in just as much, or more, selective enforcement as it engages in presently.

Economist Robin Hanson, responding to the paper , highlighted Bostrom’s optimism about global governance as a weak point, raising a number of objections. First, “It is fine for Bostrom to seek not-yet-appreciated upsides [of more governance], but we should also seek not-yet-appreciated downsides” — downsides like introducing a single point of failure and reducing healthy competition between political systems and ideas.

Second, Hanson writes, “I worry that ‘bad cases make bad law.’ Legal experts say it is bad to focus on extreme cases when changing law, and similarly it may go badly to focus on very unlikely but extreme-outcome scenarios when reasoning about future-related policy.”

Finally, “existing governance mechanisms do especially badly with extreme scenarios. The history of how the policy world responded badly to extreme nanotech scenarios is a case worth considering.”

Bostrom’s paper is stronger where it’s focused on the question of management of catastrophic risks than when it ventures into these issues. The policy questions about risk management are of such complexity that it’s impossible for the paper to do more than skim the subject.

But even though the paper wavers there, it’s overall a compelling — and scary — case that technological progress can make a civilization frighteningly vulnerable, and that it’d be an exceptionally challenging project to make such a world safe.

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The list of new technologies grows every day. Robots, Augmented Reality, algorithms, and machine-to-machine communications help people with a range of different tasks.(1) These technologies are broad-based in their scope and significant in their ability to transform existing businesses and personal lives. They have the potential to ease people’s lives and improve their personal and business dealings.(2) Technology is becoming much more sophisticated and this is having a substantial impact on the workforce.(3)

In this paper, I explore the impact of robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning on the workforce and public policy. If society needs fewer workers due to automation and robotics, and many social benefits are delivered through jobs, how are people outside the workforce for a lengthy period of time going to get health care and pensions? These are profound questions for public policy and we need to figure out how to deliver social benefits in the new digital economy.

Emerging Technologies

Industrial robots are expanding in magnitude around the developed world. In 2013, for example, there were an estimated 1.2 million robots in use. This total rose to around 1.5 million in 2014 and is projected to increase to about 1.9 million in 2017.(4) Japan has the largest number with 306,700, followed by North America (237,400), China (182,300), South Korea (175,600), and Germany (175,200). Overall, robotics is expected to rise from a $15-billion sector now to $67 billion by 2025.(5)

According to an RBC Global Asset Management study, the costs of robots and automation have fallen substantially. It used to be that the “high costs of industrial robots restricted their use to few high-wage industries like the auto industry. However, in recent years, the average costs of robots have fallen, and in a number of key industries in Asia, the cost of robots and the unit costs of low-wage labor are converging… Robots now represent a viable alternative to labor.”(6)

In the contemporary world, there are many robots that perform complex functions. According to a presentation on robots:

The early 21st century saw the first wave of companionable social robots. They were small cute pets like AIBO, Pleo, and Paro. As robotics become more sophisticated, thanks largely to the smart phone, a new wave of social robots has started, with humanoids Pepper and Jimmy and the mirror-like Jibo, as well as Geppetto Avatars’ software robot, Sophie. A key factor in a robot’s ability to be social is their ability to correctly understand and respond to people’s speech and the underlying context or emotion.(7)

These machines are capable of creative actions. Anthropologist Eitan Wilf of Hebrew University of Jerusalem says that sociable robots represent “a cultural resource for negotiating problems of intentionality.”(8) He describes a “jazz-improvising humanoid robot marimba player” that can interpret music context and respond creatively to improvisations on the part of other performers. Designers can put it with a jazz band, and the robot will ad lib seamlessly with the rest of the group. If someone were listening to the music, that person could not discern the human from the robot performer.

Amazon has organized a “picking challenge” designed to see if robots can “autonomously grab items from a shelf and place them in a tub.” The firm has around 50,000 people working in its warehouses and it wants to see if robots can perform the tasks of selecting items and moving them around the warehouse. During the competition, a Berlin robot successfully completed ten of the twelve tasks. To move goods around the facility, the company already uses 15,000 robots and it expects to purchase additional ones in the future.(9)

In the restaurant industry, firms are using technology to remove humans from parts of food delivery. Some places, for example, are using tablets that allow customers to order directly from the kitchen with no requirement of talking to a waiter or waitress. Others enable people to pay directly, obviating the need for cashiers. Still others tell chefs how much of an ingredient to add to a dish, which cuts down on food expenses.(10) Other experimentalists are using a robot known as Nao to help people deal with stress. In a pilot project called “Stress Game,” Thi-Hai-Ha Dang and Adriana Tapus subject people to a board game where they have to collect as many hand objects as they can. During the test, stress is altered through game difficulty and noises when errors are made. The individuals are wired to a heart monitor so that Nao can help people deal with stress. When the robot feels human stress levels increasing, it provides coaching designed to decrease the tension. Depending on the situation, it can respond in empathetic, encouraging, or challenging ways. In this way, the “robot with personality” is able to provide dynamic feedback to the experimental subjects and help them deal with tense activities.(11)

Computerized Algorithms

There are computerized algorithms that have taken the place of human transactions. We see this in the stock exchanges, where high-frequency trading by machines has replaced human decision making. People submit buy and sell orders, and computers match them in the blink of an eye without human intervention. Machines can spot trading inefficiencies or market differentials at a very small scale and execute trades that make money for people.(12)

Some individuals specialize in arbitrage trading, whereby the algorithms see the same stocks having different market values. Humans are not very efficient at spotting price differentials but computers can use complex mathematical formulas to determine where there are trading opportunities. Fortunes have been made by mathematicians who excel in this type of analysis.(13)

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence refers to “machines that respond to stimulation consistent with traditional responses from humans, given the human capacity for contemplation, judgment and intention.”(14) It incorporates critical reasoning and judgment into response decisions. Long considered a visionary advance, AI is now here and being incorporated in a variety of different areas. It is being used in finance, transportation, aviation, and telecommunications. Expert systems “make decisions which normally require a human level of expertise.”(15) These systems help humans anticipate problems or deal with difficulties as they come up.

There is growing applicability of artificial intelligence in many industries.(16) It is being used to take the place of humans in a variety of areas. For example, it is being used in space exploration, advanced manufacturing, transportation, energy development, and health care. By tapping into the extraordinary processing power of computers, humans can supplement their own skills and improve productivity through artificial intelligence.

Impact on the Workforce

The rapid increase in emerging technologies suggests that they are having a substantial impact on the workforce. Many of the large tech firms have achieved broad economic scale without a large number of employees. For example, Derek Thompson writes: “Google is worth $370 billion but has only about 55,000 employees—less than a tenth the size of AT&T’s workforce in its heyday [in the 1960s].”(17) According to economist Andrew McAfee: “We are facing a time when machines will replace people for most of the jobs in the current economy, and I believe it will come not in the crazy distant future.”(18)

In a number of fields, technology is substituting for labor, and this has dramatic consequences for middle-class jobs and incomes. Cornell University engineer Hod Lipson argues that “for a long time the common understanding was that technology was destroying jobs but also creating new and better ones. Now the evidence is that technology is destroying jobs and indeed creating new and better ones but also fewer ones.”(19)

Martin Ford issues an equally strong warning. In his book, The Lights in the Tunnel, he argues that “as technology accelerates, machine automation may ultimately penetrate the economy to the extent that wages no longer provide the bulk of consumers with adequate discretionary income and confidence in the future. If this issue is not addressed, the result will be a downward economic spiral.”(20) Continuing, he warns that “at some point in the future—it might be many years or decades from now—machines will be able to do the jobs of a large percentage of the ‘average’ people in our population, and these people will not be able to find new jobs.”

Firms have discovered that robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence can replace humans and improve accuracy, productivity, and efficiency of operations. During the Great Recession of 2008–09, many businesses were forced to downsize their workforce for budgetary reasons. They had to find ways to maintain operations through leaner workforces. One business leader I know had five hundred workers for his $100 million business and now has the same size workforce even though the company has grown to $250 million in revenues. He did this by automating certain functions and using robots and advanced manufacturing techniques to operate the firm.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) compiles future employment projections. In its most recent analysis, the agency predicts that 15.6 million new positions will be created between 2012 and 2022. This amounts to growth of about 0.5 percent per year in the labor force.

The health-care and social assistance sector is expected to grow the most with an annual rate of 2.6 percent. This will add around five million new jobs over that decade. That is about one-third of all the new jobs expected to be created.(21) Other areas that are likely to experience growth include professional services (3.5 million), construction (1.6 million), leisure and hospitality (1.3 million), state and local government (929,000), finance (751,000), and education (675,000).

Interestingly, in light of technology advances, the information sector is one of the areas expected to shrink in jobs. BLS projections anticipate that about 65,000 jobs will be lost there over the coming decade. Even though technology is revolutionizing many businesses, it is doing this by transforming operations, not increasing the number of jobs. Technology can boost productivity and improve efficiency, but does so by reducing the number of employees needed to generate the same or even higher levels of production.

Manufacturing is another area thought to lose jobs. The BLS expects the United States to lose 550,000 jobs, while the federal government will shed 407,000 positions, and agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting will drop 223,000 jobs.(22) These sectors are the ones thought to be least likely to generate new positions in the coming decade.

Since BLS projections make few assumptions about emerging technologies, it is likely that their numbers underestimate the disruptive impact of these developments. It is hard to quantify the way that robots, artificial intelligence, and sensors will affect the workforce because we are in the early stages of the technology revolution. It is hard to be definitive about emerging trends because it is not clear how new technologies will affect various jobs.

But there are estimates of the likely impact of computerization on many occupations. Oxford University researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborn claim that technology will transform many sectors of life. They studied 702 occupational groupings and found that “forty-seven percent of US workers have a high probability of seeing their jobs automated over the next twenty years.”(23) According to their analysis, telemarketers, title examiners, hand sewers, mathematical technicians, insurance underwriters, watch repairers, cargo agents, tax preparers, photographic process workers, new accounts clerks, library technicians, and data entry keyers have a ninety-nine percent of having their jobs computerized. At the other end of the spectrum, recreational therapists, mechanic supervisors, emergency management directors, mental health social workers, audiologists, occupational therapists, health-care social workers, oral surgeons, supervisors of fire fighters, and dieticians have less than a one percent chance of having their tasks computerized. They base their analysis of improving levels of computerization, wage levels, and education required in different fields.(24) In addition, we know that fields such as health care and education have been slow to embrace the technology revolution, but are starting to embrace new models. Innovations in personalized learning and mobile health mean that many schools and hospitals are shifting from traditional to computerized service delivery. Educators are using massive, open, online courses (MOOCs) and tablet-based instruction, while health-care providers are relying on medical sensors, electronic medical records, and machine learning to diagnose and evaluate health treatments.

Hospitals used to be staffed with people who personally delivered the bulk of medical treatment. But health providers now are storing information in electronic medical records and data-sharing networks are connecting lab tests, clinical data, and administration information in order to promote greater efficiency. Patients surf the web for medical information and supplement professional advice with online resources. Both education and health-care sectors are seeing the disruption that previously has transformed other fields.

Given the uncertainties surrounding job projections, it is not surprising that experts disagree over the impact of emerging technologies. For example, in their highly acclaimed book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies , economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that technology is producing major changes in the workforce. According to them:

Technological progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead. As we will demonstrate, there has never been a better time to be a worker with special skills or the right education because these people can use technology to create and capture value. However, there has never been a worse time to be a worker with only “ordinary” skills and abilities to offer, because computers, robots, and other digital technologies are acquiring these skills and abilities at an extraordinary rate.(25)

Former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers is equally pessimistic about the employment impact. He argues that “if current trends continue, it could well be that a generation from now a quarter of middle-aged men will be out of work at any given moment.” From his standpoint, “providing enough work” will be the major economic challenge facing the world. (26)

However, some economists dispute these claims. They recognize that many jobs will be lost through technology improvements, but say that new ones will be created. There may be fewer people sorting items in a warehouse because machines can do that better than humans. But jobs analyzing big data, mining information, and managing data-sharing networks will be created. According to those individuals, the job gains and losses will even out over the long run. In future decades, work will be transformed but humans will still be needed to manage the digital world.

For example, MIT economist David Autor has analyzed data on jobs and technology but “doubts that technology could account for such an abrupt change in total employment […] The sudden slowdown in job creation is a big puzzle, but there is not a lot of evidence it is linked to computers.”(27) In the same vein, Harvard economist Richard Freeman is “skeptical that technology would change a wide range of business sectors fast enough to explain recent job numbers.”(28)

Northwestern economist Robert Gordon takes an even stronger stance. He argues that:

Recent progress in computing and automation is less transformative than electrification, cars, and wireless communication, and perhaps even indoor plumbing. Previous advances that enabled people to communicate and travel rapidly over long distances may end up being more significant to society’s advancement than anything to come in the twenty-first century.(29)

Based on this reasoning, he does not anticipate dramatic workforce effects from emerging technologies, even though many other experts already see the substitution of technology for labor.

A Pew Research Center study asked 1,896 experts about the impact of emerging technologies. Its researchers found that:

Half of these experts (48%) envision a future in which robots and digital agents have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers—with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order.(30)

Implications for Public Policy

In the classic Edward Bellamy book, Looking Backwards, protagonist Julian West wakes up from a 113-year slumber and finds that the United States in 2000 is completely different from 1887. People stop working at age forty-five and devote their lives to mentoring other people and contributing to the overall sense of community.(31) There are shorter work weeks for ordinary people and everyone receives full benefits, food, and housing.

Similar to our time period, new technologies at that time enabled people to be very productive in a short period of time. Society did not need a large number of workers so people could devote much of their lives to education, volunteerism, and community development. In conjunction with these employment trends, public policy shifted to encourage new lifestyles and ways of living.

In flash-forwarding to the current era, we may be on the verge of a similar technology transition. Robotics and machine learning have improved productivity and enhanced the overall economy of developed nations. Countries that have invested in innovation have seen tremendous growth in overall economic performance. In the future, it may be possible that society will not need as many workers as seen today.

Yet unlike Bellamy’s utopia, there has been little public discussion regarding the economic or policy impact of emerging technologies. Observers worry that knowledge societies are destroying industrial and manufacturing jobs, and exacerbating social and economic divisions. In its most pointed form, skeptics fear that technology will eliminate jobs, reduce incomes, and create a permanent underclass of unemployable people. As argued by Nicolas Colin and Bruno Palier: “Employment is becoming less routine, less steady, and generally less well remunerated. Social policy will therefore have to cover the needs of not just outside the labor market but even many inside it.”(32)

If technology innovation allows businesses to provide goods and services with far fewer employees, what will that mean for workers? A significant increase in the number of people without full-time jobs would exacerbate divisions within society and complicate the distribution of benefits such as pensions, health care, and insurance. Most benefits are tied to employment so if the economy requires fewer workers due to technological advancement, we need to consider how this will affect social benefit delivery.

In this section, I review short- and long-term steps we should consider to deal with emerging technologies. This includes thinking about how to deliver benefits outside of jobs, considering a basic income guarantee, revamping the earned income tax credit, providing activity accounts for lifetime learning and job retraining, encouraging corporate profit-sharing, providing benefit credits for volunteerism, making curricular reforms to assure that students have the skills they need for a twenty-first-century economy, encouraging adult education and continuing learning, expanding arts and culture for leisure time, and avoiding a permanent underclass suffering the ill effects of income inequality.

Benefits Outside of Jobs

If we end up in a situation with many people unemployed or underemployed for significant periods of time, we need a way to provide health care, disability, and pension benefits outside of employment. Called “flexicurity” or flexible security, this idea “separate(s) the provision of benefits from jobs.”(33) It offers health care, education, and housing assistance on a universal basis.

Currently, people must work sixty percent of the time (around twenty-four hours a week) in order to qualify for full-time benefits. When they are fully employed, they are eligible for company-sponsored health-care plans and pensions. During the period since World War II, jobs have been a primary distribution system for social benefits. Except for the poor and elderly, this keeps benefits outside of the public sector and places the onus on private companies.

That approach worked well in an era when most of the people who wanted jobs were able to get them. People with limited skills were able to get well-paying jobs with benefits in factories, warehouses, and production facilities. They could educate their children, achieve a reasonable standard of living, and guard against disabling illnesses.

The complication came when the economy shifted, wages stagnated, and technology made it possible for companies to get by with fewer workers. The advent of robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and machine-to-machine communications eliminated a number of jobs and put a number of people outside the typical workforce.

For health care, people need access to quality care through plans outside of employment. It is possible through commercial insurers to purchase catastrophic insurance for extraordinary health claims. Or if people are poor or elderly, there are government programs that guarantee access to medical care. The recent expansion of health insurance through the Affordable Care Act has extended insurance to millions of people who previously lacked coverage.

In regard to retirement planning, many employers have moved to 401-style pension plans. Employees contribute to their own funds and sometimes get a match from the employer. But this does not help those outside the workforce who need retirement assistance. Even Social Security is tied to employment. People who have not worked are not eligible for retirement benefits so we need to figure out ways to take care of those people in the newly emerging economy.

Provide Activity Accounts for Lifetime Learning and Job Retraining

We should consider the establishment of activity accounts for lifetime learning and job retraining. In an era of fast technology innovation and job displacement, there needs to be a means for people to gain new skills throughout their adulthood. When people are employed, their companies could contribute a set amount to an individual’s fund. This account could be augmented by contributions from the person him or herself as well as the government. Similar to a retirement account, money in the fund could be invested tax-free in investment options including cash reserves, stocks, and bonds. The owner of the account could draw on it to finance lifetime learning and job retraining expenses. It would be portable, meaning that if the person moved or switched jobs, the account would migrate with that individual.

The goal of this account is to provide incentives for continuing education. Under virtually any scenario, people are going to have to continue their education beyond the first twenty years of their lives. Emerging jobs are going to require different skills than what people gain in school. There will be new jobs created that may not exist today. As pointed out by Brookings Institution scholar Kemal Dervis, it will be crucial as technology innovation continues in the future to provide people with a means to upgrade their skills and knowledge levels.(34) He notes that France has established “individual activity accounts” that provide social benefits.

With the expected increase in leisure time, adults need time and financial support for continued learning. We should not envision education merely as a time for young people to learn new skills or pursue areas of interest. Instead, we need to think about education as a continuing activity that broadens people’s horizons over the course of their entire lives. Education is an enrichment activity and we need to view it as a general benefit for the individual as well as the society as a whole.

Incentives for Volunteerism

The trends cited in this analysis suggest that we need to consider income supplements or benefit eligibility through vehicles other than full-time jobs. The workforce ramifications of emerging technologies mean that many people in the future may not be able to provide for their families through regular employment.

One possibility comes through volunteer activities. Even if people have limited employment options, many participate in a wide range of public-minded organizations. They help other people, train the next generation, or provide assistance for the less fortunate in society.

A variety of survey evidence demonstrates that young people are particularly interested in volunteerism. In general, they have different attitudes toward work and leisure time, and many say they want time to pursue outside activities. For example, a survey of American students found that they want “a job that focuses on helping others and improving society.” In addition, they value quality of life considerations, not just financial well-being.(35)

A number of them value volunteer activities outside of their work experience. They have varied interests and want extra-curricular activities that fulfill them. This may involve tutoring in after-school programs, helping English as a Second Language pupils, stopping domestic violence, protecting the environment, or encouraging entrepreneurship. According to a Deloitte study, “63 percent of Millennials donate to charities and 43 percent actively volunteer or are a member of a community organization.”(36)

In a digital world where there may be less work and more leisure time, it makes sense to think about incentives and work credits for volunteerism. This could include credits toward social benefits or public rewards that acknowledge community contributions. In the United Kingdom, for example, volunteers get reimbursed for expenses or earn credits for job training programs through participation in worthy causes. In addition, volunteering counts as “looking for work” so people can use those activities to qualify for national insurance credits.(37)

Going forward, the United States should consider those types of incentives. In the future, people are likely to have more time outside of employment so it makes sense to encourage them toward community engagement and give them incentives to volunteer for nonprofit organizations or charitable causes. This will benefit the overall community and give people purposeful activities in which to engage.

Expanding Arts and Culture for Leisure Time

The so-called “end of work” may create a new kind of economy. According to Harvard economist Lawrence Katz: “It is possible that information technology and robots [will] eliminate traditional jobs and make possible a new artisanal economy […] an economy geared around self-expression, where people would do artistic things with their time.”(38) From his standpoint, this transition would move the world from one of consumption to creativity.

People will use their leisure time to pursue interests in arts and culture, or special areas that they follow. This could include reading, poetry, music, or woodworking. Depending on their background, they could have more time for family and friends. A study of family time found that macroeconomic conditions affect how much time people spend together. When employment problems rise, “fathers spend more time engaging in enriching childcare activities” and “mothers are less likely to work standard hours.”(39) As long as there are opportunities for people to pursue broader interests, reduction in work does not have to eliminate chances for cultural pursuits.

To summarize, advanced societies are at a major turning point in terms of how we think about work, leisure, and social benefit delivery. If these economies need fewer workers to complete needed tasks and benefits are delivered mainly through full-time jobs, there is a danger that many people will have difficulties getting health care, pensions, and the income maintenance they need to sustain their lives. This is of particular concern at a time of large income inequality and highly skewed economic distributions.(40)

The contrast between the age of scarcity in which we have lived and the upcoming age of abundance through new technologies means that we need to pay attention to the social contract. We need to rewrite it in keeping with the dramatic shifts in employment and leisure time that are taking place. People have to understand we are witnessing a fundamental interruption of the current cycle where people are paid for their work and spend their money on goods and services. When a considerable portion of human labor is no longer necessary to run the economy, we have to rethink income generation, employment, and public policy. Our emerging economic system means we will not need all the workers that we have. New technologies will make these individuals obsolete and unemployable.

In this situation, it is important to address the policy and leisure time issues raised by persistent unemployment or underemployment. There is a danger of disruptions and unrest from large groups of people who are not working. That creates poverty and social dissatisfaction and runs the risk of instability for the society as a whole. Stability cannot be enforced through a police presence or having wealthy individuals live in gated communities.

There needs to be ways for people to live fulfilling lives even if society needs relatively few workers. We need to think about ways to address these issues before we have a permanent underclass of unemployed individuals. This includes a series of next steps for society. There needs to be continuous learning avenues, opportunities for arts and culture, and mechanisms to supplement incomes and benefits other than through full-time jobs. Policies that encourage volunteerism and reward those who contribute to worthy causes make sense from the standpoint of society as a whole. Adoption of these steps will help people adapt to the new economic realities.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Hillary Schaub for outstanding research assistance on this project.

1. James Manyika, Michael Chui, Jacques Bughin, Richard Dobbs, Peter Bisson, and Alex Marrs, Disruptive Technologies: Advances That Will Transform Life, Business, and the Global Economy (McKinsey Global Institute, May, 2013).

2. Daniela Rus, “How technological breakthroughs will transform everyday life,” Foreign Affairs, July/August, 2015.

3. A more extended discussion of these issues can be found in Darrell M. West, What Happens If Robots Take the Jobs? (Brookings Institution Policy Report, October, 2015).

4. James Hagerty, “Meet the new generation of robots for manufacturing,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2015.

5. Alison Sander and Meldon Wolfgang, “The rise of robotics,” The Boston Consulting Group, August 27, 2014. https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/business_unit_strategy_innovation_rise_of_robotics.

6. RBC Global Asset Management, Global Megatrends: Automation in Emerging Markets (2014).

7. Cynthia Breazeal, “The personal side of robots,” South by Southwest, March 13, 2015.

8. Eitan Wilf. “Sociable robots, jazz music, and divination: contingency as a cultural resource for negotiating problems of intentionality,” American Ethnologist: Journal of the American Ethnological Society, November 6, 2013: 605. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.12041/abstract.

9. Mike Murphy, “Amazon tests out robots that might one day replace warehouse workers,” Quartz, June 1, 2015.

10. Lydia DePillis, “Minimum-wage offensive could speed arrival of robot-powered restaurants,” Washington Post, August 16, 2015.

11. Thi-Hai-Ha Dang and Adriana Tapus, “Stress game: the role of motivational robotic assistance in reducing user’s task stress,” International Journal of Social Robotics, April, 2015.

12. Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (New York: Norton, 2015).

13. Andrei A. Kirilenko and Andrew W. Lo, “Moore’s Law versus Murphy’s Law: algorithmic trading and its discontents,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23391690.pdf?acceptTC=true.

14. Shukla Shubhendu and Jaiswal Vijay, “Applicability of artificial intelligence in different fields of life,” International Journal of Scientific Engineering and Research, September, 2013.

17. Derek Thompson, “A world without work,” The Atlantic, July/August, 2015.

18. Dawn Nakagawa, “The second machine age is approaching,” Huffington Post, February 24, 2015.

19. MIT Technology Review, “Who will own the robots,” September, 2015.

20. Martin Ford, The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology, and the Economy of the Future (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2009). Also see his more recent book, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

21. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment projections: 2012–2022 summary,” December 19, 2013. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.nr0.htm

23. Quoted in Harold Meyerson, “Technology and trade policy is pointing America toward a job apocalypse,” Washington Post, March 26, 2014. The original paper is by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, “The future of employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerisation,” Oxford University Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, September 17, 2013.

24. Frey and Osborne, “The future of employment,” op. cit.: 57–72.

25. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 11.

26. Lawrence Summers, “The economic challenge of the future: jobs,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2014.

27. Quoted in David Rotman, “How technology is destroying jobs,” MIT Technology Review, June 12, 2013. http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/

29. Quoted in Melissa Kearney, Brad Hershbein, and David Boddy, “The future of work in the age of the machine,” Brookings Institution Hamilton Project, February, 2015.

30. Aaron Smith and Janna Anderson, “AI, robotics, and the future of jobs,” Pew Research Center, August 6, 2014.

31. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000–1887 (Boston: Ticknor & Co., 1888).

32. Nicolas Colin and Bruno Palier, “Social policy for a digital age,” Foreign Affairs, July/August, 2015.

34. Kemal Dervis, “A new birth for social democracy,” Brookings Institution Project Syndicate, June 10, 2015.

35. The Griffith Insurance Education Foundation, “Millennial generation attitudes about work and the insurance industry,” February 6, 2012.

36. Lindsey Pollack, “Attitudes and attributes of millennials in the workplace,” September 12, 2014.

37. Job Centre Plus, “Volunteering while getting benefits,” UK Department for Work and Pensions, October, 2010. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/264508/dwp1023.pdf

38. Quoted in Thompson, “A world without work,” op. cit.

39. Melinda Sandler Morill and Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia, “What effects do macroeconomic conditions have on families’ time together?” Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10419/58561

40. Darrell M. West, Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2014).

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Description and Historical Perspectives of Technology

• First Online: 07 March 2017

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Technology is development and use of tools and machines to extend our capabilities to solve real-world problems. It is very much concerned with what can or should be designed, made, or developed from natural world materials and substances to satisfy human needs and wants. It deals with how humans change objects and events while the science tries to explain object and events. Technology is evolutionary and is often the result of a series of refinements to an idea or basic invention. The acquisition of techniques is a cumulative matter, in which each generation inherits a stock of techniques on which it can build if it chooses and social conditions permit. Many different cultures have had significant impacts upon technological advances. Early in the history of technology, the development of tools and materials was based on technological know-how. However, current technological development is based on scientific knowledge and engineering design.

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Department of Biomedical Engineering, Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakif University, Istanbul, Turkey

Bahattin Karagözoğlu

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Karagözoğlu, B. (2017). Description and Historical Perspectives of Technology. In: Science and Technology from Global and Historical Perspectives. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52890-8_5

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52890-8_5

Published : 07 March 2017

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