 Hello, and welcome to iNetLife. My name is Katya Klinava, I lead labor and economy research programs at the partnership on AI. This episode of iNetLife is on the future of work, and today's topic is called making technologies work for all. I'm joined for this conversation by a terrific and truly multidisciplinary panel. On it today are Tess Posner, CEO of AI for All, Martin Wiefs, managing director, senior partner, and chairman of VCG Henderson Institute. And stepping in for Mariana Matsukada, who unfortunately was not able to join us today, is Dr. Antonia Andeon, associate professor of industrial economics at University College London, and head of research at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Welcome to all three of you. We will leave time at the end for audience questions. So to our audience, thank you very much for joining us today, and please submit your questions at any point during our discussion by clicking on the Q&A button. I'd like to start by acknowledging why today's topic calls for making technologies work for all. It is because in the last four decades, at least when it comes to wages employment, not everyone has been sharing on the source of technological advances. In theory, technology improves productivity, and productivity growth drives wage growth. But in practice, what we seem to be seeing is that productivity growth has not been spread uniformly across wage and education levels. The technologies of the information era have been hugely complementary to people with stem skills, managers, and the so-called knowledge workers, and that translated into wage growth for them. But the median worker hasn't been enjoying those same wage gains. In fact, the wages of workers without college degrees have been stagnating and in the U.S. even declining in real terms over the past few decades. So I'd like to invite our panelists to share where you stand on why people are getting left behind by the latest form of technological progress. Is the issue with technologies, with how we invent them, with how we govern them, with how we distribute or fail to distribute the fruits of their advancement, or there is some combination of some of those reasons? Antonija, would you like to take a picture? Sure, thanks so much. Thanks for having me in this panel. I think your question is a big question in the sense that lots of the answers that we are going to try to give will have to take into consideration, first of all what has been happening in terms of technological change, what are we really referring to, and how actually this phenomenon is extremely heterogeneous across, within countries, across countries, and if we look at the cutting edge frontier technology countries, these are the rest. And of course all these different contexts are put together and integrated to a certain extent by the way in which the organizational production at the global level has been restructured. So processes of outsourcing and offshoring are an important part of understanding the machinery that is behind this phenomenon. I think as well the problem is to be able to understand what has been happening within firms, business enterprises, and why is that the institutions that could regulate these business enterprises and failed to actually address a number of distortions that we've been seeing happening for seven decades, in particular in relation to work. I'm referring to, in particular, to the way in which we have been seeing the dominance of a pattern of financialization in the productive sector in business enterprises, not just in terms of the financialization of the global economy, but actually financialization in the way in which corporate organization, business enterprises have been working in the engagement with technologies, in engagement with investment, in engagement with the path of investment, through investment of profits into activities. We've conducted quite a lot of work with colleagues at IPP, but also with scholars like William Lazzoni, who has been raising this concern, in particular in the context of the U.S., talking about how the sustainable prosperity, the machines that generated the middle class, got broken at some point, and one of the mechanisms responsible for that was definitely the high degree of financialization that a number of companies experienced, and how that also trickled down along supply chains in these ecosystems of firms. And of course this is important because firms who do not reinvest in their workforce might be innovative to a certain extent for a certain period of time, but this is not a sustainable pattern of development, but also a pattern to increase productivity. And in fact you mentioned the productivity problem and here sitting in London, this has been one of the major puzzles that the government has been trying to address over the years, major industrial policy plan and productivity plans, and again the heterogeneity of the problem has made very difficult to address it, but of course cannot be addressed simply as a technical problem. The technology can provide solution to lack of productivity or better organizational forms of integration, but there is a more fundamental problem around how we give electionality to technologies innovation to make sure that they deliver the type of outcome we want to see. And this is why the KIPP used the slogan of innovation is political, exactly to refer to this important intersection between the technological change dynamics and the governance of technology and what is the role of the state in giving this directionality and shaping the direction of technological change. Thank you. I can't wait to dive in more to all of these points for now over to Ted. Hi, thank you so much for having me and thank you all in the audience for joining. I think my perspective is, you know, we've seen that it's really about who is shaping and building these technologies and we've seen that many that are most impacted by the technologies we're developing on an everyday level and including impacted by the disruptions that the technologies are causing are not included in fact are historically excluded from being part of ideating, creating and deploying these technologies and I think as a result of that power dynamic the actual technologies are not representative of the wider society and to me the most critical thing to do is to disrupt that history because if we include those that are most impacted in the downstream effects of any new technology you're going to get better representation of what the true impacts would be and be able to prevent those better as well as really being able to understand what are the problems like before we've been go down the road of building something what are the problems that we're trying to solve and why and asking those questions with the right people in the room is really really critical. I think I work in the artificial intelligence space and we've seen that only 14 percent of AI technologists are women of any race and the numbers are much worse for people of color and we've already seen even in its nascent kind of development how that has led to bias in AI technology that has directly harmed communities of color and women whether it's lack of access to loans or insurance or even misidentification by computer vision systems and I think that this question becomes even more pressing in light of our current situation where we have COVID-19 and the impact of the pandemic being felt more by women in communities of color if we look at like who the front line workers are who these people who are actually keeping our society together are also getting the most impacted by the economic impacts and the health impacts of COVID-19 so it's critical that we think about who is in the room in in terms of who's making these decisions about what should be built how it's built and how it's applied and I think until we solve that you know no solution whether it's a governance policy or otherwise will be sufficient to actually ensure the technology can work for all as your opening question was so I'm excited to dig into this further thank you thanks a lot Martin over to you yes thank you Katja thank you for inviting me so I'd say the the question to the unequal benefits is actually not to begin with that cost but to begin with the benefits themselves so I think my first point would be that there are benefits so some people are skeptical about whether technology is actually driven aggregate productivity up I think if you de-average we see that it definitely is but it's it's very unequally spread however the securing the benefits for a nation or a corporation is far from guaranteed it requires organizational innovation to to unlock that so if you're sitting in a country that's not generating benefits that's a bigger problem than I think a problem of side effects and there are of course a lot of side effects and I think maybe the one of the main ways of dealing with that is is the self-interest of corporations what I call corporate statesmanship which is if there are extreme outcomes in terms of exclusion and inequality and unintended consequences the the technological innovating companies will bear the cost of that in terms of regulatory overreaction and so on so I think there's an education towards a new environment that is you know more brittle with respect to unintended consequences and and ripple effects and the third point I'd make is that the regulatory issues here are not straightforward some of them we don't have technical solutions for some of them we don't have regulatory solutions for for example how do you regulate an ecosystem that's not something that is any in any statute bought there's no common sense so I'd say don't just act innovate we need regulatory innovation to to deal with these these problems and some of that actually involving technology which brings me on to my fourth point which is the public sector embracing technology and the nonprofit sector embracing technology is an important part of not only dealing with the side effects but dealing with widespread benefits and that's also necessary I think to prevent regulatory asymmetry whereby the governments are not really savvy or competent enough technologically to actually be precise and effective in their interventions my fifth point would be don't just focus on technology let's imagine for example a technology where AI helps to judge people in courtrooms the effectiveness of that technology depends upon the broader socio-technical system so how the technology is used how it's communicated so I think we have to look at technology in context and not think that the the object here is technology narrowly defined my and then I'd also stress that it would be nice to believe that there's one primary problem here but actually there are many specific problems bias unintended consequences instability of highly connected systems trivial uses financialization privacy each of these requires for different interventions so I think we have to be very specific about which issue that we're looking at and then the last one I'd say it may be fashionable to attribute many of our ills to technology but actually some of what we're talking about today may be a coincidence in other words we have seen a trend towards the the financialization of corporate activity and more recently there's been a counterweight to that in terms of the stress on purpose and materiality but we might be here dealing with a coincidence of issues in a sense they'll maybe be broader issues of the revival of business ethics the updating of business ethics purposefulness the next generation of thinking on corporate social responsibility some of that might have happened some of the inequality we're talking about today and the polarized consequences of technology may have happened even without the technology in my view so it's a it's a very big and and complex agenda I think it is indeed quite a listed by the complex agenda I'm really looking forward to discussing more the corporate statementship questions and what that should look like in the future and as we begin to think about the future I'd like to invite you to reflect on our most recent past in the king-shaped jobs recovery with the always strong that we're seeing data shows that high wage employment so a much smaller dip to start with after the initial lockdown began in spring of last year and then recovered just after a few weeks after that by a low wage employment both experienced much deeper shock and still remains quite a bit under the pre-pandemic levels and of course who was able to keep their jobs and who wasn't often was determined by what kind of technologies we had available so it just turns out that the computer age has prepared higher wage workers so much better for the pandemic whipping them with the tools to stay productive at home to really work but those technological adjustments evidently were not enough and did not benefit the lower wage workers in the same degrees sometimes actually their jobs were made more precarious and harder to keep in the context like a pandemic when many people needed more flexibility to balance their professional and their family commitments so my question to you is dreaming about the future and thinking about the future going forward what can we do to incentivize creation of technologies that would help all people especially the more economically vulnerable groups to better whether the next shock that the climate crisis the next pandemic or something else um just would you like to to keep yourself I think you already started talking about these uneven impacts from the pandemic yeah thank you it's a really great question and it's one that's I find deeply troubling because if we look at you know on the one hand we're praising what we're calling essential workers who have basically kept the world going I mean none of us would be able to sit on zoom get our delivery food or whatever it is um get our groceries delivered and remain safe you know it kind of sheltered and privileged from from getting the brunt impact of that and if we look at who the essential workers are 45 percent are women and people of color and so what we're seeing is those impacts will be felt and are already felt predominantly by certain groups and so I think again that comes down to exactly what you said which is that a lot of the technological innovation has been benefiting those that are already privileged and those that have those jobs that already pay well and are benefiting certain segments of the population imagine if we had the reverse where all of the solutions were being developed with those workers in mind with the essential workers in mind and it really shows us I think the experience of it of what we're going through really proves that point that it's all interconnected the essential workforce we're saying is essential because it's really holding up the rest of society and so if we're you know creating the innovations with that group in mind it's not just going to benefit them but it's going to benefit everyone and the entire fabric of what holds our economy together to me one of the biggest issues is you often don't have those people represented in the creation process of the technology and I think that is a multifaceted problem that goes back to education history of historical exclusionary practices and discriminatory practices that exclude certain people from from that process but you know you see it starting in middle school and high school where you're not having equal access to exposure to technology access to role models and mentors and therefore that pathway that access pathway into being part of the creation process is so limited it's such a narrow pathway and then even if you make it onto that pathway once you make it there's all these barriers because the current system isn't set up to actually welcome and include those folks that aren't included now so I think it's a it's a deeply systemic issue that's historically entrenched in a lot of different factors including racism and the history of marginalization especially in the US if we're looking at that specifically and we really need to focus on that because I think imagine what it could unlock if you had more people represented in that creation process and are thought of as the innovators and creators rather than this group of people who are making decisions for everyone who will be affected which I think regardless of the intentions of that group will always be limited because they're represent themselves and a homogenous group of people so I think to me to solve this problem the essential thing is to focus on the inclusion of who is shaping and making these decisions thank you Martin would you like to turn yes so on the question of what we can do about excluded groups I think this applies to different levels so so the level of a nation the level of different sectors of society and then within individual corporate networks so the level of a nation I'd say it's very important that whole nations and economies don't don't get excluded and so I think the science and technology policy becomes essential so I think to make that specific I think Europe has to think very hard about how to be competitive in a in a world where advances in AI are largely being driven by China and the US otherwise you have whole societies of excluded people I think at the the level of different classes in society I think we have to think about the nature of employment so it's likely that the AI revolution will essentially commoditize white collar work much of what is is high paid today may simply not be required in the future this huge economic sense incentive to reduce employment in certain professions and so actually I do worry about the high earning in the very short term we may have these marginalized groups I also worry about the the relevance of the current skill set of the of the of the higher paid workers professional workers and so I think that requires thinking about rethinking education basically now the education system is you know known for a huge inertia but we the pace of technological movement and the nature of work is moving very fast I think we need to move to a more sort of real time as needed and completely rethought educational agenda for for managers in particular in relation to AI I think we need to think about the unique the uniquely human activities that the machines cannot take over and things to do with creativity and empathy as well as thinking about tech savvy and rethinking education from from that perspective then within corporate networks actually within those people that may in aggregate appear to be doing well you know elite corporation workers and so on we've just been doing some research on on who within those networks is doing well and actually you find huge inequalities within corporate networks so basically working from home digital working has been in in aggregate a much smoother transmission transition than we might have imagined but it is focused meetings and communications on people that already have well established networks so if so new recruits Mavericks brokers between different parts of a corporate network people that are not central to the corporate network basically you can see in their communication patterns are being excluded and the cost of that of course is not only the exclusion of those groups but it essentially reduces the social capital and the future innovation potential of an organization so we need to rethink how digital networks work and how we can capture that serendipity and that broader set of interactions that are essential for the longer term health of the of the corporation and but I won't repeat what Tess said but I also very much think that the way to get a lot of these things thought about in the first place is to have a very diverse workforce that represents the the broader society because you will be you know raising the issues at the beginning of the innovation process that then become part of the solution in terms instead of developing more narrowly type of technologies and then bumping into a tricky exclusion phenomena down the line yeah that's okay that'd be great I just wanted to agree with something that you said which I think just offer one data point at AI for all so what we do we're a non-profit organization that focuses on education programs in artificial intelligence for groups that would otherwise be left out and we work with actually 18 universities to host high school students and college students to really build their skills in AI but to really build on your point about education one of the things that we believe is really critical is this really focus on future proof skills right because when anyone enters the workforce the shelf life of skills is shortening so even if you learn you know one programming language by the time a high school student makes it to the workforce who knows what that's going to look like so it's so important to think about critical thinking empathy and really getting students enmeshed in the sense of like what the societal implications of technology are and ethical frameworks and things like that to get them to engage in those questions early because those are the types of skills that you're going to need to answer some of these bigger questions and I just wanted to offer this as one data point that what we're seeing is that when you approach it that way young people get really fired up about what kinds of solutions they can get involved in based on what they care about and I think that that also helps unleash their creative potential and that innovative potential that's really untapped and so it has that multiple benefit of being this future proofing skill set that will basically serve someone throughout their whole life as they have to learn new skills um ongoing as the economy changes but also brings out that innate potential to think about new creative solutions with that thinking so I absolutely agree with you that you know the education system needs to be rethought in context of this and that will have tremendous benefits not just for ensuring that workers can keep pace with the changes but also really thinking about how to empower them with the agency to become creators because we're going to need that in the future with the kinds of challenges that we're facing over the next few decades so I just wanted to offer AI for all as an example of that where we see over 60 percent of our alumni starting projects AI projects in their communities to solve problems these are high school students so imagine what we could see if that was done on a massive scale it would be beyond what we could comprehend if I could just briefly respond to that um test I'm unfortunately I've got a memory like a seven-eyed car member the name of the starter but one good piece of news here is um there are a number of startups that train um underprivileged groups um you know people have drug problems people excluded from workforce and high school dropouts in programming and the evidence is that programming skills are eminently uh trainable and and so it it does appear to be a tractable problem if we approach it in a different way. Thank you very much and thank you so AI for all for the support this is a very important yeah Antonia, over to you over to you. I think lots of important points have been raised let me try also to uh problematize some of these issues I think we all agree that education is extremely important for social mobility inclusiveness and so on but we also know that we cannot have an approach to skills development as an individual problem and people are productive as part of organizations so if we do not have ways to rethink the way in which organizations and productive organizations work the individual skills themselves the education themselves do not address the fundamental problem also because as we know the nature of many of the technological changes changes we are seeing now uh is uh the nature of technology fusion that costs many different disciplinary and scientific areas which means that it's very difficult to predict what are going to be the exact type of skill profile that you are going to uh need so to a certain extent there is this need for working both the individual level but also the organizational level to understand what forms of organizations will be better in forms of management of work will be better suited to address the new challenges and yeah I think you raised before this point around I think Martin was mentioning about you know how do we think about new forms of thinking about management and representation and I think this is an important area the big topic of future of work is who is going to be involved in designing these words of work right these new spaces where people uh you know spend a large part of their life how do we create forms of involvement and you know the experience from the past if we think about mechanism of co-determination in the German system or form of employment like in the case of Japan that were sort of developed in order to provide people with uh more certainty and more willingness to accept technological change um we're talking about the countries where for example organization has gone ahead at highest speed uh we need to think about what are going to be the new forms of organization or world workforce that would allow to actually engage with this technology in a different way and we are facing challenges I mean I I've been looking for example at how work council and collective bargain Germany itself has been declining since 2000 dramatically which means that very important model that showed adaptability capacity of inclusiveness and so on have probably now need to be rethought and be integrated with these new type of challenges. The other set of points that I think were prompt by what Martin was saying I think we you know there is increasing evidence that um we should try to avoid as much as possible to get into this idea that we are uh in the middle of a revolution that is is roughly everything right so to a certain extent even in the use of technologies like AI there are a number of still challenges and the process is perhaps more incremental in terms of changing the nature of works and jobs than people would think of I mean I'm for example for some of you are interested I mean the MIT has just completed the I think two three years research program of the future work and part of the result is exactly trying to understand heterogeneity of the way which these things work and also how incremental and how much space we have actually to affect them and give them some directionality which I think goes back to the original point here so what we would like to see happening it's first of all understanding the nature of this phenomenon what are the entry points because I think we know that the complexity of the issue requires a sort of multi-pronged approach it's not just regulation in one area it's not just job rights it's not just you know getting quarters of people people participation it's about rethinking the food package of policies and integrating them in a way that provide effective directionality and you know I've been doing work for example in South Africa in terms of looking at how you can integrate industrial competition policy in order to get the benefit to what Marty was referring to of the digital technologies also in the public sector but at the same time you can actually avoid that a digital platform in particular or digital ranks leads to further concentration and further constitutional power and so production in consequence I can't resist responding to that Antonio if I may so I think I think there's a precedent a pattern in the history of technology which is the piloted by Carla to Perez and others which says that basically technology doesn't create wealth and prosperity unless it's accompanied by an organizational change a sociological change in how that technology is deployed as a business strategist I very much see that in business so we can think about the corporations of today employing technology in order to create value and create work I think the evidence is that that's probably not going to work because the technologies we're talking about actually change the nature of the way that we produce the nature of what we produce and consume and how we communicate so we have to actually change the the fabric of the corporation and so that's a very important area I think which is what is a corporation how does it work and a couple of speculations on my part in relation to that so I think we've been used to the idea that corporations produce things and it is true that going back a few years corporate success used to last for at least a decade if you're successful you'd likely continue to be successful the decay rate of corporations now is about a year and so in other words just because you're successful yesterday does not mean that you'll be successful tomorrow which means that we need to reconfigure corporations as machines which learn and adapt so it all becomes about learning so you basically need all corporate organizations which are geared for learning not producing based upon yesterday's learning that's a very different type of organization and secondly what do we mean by organization we may think about an organization as an org chart a hierarchy of individuals segregated by roles but actually if white collar work is being taken over by AI we need to reconceptualize the organization as a productive hybrid a productive learning hybrid of humans and algorithms you know what does the org chart for that look like and and and how do we how do we make that happen so I think there's a there's a responsibility and an opportunity for corporativeness here in order to generate work we need to think about the organizations that create value and those corporations need to rethink themselves so hybrid learning organization I think is what we need to define and and there are a handful of companies that are making enormous progress in that direction but I think the majority of companies are not really thinking about things in that way currently I want to come back to the segment you were looking Martin about corporate state friendship and tie it with the point that Antonio was making about the directionality of technology so the institute for innovation and public purpose that where Antonio is heading up research has done really a lot of work to help the world recognize the major positive role that governments can play in setting this directionality driving innovation forward often taking the most risks without much reward for that but the problem with governments that's a problem is that national governments are entities that you know are mandated to care for the well-being of a single nation while technology as we're witnessing most snowboarders american innovators might automate the cost in the u.s labor costs in the u.s but once it is automated here the technology spreads globally often at virtually zero costs and workers in poorer countries might not be able to compete with it no matter how low they push their wages so this speaks to this heterogeneity that Antonio was referring to and that really the appropriate and needed technology is different for different countries so in this environment of borderless technology should there be some kind of truly empowered international body that is mandated to ensure technology's voice to solve to serve all people of the planet and in an absence of such a body are there additional responsibilities on the shoulders of technology companies because those are often international while governments are not and whoever wants to champion on that. If you allow me to because you were mentioning before also the COVID I think the COVID crisis has been accelerating patterns that we were already observing going on but in doing that in generating this acceleration has made clear a number of these issues that you're referring to so when I was talking about directionality for example and now people are aware of the fact that a technology that doesn't deliver in terms of resilience in terms of robustness of systems that allow to keep society cohesive and able to respond to a pandemic it's not a technology useful for all at all right and now if we think about COVID and we think about what we are learning about the problem of who is going to produce the vaccine where the vaccine is going how is it going to be distributed how developing countries are going to get access to that and so on. We also realize that while we do not have what you said you know the an easy way to make some of these technologies immediately public use at the same time we know that we have the possibility and not referring to just drugs and the pharma side but also the made tech side we have the possibility of promoting development of a key industry like the health sector in a number of countries in much more distributed form which would allow to have much more resilience across countries in the world in providing the type of answer to things like pandemic without even entering now into the climate change side and I think you know we've been discussing about how difficult it was to scale up and ramp up production of ventilators and then became masks and then became PPE and so on and so forth right so it seems to me that this is an area where the health sector and made tech so the broader made tech in biopharma can really become an important driver for a more distributed form of development of technologies and adaptation of technologies in different country conflicts and also an important multiplier when we think about biomed tech we are talking about lots of critical product system which implies lots of linkages lots of supply chain development and also lots of adaptation and institutional level context and here the government can really take the lead in shaping this direction because of course the health sector implies a significant procurement commitment by the government and procurement could be a very important instruments to shape is much more distributed form of development in use of the technology in the made tech sector I mean I could say more about the climate change side but I think in everyone's mind at the moment there is this issue of how would be the current situation different if we had invested in developing productive capabilities in pharma made tech across several developing countries and by the way not losing this capability is also in advanced the comments right because the fact that we had so many logistics problems so many problems in addressing the crisis in the beginning is partially the result of lacking and losing capabilities in critical areas where actually realized you know many of the our well-being and wealth of the economy was was based on so I think this is an important moment where we can actually innovate both the technology much more importantly organizational level in thinking how this can become an opportunity to actually open up a new I would say I like to think about these sectors and multiplier of development in number of both developing countries and the regions within developed countries where the certification of the productive system has led to unemployment has led to populism has led to a number of challenges we're facing now I think just to build on that and think about the question of you know production of technology if we think about something like AI or even in your example around the vaccine and health care technology when we think about the governance so how how is this being distributed what are the rules and policies that dictate that and I think back to your question of like a global technology council that's this kind of top-down body that's trying to equally distribute these things the third leg of that stool that we haven't really touched on is this idea of trust and that's been such a tremendous theme over the past year when we think about technology and how tools like social media have had this tremendous backlash because of how people perceive them interfering with democracy for example on the one side or just being completely full of like false information and even with something like the masks like we could have ramped up the production and we could have mandated masks and at the same time many many people didn't believe didn't trust in this information and so to me you know there's like we can talk about how the governance and the regulation as well as the production side of things can impact kind of the distribution but what also affects the distribution is that trust and I really wonder about that when we're talking about any kind of top-down solution whether it's like this global body or the government and really thinking about something that might be more decentralized and grassroots and how we start to build that participation because I think that participation builds trust and that may look really different depending on how you look at it might be really grassroots it might be education campaigns it might be just people getting to speak out and and feel heard in this space but I think if we don't address that any kind of policy or massive wide-scale idea it won't take root especially in certain areas is what we're seeing so to me that's one of the key issues we need to address and I think again it has to do with very complex pieces but one way is again thinking back to this like participation architecture how do we get more people to feel like they're contributing like they're part of the solution and that that does build the sense of trust for any kind of solution that we want to roll out or feel like are going to work for everybody but they won't if they don't accept it and and I think to me that's a very troubling piece that isn't often talked about when we think about the solutions like governance and policies yeah expanding on this idea of corporal citizenship and what do we mean by it so there is a clear role for government corporations can't be expected to self-regulate everything in their own interest you would have an enormous governance problem however there are problems with expecting too much of government for a number of reasons you know current political divisiveness and fragmentation means that governments are not in their best position to respond to many of these issues the speed of development doesn't mitigate towards a government taking prompt action asymmetry of information we don't have the best expertise on these new technologically related externality issues in government. Globality governments are national or global corporations many corporations are more global and also the complexity of the issue the fact we're not dealing with one issue here we're dealing with maybe maybe 50 discrete issues so what is the role of the corporation in taking action beyond their own boundaries either in their own enlightened self-interest or in the interests of the societies in which they're embedded you know that's what I mean by corporate statesmanship and I think some of the key elements of that first they are to see that big picture to say that is absolutely a role for the corporation the corporation must shape its context so in biology it's called niche formation that in new emerging businesses businesses have a role to play in shaping the environment in which they play as well as playing in that environment. I think it's about expanding the canvas of consideration so strategy traditionally is dealt mainly with issues of what you may call you know next door neighbor next to neighbors customers and competitors but not really societies regulators and so on expanding the canvas expanding the time scale of consideration so not just the next quarter of the next year but the the long-term consequences of the new social media models or whatever it happens to be and then thinking about a more integrated way of thinking about those issues so corporate social responsibility has played an enormous role in raising the interests of corporations in these on these broader social issues but you know one of its principal drawbacks is it's not really baked into strategy so it's almost like a parallel you know co-optimization of social issues and business issues so you get a lot of contradictions so I'm more baked in way of thinking about what I call sustainable business model innovation where you actually think about the the limits as you stretch and scale a business model and and you for sustainability and sustainable contribution you actually think about baking those considerations into the strategy itself rather than into some parallel set of of corporate measures. The final thing I'd say is you know when when corporations apply that in apply that in light and self-interest you know I think there's a growing awareness that constraints are not entirely a bad thing so I think traditionally coming out of the era of of ergonomics and free market capitalism the idea was that perhaps the common sense idea was that regulation was something to be resisted because it harmed you know corporate freedoms to you know to create value but of course without any constraints whatsoever and tests refer to a big one which is we you know if we can't agree on what constitutes a fact because we're all free to say whatever we like in whatever channels we like then you start to erode the trust which affects the business of everybody so you know I think corporations thinking about the constraints which operate in favor of a well-ordered and sustainable game which is in their long-term self-interest as well as society is an important aspect of this so I see hopefully a future where corporations will be on a global basis you know lobbying for some types of regulation which are both socially necessary and in their own long-term self-interest they become active shapers of the of the corporate context so sometimes the debate is trivialized as CEOs taking a stance or not on an issue taking not taking a stance can seem irresponsible or amoral and and taking a stance can actually exacerbate an issue that is already polarized but there are alternatives of course one creates platforms for dialogue one can create fora for discussing new types of regulation one can lobby for certain types of regulations all of that I call corporate statesmanship and I think it's it's an emerging topic an emerging art that I think will be more important moving forwards just to respond to one point just martin rates I think we have the narrative around the state lack of capacity in terms of managing some of these processes actually is a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that the more we ease we make the state incapable the more it will become incapable right and the more it stops doing the type of things that has to do the worst it's going to be for the function of the economy I think the narrative around the role of the state and how state can set up a relationship with business enterprises that actually allow to maximize the type of symbiotic relationship that emerged is at the core of the idea of managing some form of industrial poison regulatory power and I think this is where I think there is to be a profound shift not just the cosmetic shift but a profound shift in rebalancing the type of way which we've been engaging with the problem of how the state and the corporations interact we have been seeing corporations being completely incapable to deal with the with the pandemic in many respects and the state had to step in in many areas right at the same time we are in a situations where as we said in the very beginning the new technologies can allow the state to develop dynamic capabilities and new forms of engagement which actually allow for addressing the kind of systemic problems and regularly that problems that I think Mark was also referring to and I think there is an element of you know the and I share what Thess was mentioned you know how do you rebuild the social contract how do you build a platform that allows people to beyond some form of simple etiquette around what is the role of the public what is the product but actually allow around specific problems to really find missions or activities that actually are functional to the solution of the problem and this can mean the new architecture of governments that we are not still seeing happening but and this is why I'm saying I think we should allow for a plurality of experimentation around how this platform of governance would work and how it would develop a different country context thank you I want to what's along the audience questions we have quite a few really interesting ones and because we only have I'm going to string them into themes and combine a few questions into one so there's definitely a theme coming across about antitrust what what role can it play in driving inclusive economic outcomes from technological advancement as well as taxation people are asking our viewers how technologies can be inclusive if profits are being diverted into tax havens and also there is a question around what what US could learn in terms of regulation from Europe and from the UK which I think is a special relevant question on the US presidential immigration so if anyone would like to comment on any of these aspects this channel I'm not an expert in regulation but just just comment on one aspect of that which is so I think the the anti-monopoly issues of a large part of the debate is focused around you know breaking up the tech oligopolies you know I would separate the creation of the benefit from the from dealing with the side effects and I I think it's very important that we you know these many of the technologies and the benefits of digital platforms rely on the efficiency of of scale so I would I think we think need to be more in the direction of the distribution of benefits rather than measures that may undermine the ability to obtain those benefits in the in the first place so this is the difference between saying you know e-commerce is to is to concentrated let's break it up and you know we need to balance the efficiency of the model with you know rules about distribution of benefits inclusiveness of partners and so on I think going the second route is in aggregate more perhaps more productive from from my perspective I think I think the competition policy angle is we have been as the economy change and the platform type of structure becomes the new forms of you know from the factory to the platform some people have been saying of course the way which we think about competition policy has to change as well in the sense that we need to better understand what accounts for abuse of dominant positions what are the relevant markets how we define all this different context and in a sense the problem here is to identify what is the optimal level of competition which is not necessarily trying to break all sorts of corporate structures that rely on technologies that have network effects that require agglomeration that requires some form of more global type of structure the problem is more you know how what are the instruments that we had what are the type of trends that we are seeing happening and for those of you interested and also as this initiative called digital pathways to prosperity where many of us have been working on trying to identify exactly how in different contexts competition policy when is used strategically integrated with other type of regulatory measures especially industrial policy can actually become an instrument to unlock the kind of negative side of extreme concentration where same as the opportunities offered by digital technologies I would say the other two bits where clearly we need to work more is how to think about corporate governance reforms because this is an area which affect dramatically extent to which the firm can be what Martin described the learning type of institutions of organization or platform and the extent to which actually there is a financial commitment of resources into technology innovation with the public type of purpose with proper directionality so I think these two are key artists that require rethinking in this new context of technological change I'm just quickly responding to that I I think regulatory innovation I think the word innovation I think we shouldn't rush to action on things that we need to to innovate around if you think about competition policy traditionally it's it's got a couple of hidden assumptions one of them is that it's mainly a national issue another one is that mainly concerns you know issues of consumer harm I think these networks these these policies don't apply easily to say e-commerce where there is no obvious consumer harm if there's harm it's probably more more on the supply side and where you're dealing with where you're dealing with global issues so we we absolutely need regulatory innovation so I think there's a lot perhaps that academics and politicians can do to put in place those those that international collaboration around regulatory innovation on and this is a whole set of issues around you know privacy interpretability unintended consequences transparency and so on so that we we we we have new ways of new more soft ways of dealing with these issues some of them being perhaps technological solutions yeah I wonder about how you know regulation can often in some places be much slower to act and slower to make an impact and in the implementation of that regulation there can be all these unintended consequences to pull out a phrase that you used and I think being continuing to be cautious and knowing that that's a slow vehicle and also one that is you know can can bring opposite effects than what we're intended so I think we need to look outside of just regulation as a vehicle for change because of its speed but also it's inaccuracy in in solving these issues so what are the other solutions that we can use that are faster and more decentralized and that really take into account you know everyone's needs in terms of how the speed at which some of these changes are happening how do we keep up with that in a way that is inclusive and really thoughtful about the implications and unintended consequences these are really excellent points I want to thank the panelists for they're really insightful it's very nuanced conversation today for not trying away from complexities and problematic aspects of the questions that we've been discussing and the questions that our audience has been submitting for us thank you all very much for joining this discussion will now continue in an open forum with iNed's young scholars to join it please click on the young scholars initiative link at the bottom of the screen the next episode of iNed's live future work series will feature Danny Roderick Paulina Czerniewa and Laura Tyson and will be moderated by Steve Clemens they will discuss economic and social policy for the digital era save the day it's january 26 at noon eastern time please register on the iNed's website if you haven't done that done so yet the link is to the right of this video on the iNed webpage please follow iNed live at iNed economics to hear about new episodes of the future work series thank you very much and see you next time