In an era of exponential technology with broad and deep implications and reverberations that we cannot even predict or fathom, good-to-great tech governance is no longer a nice thing to have or something to think about tomorrow. It’s a must-have to think about yesterday and today. Moreover, good-to-great tech governance cannot consist of merely grafting old practices and systems onto something so new and so fundamentally different. The exponential governance mindset is about adaptable, future-facing governance.
While the innovators are “moving fast and (possibly) breaking things” — things that may be unfixable once broken — in furtherance of discovery and riches, the stewards are also trying to move fast, racing against time to fix flaws and build or rebuild things. The recent adoption by the European Union of the AI Act and policy developments in China and the United States addressing the development of AI and generative AI guardrails speak volumes to the urgency of developing national and global tech governance standards applicable to persons, organizations, and nations in every sector. While the innovators are more motivated by riches, influence, and power mostly for themselves and their peers, the stewards are more motivated by safety, security, ethics, and guardrails, and thus protecting a broader swath of stakeholders.
It’s not that the twain shall never meet — there are many of us who embody both the excitement and the concern, as well as the desire for innovation and the need for safety. We are human after all. It’s not the tech that is dangerous or evil; it is the humans with negligent, dangerous, or evil intentions that deploy the tech as harmful weapons for their own ends that need to be kept in mind. This includes the powerful human technologists who become potentially more careless, disconnected, or hubristic as they gain fame and fortune. Indeed, the twain — innovation and stewardship — must always meet.
Picture drone swarms armed with synthetic biological agents, all created with the assistance of GenAI, inflicting terror upon an urban environment. That involves humans making the wrong choices. That is what we must be concerned about. That is what we must prepare for and prevent to the greatest extent possible at every level of governance within and across entities and jurisdictions while allowing for the unfurling and broad sharing of helpful, life-changing inventions.
In this Age of Pandora, we, as individuals, as leaders and as global citizens, can achieve the exponential governance mindset sweet spot — we can be both innovators and stewards.
In an internal email the press got its hands on during the OpenAI governance crisis of November 2023, a Microsoft executive stated, “Speed is even more important than ever…it would be an absolutely fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later.”
To this, I would respond and ask: But what about the things that cannot be fixed later? My point is that we do not need to sacrifice innovation for governance, nor do we need to sacrifice governance for innovation. It is up to diverse, knowledgeable, learning-oriented, forward-thinking, and continuously curious managers, directors and policymakers to develop this better, more savvy approach to the future. Bottom line: we need to develop the exponential governance mindset to survive and thrive in the coming exciting and daunting turbulence while protecting the vulnerable and advantaging humanity and life on earth.
In this Age of Pandora, we, as individuals, as leaders and as global citizens, can achieve the exponential governance mindset sweet spot — we can be both innovators and stewards. We can be careful technologists, and exuberant consumers. We can be cutting edge inventors and cautious beta testers. We can be effective ethicists and enthusiastic gamers. We can be robotics inventors and safe and happy drone users. We can be health-conscious biotechnologists and grateful recipients of the latest customized cancer treatments. We can be all those things and both sides of the equation at the same time — innovators and stewards.
While we can be all of these things simultaneously, it will require a conscious effort on all of our parts. Even then, there will always be those who don’t participate — either because of the absence of opportunity (humanitarian reasons) or the presence of depravity — criminal gangs, rogue nation states, the guy in his mom’s basement with nothing better to do than to wreak technological havoc. Yes, there will be outliers, non-participants, those excluded because of the absence of educational, health, resources, or the presence of poverty, hardship, war and other conditions out of their controls. We need to make conscious and positive efforts to include the excluded on the bright side of this equation. For the rest of us, privileged enough to have access to a little or a lot of technology, we must guide our organizations to be future-ready and not future-reactive and do our best as global citizens to contribute to and protect the exponential tech frontiers and our shared global commons.
Innovation and stewardship are two sides of the same coin and are just as needed and as valuable. Instead of calling each other names — “accelerationists versus decelerationists” or “techno-optimists versus doomers,” why don’t we stop the unnecessary, negative polarization and settle on a positive spin for both sides of this equation and call ourselves innovators and stewards where there are a number of constructive possibilities.
This article Move fast and mend things is featured on Big Think.