February 5th, 2019
Too Deep to Fail: Big Tech and Civil Society
Conference
As the world of computing is increasingly dominated by lightly regulated technological behemoths which do not conform particularly well to any previous model of a firm with which civil society has built up experience and intuition, it has been dawning on leading voices that without adequate foundations, we can neither afford to simply regulate such entities using our current limited understanding, nor allow them to amass power, unfettered as largely self-regulated entities. This is increasingly being seen as due to their now essential role within societal and security infrastructure, the discretion with which they curate social media backed by server farms full of sensitive personal data, and the war chests of cash on which they now sit. This conference brings together economists, legal scholars, and technologists to explore how best to comprehend and potentially regulate the new breed of Tech giants within the context of a market based civil society.
February 4th, 2019
An Analog World Riding on Corporate Digital Infrastructure: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
With Jaron Lanier and Eric Weinstein
CIGS hosts a conversation between Jaron Lanier, Father of Virtual Reality and author of the books “Who Owns the Future” and “Dawn of a New Everything” and Eric Weinstein, Managing Director of Thiel Capital on the manifold issues now being raised by digital platforms, and the need for new economic thinking beyond traditional regulation and theory.
October 29th, 2018
AI Superpowers
With Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, Chairman, Sinovation Ventures
CIGS, together with Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, hosted a discussion with Kai Fu Lee, former president of Google China, current CEO of Sinovation Ventures, and author of the new book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order.
In his book Dr. Lee compares developments in AI and computing technology in the US and China, and the ways in which China is catching up. The conversation focused on the different comparative advantages that each country brings to the table and also the need, as the competition heats up, to keep track of the social and economic implications of improved AI. As automation increasingly displaces workers the need to elevate the most human of qualities, compassion and empathy becomes increasingly important and we discussed what this might mean in terms of long term economic policy.
September 13th, 2018
Capitalism in the Age of Robots
With Lord Adair Turner
The rapid, unstoppable, and limitless progress of automation has potentially profound implications for the nature of and need for work, and for the distribution of income and wealth. But it also has profound implications for the very meaning of some concepts and measures that play a fundamental role in economic analysis – in particular productivity growth and GDP per capita. At the limit, one can question whether the very concept of “an economy” or of “economics” – if defined as the study of production and consumption choices amid conditions of inherent scarcity – will have any meaning in a world where, eventually, all human work activities can be automated.
Lord Adair Turner, former Chair of the UK Financial Services Authority and the International Financial Stability Board’s major policy committee, led this CIGS gathering in a discussion of some of the issues analyzed in his recent paper, Capitalism in the Age of Robots.
April 12th, 2018
Is Tech Tearing Apart the Work and Life Cycles?
Co-hosted With Sam Altman, President, Y Combinator
It has been approximately 50 years since industrialized society has had a stable model tying together the cycle of work with the cycle of life. Consider the following stark and stylized facts:
- Fewer than 1 in 10 children born before WWII, would not out-earn his/her parents. For children born in 1980, that number had jumped to 5 in 10.
- A child born in 2014 is unlikely to be born to a married couple in their first marriage. In 1960 the odds were 73%.
- Measured in 2016 dollars, the 1973 median male income was just over 54K. It has been lower in all 45 years since then. In 1970 fewer than 10% of adult males aged 25-34 lived with their parents. In 2017 that number was 20%.
- Originations for conventional home loans recently fell more than 50%, from over 4 million in 2004 to under 2 million in 2015.
Simply put, our markets have been rewriting our lives as we continue to reference ourselves to a past that will likely never return and which fewer Americans have ever experienced first-hand.
CIGS co-hosted a discussion with Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, to explore a narrow question: “Are our lives now driven around a crisis in the lifecycle of the modern American Family that, more than 50 years on, still has no name or generally agreed upon unifying description?”
Economists, technologists and policy-makers sometimes approach this issue much like the Blind Men and the Elephant, where each person focuses on the area they see the most clearly, be it income inequality, education, UBI, longevity or growth, and loses track of the bigger picture. The goal of this discussion was to step out of pre-existing frameworks and address the question more holistically to try and understand what form any unifying solution might need to take.
April 3rd 2018
Free Speech in the Era of Social Media: Market Failure in The Attention Economy
Co-hosted With Tristan Harris, Center for Humane Technology
The Cambridge Analytica story brought to fore questions about a new species of speech – machine-automated, A/B tested, micro-targeted speech – precisely matched to 2 billion people’s minds. Familiar maxims like “the solution to bad speech is more speech” or “transparency is the best disinfectant” are insufficient to a world of finite attention and exponential automation. How can platforms marry the benefits (breaking through politically correct, institutional narratives controlled by the few) while not being intrinsically designed in a way that enables exponential damage to the public sphere?
Center for Innovation Growth and Society co-hosted a discussion with Tristan Harris, founder of the Center for Humane Technology and the inspiration of the Time Well Spent movement on how to understand and push back against the frequently opaque algorithms that may be negatively altering our economic and political discourse.
January 31st 2018
Bubbles in Technology
With Bill Janeway, INET cofounder and former Warburg Pincus Vice Chairman
As current debates around Bitcoin swirl, mirroring other ongoing debates about bubbles in Tech markets, CIGS held a meeting led by INET cofounder and former Warburg Pincus Vice Chairman Bill Janeway that focused on trying to understand some of their driving causes and economic implications. Here are some of the issues that were discussed:
It is critical, firstly, to distinguish structural bubbles, which facilitate the growth of innovation, from more simply destructive bubbles whose chief effects are redistributive. Such bubbles, like the 2005-2008 housing bubble are often fueled by credit and may have as their focus assets such as real estate, which have little to do with true innovation. The 1998-2000 tech bubble, by contrast, fueled mostly by capital markets, can be seen a productivity enhancing bubble.
Both psychology and structural factors are important in understanding bubbles. Psychological factors often make market participants willing to accept negative expected value as with a lottery ticket. However this is exacerbated by the structure of investment markets, where in periods of rising returns investors, who are investing other people’s money, do not always have the freedom to opt out of the bubble as there is an expectation that their returns would be comparable to the rising market. There is a principle-agent problem, as investment companies are removed from the consequences of their investment choices causing a misalignment of prices. Missing types investment vehicles could potentially ameliorate the issue.
One of the takeaways from the discussion is that we can begin to see bubbles as an emergent phenomena, something to be understood non-normatively as natural consequences of the rules we put in place to constitute a market.
The discussion suggested the beginnings of a research program that could explore:
- A taxonomy of meaningful bubble types so that we do not conflate structural bubbles from uncompensated redistribution.
- An explication of the transmission mechanism from the parameterized rules of markets to the types and frequency of bubbles that are likely to form within them.
- The search for a prescriptive strategy as to how one might redesign the three player game between government backed research, technologist backed enterprise and financial speculation, to allow more broad and survivable participation leading, to an increase in innovation investment.