There will be turbulence

"While small changes in technology can fundamentally alter the balance of power, trying to predict exactly how, decades into the future, is incredibly difficult. Exponential technologies amplify everyone and everything. And that creates seemingly contradictory trends. Power is both concentrated and dispersed. Incumbents are both strengthened and weakened. Nation-states are both more fragile and at greater risk of slipping into abuses of unchecked power.

Recall that growing access to power means everyone’s power will be amplified. In the coming decades, historical patterns will play out once again, new centers will form, new infrastructures develop, new forms of governance and social organization emerge. At the same time, existing loci of power will be amplified in unpredictable ways. Sometimes, when one reads about technology, there is a heady sense that it will sweep away all that has come before, that no older businesses or institutions will survive the whirlwind. I don’t think that’s true; some will be swept away, but many will be augmented. Television can broadcast the revolution, but it can also help erase it. Technologies can reinforce social structures, hierarchies, and regimes of control as well as upend them.

In the resulting turbulence, without a major shift in focus, many open democratic states face a steady decay of their institutional foundations, a withering of legitimacy and authority. This is a circular dynamic of technology spreading and power shifting, which undermines the foundations, dents the capacity to rein it in, and so leads to further spread. At the same time, authoritarian states are given a potent new arsenal of repression.

The nation-state will be subject to massive centrifugal and centripetal forces, centralization and fragmentation. It’s a fast track to chaos, calling into question who makes decisions and how; how those decisions are executed, by whom, when, and where, pressurizing those delicate balances and accommodations toward the breaking point. This recipe for turbulence will create epic new concentrations and dispersals of power, splintering the state from above and below. It will ultimately cast doubt on the viability of some nations altogether."

Trecho retirado de "The Coming Wave" de Mustafa Suleyman e Michael Bhaskar.

"The coming wave of contradictions"

Um tema interessante retirado de "The Coming Wave" de Mustafa Suleyman e Michael Bhaskar, "The coming wave of contradictions":

"If centralization and decentralization sound as if they are in direct contradiction, that's with good reason: they are. Understanding the future means handling multiple conflicting trajectories at once. The coming wave launches immense centralizing and decentralizing riptides at the same time. Both will be in play at once. Every individual, every business, every church, every nonprofit, every nation, will eventually have its own AI and ultimately its own bio and robotics capability. From a single individual on their sofa to the world's largest organizations, each AI will aim to achieve the goals of its owner. Herein lies the key to understanding the coming wave of contradictions. a wave full of collisions.

Each new formulation of power will offer a different vision of delivering public goods, or propose a different way to make products or a different set of religious beliefs to evangelize. AI systems already make critical decisions with overt political implications: who receives a loan, a job, a place at college, parole; who gets seen by a senior physician. Within the decade Als will decide how public money gets spent, where military forces are assigned, decentralizing ways. An Al might, for example, operate as one massive, state-spanning system, a single general-purpose utility governing hundreds of millions. Equally we will also have vastly capable systems, available at low cost, open-source, highly adapted, catering to a village.

Multiple ownership structures will exist in tandem: technology democratized in open-source collectives, the products of today's corporate leaders or insurgent blitz-scaling start-ups, and government held, whether through nationalization or in-house nurturing. All will coexist and coevolve, and everywhere they will alter, magnify, produce, and disrupt flows and networks of power.

Where and how the forces play out will vary dramatically according to existing social and political factors. This should not be an oversimplified picture, and there will be numerous points of resistance and adaptation not obvious in advance. Some sectors or regions will go one way, some the other, some will see powerful contortions of both. Some hierarchies and social structures will be reinforced, others overturned; some places may become more equal or authoritarian, others much less so. In all cases, the additional stress and volatility, the unpredictable amplification of power, the wrenching disruption of radical new centers of capability, will further stress the foundation of the liberal democratic nation-state system.

And if this picture sounds too strange, paradoxical, and impossible, consider this. The coming wave will only deepen and recapitulate the exact same contradictory dynamics of the last wave. The internet does precisely this: centralizes in a few key hubs while also empowering billions of people. It creates behemoths and yet gives everyone the opportunity to join in. Social media created a few giants and a million tribes. Everyone can build a website, but there's only one Google. Everyone can sell their own niche products, but there's only one Amazon. And on and on. The disruption of the internet era is largely explained by this tension, this potent, combustible brew of empowerment and control."

Vantagem competitiva, capital intelectual externo e Mongo

Ontem, aproveitando uma viagem de ida e volta a Bragança iniciei a escuta do livro "The Coming Wave" de Mustafa Suleyman e Michael Bhaskar.

A certa altura, já no regresso fixei este trecho tão ao jeito de Mongo:

“The field of systems biology aims to understand the “larger picture” of a cell, tissue, or organism by using bioinformatics and computational biology to see how the organism works holistically; such efforts could be the foundation for a new era of personalized medicine. Before long the idea of being treated in a generic way will seem positively medieval; everything, from the kind of care we receive to the medicines we are offered, will be precisely tailored to our DNA and specific biomarkers. Eventually, it might be possible to reconfigure ourselves to enhance our immune responses. That, in turn, might open the door to even more ambitious experimentation like longevity and regenerative technologies, already a burgeoning area of research.” 

Ao ouvir isto pensei logo no que pode tornar obsoleta a indústria farmacêutica tal como a conhecemos. E foi então que a imagem de Roger Martin, "For me, the metaphor for competitive advantage is a long row of rooms. In this conception, every company, at any given point in time, exists in a room of its own making", publicada ontem no blogue me assaltou. Quando aqui escrevo sobre a importância do investimento directo estrangeiro, estou na verdade a abordar a possibilidade de capital intelectual vindo de fora permitir unidades de negócio que dão saltos na sequência da "row of rooms"