Tag Archives: technology

Great power transitions and the role of technology

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I have mixed feelings about Jeffrey Ding’s Technology and the Rise of Great Powers. On the one hand, it’s an interesting and persuasive hypothesis. He argues that great power transitions such as from the UK to the US around the turn of the 20th century are driven not by the new great power commanding the technological frontier but rather by the extent to which new general purpose technologies have diffused across the whole economy. He contrasts this with the idea – apparently dominant in political science – that it is the country with control of the leading sectors that predominates.

Thus for example it was the US, not Germany, which overtook Britain because Germany commanded the chemistry frontier but the US educated chemical engineers en masse and the new chemical-enabled manufacturing techniques permeated widely. The book looks at the first Industrial Revolution – the UK’s emergence as dominant after the earlier reign of the Netherlands – as well as this 2nd industrial revolution; and also at the failure of Japan to take over from the US in the late 20th century. The book focuses on the importance of developing skills institutions that enable widespread uptake, citing for example the Mechanics’ Institutes in 19th century Britain and the spread of engineering through universities in 20th century America.

This analysis is backed up by detailed case studies – very interesting – as well as empirical work. While economists will characterise transitions involving new general purpose technologies as involving both a period of leading sector change and then diffusion across the economy, it seems very plausible to me that geopolitical transitions depend on the latter. Military and strategic strength depend on robust engineering and production capabilities; leading edge R&D is necessary but not sufficient.

The ‘other hand’ is the writing style. The text is rather repetitive and written in academic-speak. I guess the book is based on the author’s PhD dissertation, but it would have benefited from a rewrite in order not to read like a series of academic journal articles. This is a bit of a shame, as of course the argument is relevant to the relative roles of the US and China now. The book was written before the US started shooting itself in all the feet it could find in terms of sustained technical and economic progress; but in any case the author recommends the US switch its focus to developing the broad skill base needed to enable AI use across the economy if it’s serious about winning the geopolitical contest.

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The end of progress?

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Carl Frey’s How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation and the Fate of Nations is the kind of book that is exactly my cup of tea. I did have the opportunity to read it before publication and part of my blurb comment was: “How Progress Ends is a fascinating account of the way culture and institutions interact with new technologies.” The major part of the book consists of the history of some major technological advances along with some significant innovations in societal models (the American Revolution, Soviet central plannng) exploring exactly this interaction.

The thing that makes institutions and culture matter is that general purpose technologies – printing, steam, electricity, telecommunications – is their disruptive character. The affordances of the technologies enable challenges to the established economic or political order. Sometimes the incumbents can resist successfully – as in China’s ‘reversal of fortune’ following the formation of the Qing dynasty, or in the Soviet elite’s resistance to reform until it was too late. Sometimes the character of technology means political competition enables it to advance faster than if there were political centralisation – and sometimes the other way round.

States can therefore play a decisive role in whether their societies experience and (eventually) benefit from technological progress. The book ends with some reflections about the present. Frey is pessimistic about both the US and China (a bit of an echo of Dan Wang here). In the US he sees the incumbent AI companies and their relationship with the government as freezing out innovation: “Reaping the benefits of technological change requires institutional support to make space for exploration.” In China he sees future innovation as falling victim to cronyism and the assertion of control by the central government. “The decline of either China or the United States is by no means inevitable,” he writes, although one senses he thinks it is.

Who knows. What does seem clear is that the path taken by technology cannot be divorced from the politics, which is highly uncertain everywhere. The historical lessons are well worth pondering. How Progress Ends is well worth reading alongside for example Carlotta Perez (Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital) and Bill Janeway (Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy) to reflect on the current moment.

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The magic of the technology business?

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For anybody interested in the history of telecommunications, Stephen Unger’s From Beacon Fires to Fibre Broadband will be a must-read. Steve is a former senior Ofcom Executive, with a career in telecoms before joining the regulator. (He has also been one of our Bennett Institute affiliates from the start.) The book is a combination of technological history – mentioning the beacon fires but really from the days of optical and then electric telegraphy through to fibre broadband – and policy history. The focus in the latter thread is the role of public versus private sector, and the balance between permitting or encouraging monopoly and encouraging competition.

The book covers four countries, the US, UK, France and Germany. Each produced some technical innovations but the real differences emerge in their respective policy choices. Not surprisingly, the French and German governments tend to be more statist, either for reasons of political control or focusing on national champions. But in all four countries the balance has shifted over time. One of the main conclusions indeed is that there is unlikely to be a single ideal model of shaping and regulating telecoms given how much both technology and context change.

There is an awful lot of interesting detail in the book but inevitably covering several countries and centuries it has a kind of meso-level focal length. This meant that the chapter I know most about, covering data networks, felt very abbreviated. My favourite chapter covers market liberalisation across all four economies from the late 20th century on, starting with the liberalisation of terminal equipment – that is, allowing people to buy telephones from suppliers other than the network operator, setting common standards so competing products can plug in. (Mickey Mouse phones were a thing at one point – there are plenty of ‘vintage’ 1980s models on Ebay.)

Of course, today it’s hard to imagine how the market power of the big tech companies determining the online world will be eroded, but Steve ends on a rather optimistic note: “Over the period of mode than 200 years described in this book, several compaines once thought to be unassailable have been wiped out by disruptive new technologies. The current generation of digital platforms may seem to be unassailable now but, taking the long view, that is unlikely to be the case. Their enormous success is due to them creating products that people want to buy, and if they cease to do so, I am confident that some currently unknown entrepreneur will work out how to take their place. That is the enduring magic of the technology business.”

Maybe – I think it depends on how lne that long view will turn out to be.

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Turn Left

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I’ve been letting these posts about my reading slip recently, for reasons of general busy-ness. The last thing I want to do of an evening or lunchbreak is more sitting at my screen, especially in such lovely sunny weather. Still, time to return with a recommendation for a lovely memoir. It’s Turn Left by Illah Nourbakhsh, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon.

The book isn’t about computers and AI, or very little. It is the story of an immigrant from Iran to the US at a young age, and the book begins with how – interesting – his original nationality makes it to fly in and out of the US (this was written well before Trump). There follows what is in many ways a classic immigrant tale – the navigation between two cultures, striving for and achieving success – and it’s a beautifully written story. Nourbakhsh writes: “Every immigrant who has lived here for decades spends much of their time in a self-constructed bubble, with friends and collagues who almost never bring up the whole immigrant thing. But the boundary moments are an exception, when we operate outside our constructed social networks and suddenly become immigrants again.”

However, the book does end with his work in the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon, whose motivation he describes as follows: “I was constantly troubled by the collision of complex ideas [in this case about autonomous vehicles] and what I saw as the technologists’ Achilles heel: a total lack of reflection regarding systems-level change and unintended consequences.” The CREATE Lab for community robotics was established to counter such techno-optimism; it takes on technology projects co-produced with the community – although as he points out, funders tend to want big and shiny tech projects rather than community-scale ones.

One example is a community project to measure illegal emissions of pollutants from a factory; the data gathered through sensor systems and analysis, linking the plant to local asthma and cardiovascular disease, eventually led to its closure. Nourbakhsh writes: “This is a story of community empowerment – of rebalancing the broken power structures in our society that provide privilege, expertise and believability to corporations and government over the people. It is totally unacceptable that rebalancing such inequity requires years of work and foundation funding for a technology lab in a university; but that is the fight we choose to embrace.”

Cue loud cheers. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I love its author’s philopsophy of life – it ends with the idea of ‘left turns’, the unanticipated changes of direction in career or life; or there’s the imperative to “move at the speed of trust,” without breaking things. I read the book in proof last autumn; it makes for poignant reading now the rich and powerful have tipped the balance back in their own favour in the US. But all the more important to have reminders like this about the right direction.

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Social machines

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My friend Wendy Hall co-authored a 2019 book The Theory and Practice of Social Machines, which I read only recently. The central idea of a social machine is very interesting – a social network connected by digital devices, a human-machine social entity at scale. These can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in terms of societal outcomes, and most of the book is concerned with this question: “If we take the metaphor of the ‘social machine’ seriously, then we can think of it as doing some computing, and hence processing information, which can be done more or less accurately.” Well, it’s only too obvious how that is going at the moment.

So the book asks how should one analyse social machines and, importantly, try to construct or shape them? When do you get filter bubbles or groupthink, and when robustly diverse engagement towards a common aim? The middle chunk of chapters looks at many examples of social machines in operation, in areas ranging from music to social media to healthcare to open data. It ends, in a somewhat unsatisfactory way, with a list of questions or areas for future research, and with the conclusion: “Social machines should prompt neither optimism nor pessimism; they will enable new types of problem solving and new types of mischief alike.”

I do think the metaphor can be fruitful, but I suppose with the mischief aspect so much more evident 6 years after the book‘s publication I hungered for something a bit more action-oriented.

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