Balancing Technology Progress and it’s Benefits for Society

This year’s German Valley Week #gvw17 took another Delegation of some sixty German individuals to San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. The group consisted of VC Investors like Coparion or HTGF, Politicians including our Minister for Economic Affairs Brigitte Zypris, Old Economy Executives, Executive Bank Managers and Startup Entrepreneurs. A quite diverse composition and great conditions for intense sessions.

For one week the group was hosted by numerous High Profile Silicon Valley Investors like e.ventures, by the German Consul, by rising Startups such as Datameer, Dedrone or Udacity, by Grown-up Disruptors such as Facebook or Intuitive Surgical, by the Singularity University and Stanford, or by the World Economic Forum.

I had the chance to be part of this incredible delegation and returned filled up with positive energy and inspiration, which I am extremely thankful for.

Visiting Silicon Valley can easily feel like visiting the future, with all these self-driving cars, nano technology, and innovative business models. Huge topics were Artificial Intelligence, Drones, Machine Learning, Virtual Reality, Future Mobility and Nano Materials. This was no surprise though as blogs and press articles are full with it and give access to these topics even to the most remote places on earth.

However, it feels much differently actually being there and seeing all these extremely smart, motivated people from all over the world with their emerging businesses first hand. Some of which are quite disruptive.

Being back in Germany live goes on as usual. Of course it does. It is like coming back straight from the future, and there are plenty of questions arising from this as it reveals a significant chasm between technological progress and how society copes with it — and how much society is even aware of it. There are forces that push forward. And there are forces that pull back. Some stakeholders just don’t care. And some do over-eagerly care.

All this creates tension. Pascal Finette from Singularity University made clear that technology progresses exponentially. But does mankind’s ability to deal with this progress at the same speed? And what if it doesn’t? Who is responsible for helping people coping with technical and technological progress and who is accountable? Is it the people themselves? Is it the regulatory frameworks conceived by politicians? Or is it the companies making profits from technological progress?

I am not able to deliver a detailed answer to this unfortunately. Nor were all these extremely smart and skilled people I met last week. What becomes clear is that as technology progresses, there is always a learning task for society as a whole attached. There is a big discussion going on about self-driving cars, 3D-printed organs, Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, or the potential impact of Blockchain on the stability of nations, just to name a few. But maybe the discussion isn’t yet big enough.

With reference to the Coase Theorem, I would argue that companies will need to internalize external cost effects from progressing too fast in terms of Change Management at least to a certain degree. My point of view:

In order to establish and maintain a sustainable balance between Technology Progress and it’s benefits for mankind, profits arising from monetizing Progressive Technologies (goods, services), steadily need to be partly re-invested into the Enlightenment of society and the planet we live on.

Presuming Human Beings are the desired ultimate beneficiaries of Technology Progress, such a re-investment seems imperative in order to enable people individually and the society as a whole to cope with ethical, environmental, political, regulatory and other challenges caused. We’ll need to rethink capitalism in order to achieve that. While capitalism has brought the world many desirable amenities, it is also based upon a model of unlimited resources and the planet’s (and society’s) unlimited ability to take in and then dillute capitalism’s negative outcomes. The currently dominating form of capitalism in Western countries is a purely financial form of capitalism and incentivized to maximize the internalization of profits while also maximizing the externalization of cost. How can we shift away from that current state towards a more sustainable, holistic form of capitalism, where cost and profits are being allocated in a more causation-related way?

What are your thoughts on this?