The 2024 Rhodes Technology & Society Forum kicked off with an introduction by Sorina Campean, the Director of Global Programmes at Rhodes Trust, who posed a question to the audience. “By a show of hands, how many of you feel a sense of concern when you think you think about the future in the light of rapidly advancing technology?” The majority raised a hand.
This will probably not come as a surprise. The last fifteen years have in many ways been defined by a slew of emerging technologies that certainly seem to have done as much harm as they have good. The most notable example, of course, is social media, which despite its initial promise of bringing people together, has proven to be perhaps the most potent tool of division ever made—fuelling misinformation, disinformation on unprecedented scales. It is consequently little surprise that the sudden—and seemingly inexorable—rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence has been met by many of us, this writer included, with a sense of technological anxiety.
For this reason, it was a relief to have Sorina hand over to Patrick Pichette (Québec & Pembroke 1987) for the opening keynote, a manifesto for optimism in the face of rapid technological change. There are only a handful of people as well-placed to opine on the future of technology as Patrick, a man who served as the Chief Financial Officer of Google from 2008 until 2015, sat on the board of Twitter from 2020 until its sale to Elon Musk in 2022, and is now a partner at Inovia Capital where he places big bets on the most promising emerging technology companies. The message of Patrick’s keynote was a thesis that he came back to repeatedly. “Technology is not good or bad—it just is.”
Presenting a long-term view on innovation, Patrick made the case that new technologies are often disruptive and can be explicitly destructive in the short-term but tend to be overwhelmingly positive in the long-run. Patrick worked through several examples, but the most striking of them were the innovations that sparked the so-called Age of Discovery in the 16th-century, a series of incremental improvements in both navigation techniques and the design of sail vessels that connected Europe to the rest of the globe. What followed was the European “discovery” of the New World, and the consequent introduction of diseases that would kill millions, followed by centuries of conquest and colonialism that would eventually touch every corner of the globe.
There is a strong case to be made that this was the greatest tragedy in human history, one clearly facilitated by technological change. And yet—to paraphrase Patrick—it seems hard to make the case that it was the astrolabe that was at fault. The modern globalised economy, one that—despite its imperfections—has raised billions of people out of poverty, could not exist without technologies that are the direct descendants of those catastrophically destructive 16th-century innovations.
Whether that makes you feel better or not is up to your disposition. The waters ahead may still be treacherous. But Patrick argued that there is cause for unbridled optimism. He presented three graphs that showed the declining cost of computer power, information storage and bandwidth—respectively—over the last 75 years. The gist is that these computational resources each now cost close to nothing and will continue to become cheaper over time.
“If compute is free, storage is free, and bandwidth is free, there is no bottleneck,” explained Patrick. “You can invent anything you want, and it will work—for free.” This sudden lifting of computational constraints is unprecedented in the history of humankind and it is little wonder that it has precipitated a period of breath-taking technological, social and economic change.
But today’s stormy waters will eventually calm. The emerging technologies seem so disruptive today will eventually become the silent infrastructure of tomorrow, and the world—as always—will move on.
Dylan Barry is a Contributing Writer for The Economist.