Our former Brookings colleague Rebecca Blank, now at the Commerce Department, is today leading the first meeting of the Obama Administration’s Innovation Advisory Board, looking at the innovative capacity and economic competitiveness of the United States.

I applaud the effort.  Nothing is more important to America’s longterm competitiveness than emphasizing innovation.  As the council looks to the private sector and global markets, I urge it to examine how the U.S. government can lead innovation and contribute to economic growth.  The best place to look is new and emerging digital technologies that can make government more accessible, accountable, responsive and efficient for the people who use government services every day.

Here are some of the recommendations I made in a recent paper I wrote with colleagues here at Brookings as part of our “Growth Through Innovation” initiative:

• Save money and gain efficiency by moving federal IT functions “to the cloud,” i.e., using advances in cloud computing to put software, hardware, services and data storage through remote file servers.

• Continue to prioritize the Obama administration’s existing efforts to put unparalleled amounts of data online at Data.gov and other federal sites, making it easier and cheaper for citizens and businesses to access the information they need.

• Use social media networks to deliver information to the public and to solicit feedback to improve government performance.

• Integrate ideas and operations with state and local organizations, where much of government innovation is taking place today. 

• Apply the methods of private-sector business planning to the public sector to produce region-specific business plans that are low cost and high impact.

These improvements in government services innovations in the digital age can help spur innovation and support a robust business climate.  And, as a sorely needed side benefit, they can also serve to eliminate some of the current distrust and even contempt for government that has brought public approval of the performance of the federal government to near historic lows.  

Access to information and communication technology through cell phones, the internet, and electronic media has increased exponentially around the world. While a few decades ago cell phones were a luxury good in wealthy countries, our data show that today over half of respondents in Sub-Saharan Africa and about 80 percent of those in Latin America and Southeast Asia have access to cell phones. In addition to making phone calls and text messaging, cell phones are used for activities such as accessing the internet and social network sites. Meanwhile, the launch of mobile banking gives access to these technologies an entirely new dimension, providing access to financial services in addition to information and communication technology. It is estimated that in Kenya, where the mobile banking “revolution” originated, there are some 18 million mobile money users (roughly 75 percent of all adults). Given the expanding role of information technology in today’s global economy, in this paper we explore whether this new access also enhances well-being.

Neither of the authors is an expert on information technology. The real and potential effect of information technology on productivity, development, and other economic outcomes has been studied extensively by those who are. Building on past research on the economics of well-being and on the application of the well-being metrics to this particular question, we hope to contribute an understanding of how the changes brought about by information and communication technology affect well-being in general, including its non-income dimensions.

Our study has two related objectives. The first is to understand the effects of the worldwide increase in communications capacity and access to information technology on human well-being. The second is to contribute to our more general understanding of the relationship between well-being and capabilities and agency. Cell phones and information technology are giving people around the world – and particularly the poor – new capabilities for making financial transactions and accessing other services which were previously unavailable to them. We explore the extent to which the agency effect of having access to these capabilities manifests itself through both hedonic and evaluative aspects of well-being.

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ABSTRACT

The overall economic efficiency of a quantity-based approach to greenhouse gas mitigation depends strongly on the extent to which such a program provides opportunities for compliance flexibility, particularly with regard to the timing of emissions abatement. Here I consider a program in which annual targets are determined by choosing the optimal time path of reductions consistent with an exogenously prescribed cumulative reduction target and fixed technology set. I then show that if the availability of low-carbon technology is initially more constrained than anticipated, the optimal reduction path shifts abatement toward later compliance periods. For this reason, a rigid policy in which fixed annual targets are strictly enforced in every year yields a cumulative environmental outcome identical to the optimal policy but an economic outcome worse than the optimal policy. On the other hand, a policy that aligns actual prices (or equivalently, costs) with expected prices by simply imposing an explicit price ceiling (often referred to as a "safety valve") yields the opposite result. Comparison among these multiple scenarios implies that there are significant gains to realizing the optimal path but that further refinement of the actual regulatory instrument will be necessary to achieve that goal in a real cap-and-trade system.

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In recent months, we’ve heard a lot about the tech industry's gender gap. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women represent just 19.7 percent of software developers, an occupation with a median salary of over $92,000 a year.

Women’s underrepresentation in these and other well-paying tech jobs is a major concern given that women still earn only 78 cents for every dollar earned by men. Meanwhile, labor shortages in software development and other high-skill occupations have tech companies worried about whether they’ll be able to grow as fast as they’d like.

Seattle’s Ada Developers Academy takes aim at both challenges. This highly selective, tuition-free program prepares women students to be full-stack software developers, meaning that they can do both front-end—what the user sees—and back-end—what’s behind the scenes that makes everything work properly. Prior experience in tech isn’t necessary to earn a spot at Ada: The main prerequisite is a strong desire to pursue a career in software development.

Ada combines six months of intensive classroom instruction with a six-month internship at a sponsoring company so that students have the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned in real-world situations. Sponsoring companies—which currently include Nordstrom, Redfin, Zillow and Expedia, among others—also benefit from the internships, which provide direct access to prospective employees at a time when proficient software developers can be hard to find.

If Ada’s first cohort is any indication, the academy’s combination of rigorous in-class training and hands-on work experience has tremendous value on the job market. All 15 members of the inaugural class got job offers for software developer positions before they graduated from the program.

Event Information

On August 1-3, 2012, Brookings Global Economy and Development hosted the ninth annual Brookings Blum Roundtable on Global Poverty in Aspen, Colorado. The year’s roundtable theme, "Innovation and Technology for Development", brought together global leaders, entrepreneurs and practioners to discuss how technology and innovation can be seized to help solve some of the world's most pressing global development challenges.

Global development challenges are of massive scale: 61 million children out of school and many more failing to learn basic literacy and numeracy skills; 850 million facing hunger; 1 billion living in slums and 1.3 billion without access to electricity. Yet remarkably little is understood about successful strategies for designing scalable solutions, the impediments to reaching scale, or the most appropriate pathways for getting there.

However, a batch of new technologies offers the promise of a breakthrough by encouraging innovative business models, pushing down transaction costs and disintermediating complex activities. Mobile money could realistically reach over 1 billion poor people in the next decade and directly connect millions of rich individuals with millions of poor people. Real-time data can allow resources to be better targeted and managed. New media can sharpen accountability and reduce waste and overlap.

Roundtable Agenda

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Welcome: 8:40AM - 9:00AM
Brookings Welcome
• Strobe Talbott, Brookings

Opening Remarks
• Richard C. Blum, Blum Capital Partners, LP and Founder of the Blum Center for Developing Economies at Berkeley
• Mark Suzman, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• Kemal Derviş, Global Economy and Development, Brookings

Session I: 9:00AM - 10:30AM
Framing Session: Translating Technological Innovations into Transformational Impact
In this opening discussion, participants will explore the overarching questions for the roundtable: If the poor can readily be identified and if they have access to financial services and participate in technology-driven communication networks, how does this change the development paradigm? How can effective partnerships be forged to combine the efforts of different international and local actors (businesses, governments, foundations, NGOs, and universities) in propagating solutions? Can scalable technologies raise the profile and potential of new business models, approaches and partnerships?

Moderator
• Homi Kharas, Brookings

Introductory Remarks
• Thomas A. Kalil, White House Office of Science and Technology
• Michael Kubzansky, Monitor Group 
• Lalitesh Katragadda, Google India
• Smita Singh, Independent

Session II: 10:50AM - 12:20PM
Mobile Money and Mass Payments
Participants will explore the following questions for the rountable: Is the rapid uptake of mobile money/payment technology throughout the developing world assured and if not, what (or whom) are the impediments? What is required to enable successful mass payments systems that employ mobile money technology? What is the optimal role of government, non-profits and private actors in supporting mobile money services? How can mass payments systems be used to implement national safety nets?

Moderator
• Gillian Tett, Financial Times

Introductory Remarks
• Neal Keny-Guyer, Mercy Corps
• Mwangi Kimenyi, Brookings
• Mung Ki Woo, MasterCard Worldwide Group Executive Mobile

Dinner Program: 7:30PM - 9:15PM
Aspen Institute Madeleine K. Albright Global Development Lecture

Featuring
• Rajiv Shah, Administrator, United States Agency for International Development

Click here to read Rajiv Shah's remarks »

Thursday, August 2, 2012 

Session III: 9:00AM - 10:30AM 
Mass Networks: Leveraging Information from the Crowd
Participants will explore the following questions for the rountable: What are the most promising examples of using social media, crowdsourcing and “big data” to advance development and humanitarian outcomes? How can traditional foreign assistance make use of virtual networks to support transparency, democratic governance and improved service delivery? How can technologies be used to understand clients, promote beneficiary feedback and learning to fine tune business models in base of the pyramid markets?

Moderator
• Walter Isaacson, Aspen Institute

Introductory Remarks
• Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton University
• Juliana Rotich, Ushahidi
• Robert Kirkpatrick, UN Global Pulse Initiative
• Rakesh Rajani, Twaweza

Session IV: 10:50AM - 12:20PM
Innovation and Technology for Green Growth
Participants will explore the following questions for the rountable: How advanced is green growth technology vis-à-vis the scale and urgency of the global climate challenge? What is the role of pricing and intellectual property and push and pull mechanisms in speeding up propagation within developed and developing markets? How can the goal of “sustainable energy for all” be achieved, and is it feasible in all countries?

Moderator
• Al Gore, The Climate Reality Project

Introductory Remarks
• Mary Robinson, Mary Robinson Foundation - Climate Justice
• Helen Clark, United Nations Development Programme
• Arthur Njagi, International Finance Corporation
• Viswanathan Shankar, Standard Chartered Bank

Lunch Program: 12:30PM - 2:00PM
Partnering with Academic Research Institutions
This discussion will explore partnerships between public sector development institutions and academic research institutions to support global development goals. Topics will include the constraints to research; how to make research more relevant to developing country problems; issues around incentives for scientists and universities; and relationships between universities, financiers and implementers.

Moderator
• Javier Solana, ESADE

Panel
• Richard C. Blum, Blum Capital Partners, LP and Founder of the Blum Center for Developing Economies at Berkeley
• Luis Alberto Moreno, Inter-American Development Bank
• Shankar Sastry, University of California, Berkeley
• Alex Deghan, United States Agency for International Development

Friday, August 3, 2012 

Session V: 9:00AM - 10:30AM
Business Solutions and Private Sector Development
Participants will explore the following questions for the rountable: What role can the new breed of socially conscious private actors (e.g., social enterprises and impact investors) play in overcoming finance and delivery constraints and scaling up development impact? Where is the need for investment finance most acute, and who or what can fill these gaps? How are management approaches evolving to suit base of the pyramid markets? What are the impediments to the adoption or adaptation of scalable technologies by developing country enterprises, and are southern innovations being efficiently spread? What is constraining private sector development in Africa, and is technology a key bottleneck?

Moderator
• Laura Tyson, University of California, Berkeley

Introductory Remarks
• Rob Mosbacher, Mosbacher Energy Company
• Mathews Chikaonda, Press Corporation Limited
• Elizabeth Littlefield, Overseas Private Investment Corporation
• Amy Klement, Omidyar Network

Session VI: 10:50AM - 12:20PM
Delivering U.S. Leadership: Role for the Public Sector
Participants will explore the following questions for the rountable: What is an appropriate role for the U.S. government in promoting technological solutions for development and scaling these up? How should the government leverage new private sector players? What are the best examples of, and lessons learned from, earlier and on-going public private partnerships? How can the U.S. government work more effectively to support local innovation and technology in developing countries?

Moderator
• Sylvia Burwell, Walmart Foundation

Introductory Remarks
• Rajiv Shah, Administrator, United States Agency for International Development
• Sam Worthington, InterAction
• Henrietta Fore, Holsman International

Closing Remarks: 12:20PM - 12:30PM

• Richard C. Blum, Blum Capital Partners, LP and Founder of the Blum Center for Developing Economies at Berkeley
• Kemal Derviş, Global Economy and Development, Brookings

Lunch Program: 12:30PM - 2:00PM
A Conversation with Michael Froman and Thomas Nides
This conversation will focus on the politics and finance of the US government’s efforts on global development, including its specific initiatives regarding technology and innovation for development.

Moderator
• Madeleine K. Albright, Albright Stronebridge Group

Live Webcast Event: 4:00PM - 5:30PM
Brookings and the Aspen Institute Present: "A Conversation with Former World Bank President Robert Zoellick"

Global Economy and Development at Brookings and the Aspen Strategy Group will host Robert Zoellick, who recently stepped down as president of the World Bank after serving in that office for the past five years. Mr. Zoellick has held several senior positions in the U.S. Government, including deputy secretary of state and U.S. trade representative under President George W. Bush. This event will be webcast live on the Brookings website. Click here for more details.

Introduction
• R. Nicholas Burns, Director, Aspen Strategy Group and Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Politics, Harvard Kennedy School of Government

Moderator
• Strobe Talbott, President, Brookings

Event Information

The emergence of a new digital economy is changing the ways in which businesses and development organizations engage in emerging and developing countries. Transaction costs have been radically driven down, enabling greater inclusion. And technology is driving efficiency improvements, and permitting rapid scaling-up and transformational change.

On August 5-7, 2015, Brookings Global Economy and Development is hosting the twelfth annual Brookings Blum Roundtable on Global Poverty in Aspen, Colorado. This year’s roundtable theme, “Disrupting development with digital technologies,” brings together global leaders, entrepreneurs, practitioners, and public intellectuals to discuss three trends in particular have the potential to redefine how global development occurs and how efforts will support it over the next 10 years: (1) the growing adoption of digital payments serving people everywhere with near-frictionless transactions; (2) the spread of internet connectivity and digital literacy; and (3) the harnessing of data to better serve the poor and to generate new knowledge.

This event is closed, but you can follow along on Twitter using #Blum2015.

Roundtable Agenda

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Welcome and opening remarks - 8:40-9:00 a.m.:

• Richard C. Blum, Blum Capital Partners
• Mike Kubzansky, Omidyar Network
• Kemal Derviş, Brookings Institution

Session I - 9:00-10:30 a.m.: Realizing the potential of the digital economy

The digital revolution presents profound opportunities for global development. By integrating poor people into digital networks, the revolution can redefine what it means to be poor, and forge new pathways to prosperity for both individuals and countries.

What are the challenges in making the digital revolution fully inclusive and scalable—and how can they be lifted? In a full-fledged digital economy, which constraints facing the poor will diminish and which will remain? What risks does the digital economy pose?

Moderator:

• Kemal Derviş, Brookings Institution

Introductory remarks:

• Michael Faye, GiveDirectly, Segovia Technology
• Tunde Kehinde, African Courier Express
• Christina Sass, Andela
• Tariq Malik, National Database and Registration Authority

Session II - 10:50 - 12:20 p.m.: Global money

Between 2011 and 2014, 700 million people started a bank account for the first time, representing a giant step toward the World Bank goal of universal financial inclusion by 2020. Meanwhile, the digitalization of payments, spurred in part by 255 mobile money services across the developing world, is pushing the cost of basic financial transactions down toward zero.

How will an era of global money transform formal and informal business? Which sectors, product markets, and government services have the most to gain and lose from increased market efficiency? What are the consequences for financial regulation?

Moderator:

• Henrietta Fore, Holsman International

Introductory remarks:

• Ruth Goodwin-Groen, Better than Cash Alliance
• Luis Buenaventura, Rebit.ph, Satoshi Citadel Industries
• Tayo Oviosu, Paga
• Loretta Michaels, U.S. Department of the Treasury

Lunch - 12:30-2:00 p.m.

Cocktail reception and interview - 5:00-7:00 p.m.:

During the reception, Richard Blum will lead a short discussion with Walter Isaacson and Ann Mei Chang on the topic “Silicon Valley and Innovation for the Developing World,” followed by questions. Remarks begin at 5:30 and will end at 6:15 p.m.

Thursday, August 6, 2015

Session III - 9:00-10:30 a.m.: Global connections

Numerous ventures are competing today to bring internet connectivity to the furthest corners of the planet, while low-cost, user-centered-designed platforms are expanding the spread of digital literacy. Social media and crowdsourcing offer efficient ways for people to share information, solve problems, and act collectively.

To what extent can internet connectivity overcome isolation and empower poor communities that are socially, economically, and politically disenfranchised? Do the benefits of global connectivity for the world’s poor rely on issues like net neutrality, and what has been learned from recent battles to uphold this paradigm?

Moderator:

• Anne-Marie Slaughter, New America Foundation

Introductory remarks:

• Ross LaJeunesse, Google
• Andy O’Connell, Facebook
• Maria Ressa, Rappler
• Chris Locke, Caribou Digital

Session IV - 10:50-12:20 p.m.: Global knowledge

The creation of a universal digital network will provide the poor with greater access to the information they need, and generate new knowledge that can be used to serve poor people more effectively. Digital inclusion can expand possibilities for targeting, verification, and analysis, while big data from biometric registries, satellites, phones, payments, and the internet can unlock insights on individual needs and preferences. In addition, open source platforms and MOOCs have the potential to be powerful accelerators for technology and skill transfer.

What kinds of new personalized services can be developed using improved capacity for targeting and tailoring? How might the reduction of barriers to information affect social mobility and economic convergence? How should big data be regulated?

Moderator:

• Smita Singh, President’s Global Development Council

Introductory remarks:

• David Soloff, Premise
• Rebecca Taber, Coursera
• Jonathan Hakim, Cignifi
• Deepak Mishra, World Bank

Friday, August 7, 2015

Session V - 9:00-10:30 a.m.: Opportunities and challenges for business

The digital economy promises to disrupt many existing markets and generate new business opportunities that employ and serve the poor.

How can businesses employ digital technologies to expand their presence in poor and emerging countries? According to businesses, what is an effective regulatory framework for the digital economy? To what extent can strong digital infrastructure compensate for deficiencies in physical infrastructure or governance?

Moderator:

• Laura Tyson, Blum Center for Developing Economies

Introductory Remarks:

• Jesse Moore, M-KOPA Solar
• Anup Akkihal, Logistimo
• V. Shankar, formerly Standard Chartered Bank
• Barbara Span, Western Union

Session VI - 10:50-12:20 p.m.: Opportunities and challenges for development cooperation

The U.S. government sees itself as a leader in harnessing technology for global development. Meanwhile, aid agencies have been identified as a possible target for disintermediation by the digital revolution.

How can development organizations, both government and non-government, accelerate the digital revolution? How might traditional aid programs be enhanced by employing digital knowledge and technologies? Does U.S. regulatory policy on the digital economy cohere with its global development agenda?

Moderator:

• Mary Robinson, Mary Robinson Foundation - Climate Justice

• Neal Keny-Guyer, Mercy Corps
• Michael Anderson, Children's Investment Fund Foundation
• Helen Clark, United Nations Development Program
• Ann Mei Chang, USAID

Closing remarks:

• Richard C. Blum, Blum Capital
• Mike Kubzansky, Omidyar Network
• Kemal Derviş, Brookings Institution

Event Materials

• Participant List 731

Education is at a critical juncture in many nations around the world. It is vital for student learning, workforce development, and economic prosperity. For example, research in Turkey has found that raising the compulsory education requirement from five to eight years increased the percentage of women having eight years of school by 11 percentage points, and had a variety of positive social consequences.

Yet despite the emergence of digital learning, most countries still design their educational systems for agrarian and industrial eras, not the 21st century. This creates major problems for young people who enter the labor force as well as teachers and parents who want children to compete effectively in the global economy.

In this paper, Darrell West examines how mobile devices with cellular connectivity improve learning and engage students and teachers. Wireless technology and mobile devices:

• Provide new content and facilitate information access wherever a student is located
• Enable, empower, and engage learning in ways that transform the environment for students inside and outside school
• Allow students to connect, communicate, collaborate, and create using rich digital resources, preparing them to adapt to quickly evolving new technologies
• Incorporate real-time assessment of student performance
• Catalyze student development in areas of critical-thinking and collaborative learning, giving students a competitive edge

Downloads

• Download the paper

The 2015 Brookings Blum Roundtable was convened to explore how digital technologies might disrupt global development.

Our intention was to imagine a world 10 years from now where digital technologies have become ubiquitous. In this world, how would we expect digital trends and innovations to affect the work of business and development organizations? What policy challenges and risks will the new digital economy pose? And what are the constraints on making digital innovations fully inclusive and scalable?

In 10 years, the world will look very different from today. The number of people worldwide who own a telephone, have access to the Internet, have registered their biometric identity, and own a bank account is rising by between 200 million and 300 million a year. These technologies are spreading at such a high speed that an era of digital inclusion beckons, characterized by universal connectivity and the frictionless movement of money and information.

History attests to the transformative effects of technology. And there is every reason to believe that the impact of digital technologies will be especially profound. The spread of mobile telephones already represents perhaps the most conspicuous change for life in the developing world over the past generation. However, the impact of digital technologies on people’s well-being can be both positive and negative. The onus is on developing countries and the broader global development community to maximize the upside of digital inclusion, while managing its downside, in navigating this exciting future.

Download the full introduction »

Extreme poverty around the world has decreased from around 2 billion people in 1990 living under $2 per day to 700 million today. Further, nine out of 10 children are now enrolled in primary schools, an increase over the last 15 years. Progress in both areas since 2000 has been part of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which set targets for reducing extreme poverty in eight areas, and which were the guiding principles for global development from 2000 to 2015. Today, the global community, through the UN, has adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals to continue these poverty reduction efforts. 

In this new episode of Intersections podcast, host Adrianna Pita engages Brookings scholars Laurence Chandy and Rebecca Winthrop in a discussion of how digital technologies can be harnessed to bring poverty reduction and education to the most marginalized populations.

Listen:

Chandy, a fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings, says that the trends in getting people digitally connected "are progressing at such speed that they’re starting to reach some of the poorest people in the world. Digital technology is changing what it means to be poor because it’s bringing poor people out of the margins.”

Winthrop, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, says that "I think [education] access is crucial. And I do think that’s almost the first wave because without it we could work on all the ed tech—fabulous apps, great language translated content—but if you do not have the access it’s not going to reach the most marginalized."

Listen to this episode above; subscribe on iTunes; and find more episodes on our website.

Chandy was a guest on the Brookings Cafeteria Podcast in 2013; Winthrop has been a guest on the Cafeteria a few times to discuss global education topics, including: access plus education; investing in girls' education; and getting millions learning in the developing world.

Event Information

Advances in mobile technology have transformed the global marketplace, especially in emerging economies. How has mobile technology changed economic progress in emerging economies? Who has benefited and why? How can emerging economies further take advantage of the mobile revolution to propel growth? Which challenges and decisions do policymakers currently face?

On December 10, the Center for Technology Innovation hosted an event to discuss mobile technology’s role and potential future in developing economies as part of the ongoing Mobile Economy Project event series. A panel of experts discussed what is needed to ensure that emerging mobile economies continue to grow, and how intellectual property, spectrum policy, and public policies contribute to sector development.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #TechCTI

Audio

• Mobile Technology’s Impact on Emerging Economies and Global Opportunity

Transcript

• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20141210_mobile_technology_transcript

Event Information

Cutting-edge technology has led to medical breakthroughs, the information age, and space exploration, among many other innovations. The growing ubiquity of advanced technology, however, means that almost anyone can harness its power to threaten national, international, and individual security. In their new book, The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting a New Age of Threat (Basic Books, 2015), Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum explore the potential dangers of modern technology when acquired by hostile groups or individuals.

On March 11, Governance Studies at Brookings hosted a book event to discuss the new threats to national security and the developing framework for confronting the technology-enabled threats of the 21^st century. In order to manage the challenges and risks associated with advanced technology, governments, organizations, and citizens must reconsider the intersection of security, privacy, and liberty. What does this mean for domestic and international surveillance? How will the government protect its citizens in an age of technology proliferation?

After the program, panelists will take audience questions.

Audio

• Confronting national security threats in the technology age

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20150311_national_security_technology_transcript

Technically, all of the Star Wars films occur a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but there are countless gadgets featured in the films that human beings in this galaxy can find here on Earth. Here are a handful of gadgets you will see this weekend when the seventh Star Wars film, "The Force Awakens," blasts into theaters.

Drone surveillance

The evil Galactic Empire has long employed drones and machines to do their dirty work. Way back when the empire was just a glint in Darth Sidious' eyes, his merciless apprentice Darth Maul used autonomous drones to search the desert landscape of Tatooine for fugitive Jedi. Later, when Darth Vader tirelessly searched the galaxy for Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliance, he sent similar autonomous drones to countless worlds such as the ice planet Hoth.

Sure, the Empire may call them droids, but on the planet Earth these instruments are essentially remote drones you might see flying in cities or around your neighborhood. In the U.S. the use of unmanned drones to aid law enforcement is on the cutting edge of technology and sparks a spirited debate among privacy advocates. Should fear law enforcement as we would a Sith lord and thus burden them with a warrant-based, technology-centric approach to drone surveillance that might curtail the beneficial use of drones?

Gregory McNeal wrote last year in a Brookings report that a property rights-centric approach with limits on surveillance would best appease privacy advocates and law enforcement, enabling drones to protect privacy in ways even manned surveillance can't achieve. By crafting simple, duration based surveillance legislation, law enforcement would only be permitted to surveil a person for a limited amount of time. Additionally, data retention guidelines could limit the amount of time that surveillance would be accessible to law enforcement.

"Legislators should reject alarmist calls that suggest we are on the verge of an Orwellian police state," McNeal writes, as privacy advocates almost always invoke the the novel 1984 when technology makes surveillance more widespread and pervasive.

As McNeal points out, the police state is hardly as nefarious as Darth Vader, so sensible legislation may be enough in this case to keep law enforcement from falling to the dark side.

Holography

In the first Star Wars film, Princess Leia recorded a short holographic message for Obi-Wan Kenobi asking for his help delivering the Death Star plans to the Rebel Alliance. The droid R2-D2 recorded the message almost as succinctly as many of use record short videos on our cell phone. But when can we expect to send and receive holographic messages ourselves?

Barring some laughable election night hologram shenanigans on CNN, there have been some notable uses of holography in this galaxy. In 2012, the late rapper Tupac Shakur took the stage at the Coachella Festival with contemporaries Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. At the 2014 Billboard Music Awards, Michael Jackson performed on stage—five years after his death. These holograms were made possible by artful projections and reflections, creating convincing illusions suitable only for crowded concert halls. The technology is especially popular in South Korea where K-Pop performers regularly "perform" at virtual concerts to adoring fans.

But a bona fide hologram? Researchers at Swinburne University this year used lasers and a specialized graphene mesh to project 3D objects in the air very much like you would see in Star Wars. As TIME Magazine reported, "It’s not quite Princess Leia-quality, and researchers say it has a long way to go before commercialization, but it’s a step."

BB-8 Droid

Since the first teaser for the new Star Wars films, fans have had questions about the new droid character BB-8. Rather than resort to computer animation to bring the droid to life, director J.J. Abrams and Lucasfilm designers sought to produce a live prop that could portray the droid on film.

The filmmakers demoed the droid on stage at Comic Con to the roar of audience applause and delight—"It was the first official confirmation that BB-8 was not a CG creation, but rather, a practical effect."

The use of practical effects in "The Force Awakens" is a return-to-form for the filmmakers who have shunned the special effects and digital artistry of the Star Wars prequel trilogies and instead embraced the kinds of practical effects and puppetry that made the original trilogy so beloved.

The droid BB-8 even has a cousin here on Earth—the robotic ball toy Sphero. Inventors Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson have adapted their smartphone-controlled spherical toy into a BB-8 toy that performs many of the same practical effects the screen version of BB-8 does in "The Force Awakens."

As the new sequel trilogy continues, filmmakers are sure to wow audiences with amazing technologies—some we may even recognize from planet Earth.

Eye-tracking technology now makes it possible for computers to gather staggering amounts of information about individuals as they use the Internet, and draw hyper-accurate conclusions about our behavior as consumers. As the technology becomes more practical, Senior Fellow John Villasenor discusses its benefits and risks.

Video

• Eye-Tracking Technology and Digital Privacy

Audio

• @ Brookings Podcast: Eye-Tracking Technology and Digital Privacy

Event Information

On January 25, 2013, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings (CUE) and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) hosted a technical workshop on national education accounts (NEAs). Participants discussed experiences and challenges related to developing various tools to track financial expenditures in education, with a focus on national education accounts. After discussing particular experiences with NEAs and the framework underlying them, participants worked to identify priorities for expanding their reach.

Jacques van der Gaag, from the Center for Universal Education opened the workshop by underlining its primary goals—to find out what different groups and individuals have been able to accomplish in relation to comprehensively tracking expenditures, connecting those expenditures with learning outcomes in education systems and collaborating where possible to advance the use of NEAs. Following this introduction, participants gave an overview of their experiences in using financial tracking tools and NEAs in particular. Igor Kheyfets of the World Bank presented BOOST, a tool that the World Bank has used over the past three years to bring together detailed data on public expenditures. Next, Jean Claude Ndabananiye, from UNESCO Pole de Dakar, discussed country status reports, which aggregate and analyze government data on expenditures. Afterward, Elise Legault of UIS described their collection of education statistics, which is completed through annual country questionnaires, of which one in particular has a finance focus. Quentin Wodon of the World Bank described other World Bank efforts aside from BOOST in capturing education finance data, including a cross-sector effort on public expenditure reviews (PERs).

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The weakness of the economic recovery in advanced economies raises questions about the ability of new technologies to drive growth. After all, in the years since the global financial crisis, consumers in advanced economies have adopted new technologies such as mobile Internet services, and companies have invested in big data and cloud computing. More than 1 billion smartphones have been sold around the world, making it one of the most rapidly adopted technologies ever. Yet nations such as the United States that lead the world in technology adoption are seeing only middling GDP growth and continue to struggle with high unemployment.

There are many reasons for the restrained expansion, not least of which is the severity of the recession, which wiped out trillions of dollars of wealth and more than 7 million US jobs. Relatively weak consumer demand since the end of the recession in 2009 has restrained hiring and there are also structural issues at play, including a growing mismatch between the increasingly technical needs of employers and the skills available in the labor force. And technology itself plays a role: companies continue to invest in labor-saving technologies that reduce demand for less-skilled workers.

So are we witnessing a failure of technology? Our answer is "no." Over the longer term, in fact, we see that technology continues to drive productivity and growth, a pattern that has been evident since the Industrial Revolution; steam power, mass-produced steel, and electricity drove successive waves of growth, which has continued into the 21st century with semiconductors and the Internet. Today, we see a dozen rapidly-evolving technology areas that have the potential for economic disruption as well in the next decade. They fall into four groups: IT and how we use it; machines that work for us; energy; and the building blocks of everything (next-gen genomics and synthetic biology).

Wide ranging impacts

These disruptive technologies not only have potential for economic impact—hundreds of billions per year and even trillions for the applications we have sized—but also are broad-based (affecting many people and industries) and have transformative effects: they can alter the status quo and create opportunities for new competitors.

While these technologies will contribute to productivity and growth, we must look at economic impact in a broader sense, which includes measures of surplus created and value shifted (for instance from producers to consumers, which has been a common result of Internet adoption). The greatest benefit we measured for autonomous vehicles—cars and trucks that can proceed from point A to point B with little or no human intervention. The largest economic impact we sized for autonomous vehicles is the enormous benefit to consumers that may be possible by reducing accidents caused by human error by 70 to 90 percent. That could translate into hundreds of billions a year in economic value by 2025.

Predicting how quickly even the most disruptive technologies will affect productivity is difficult. When the first commercial microprocessor appeared there was no such thing as a microcomputer—marketers at Intel thought traffic signal controllers might be a leading application for their chip. Today we see that social technologies, which have changed how people interact with friends and family and have provided new ways for marketers to connect with consumers, may have a much larger impact as a way to raise productivity in organizations by improving communication, knowledge-sharing, and collaboration.

There are also lags and displacements as new technologies are adopted and their effects on productivity are felt. Over the next decade, advances in robotics may make it possible to automate assembly jobs that require more dexterity than machines have provided or are assumed to be more economical to carry out with low-cost labor. Advances in artificial intelligence, big data, and user interfaces (e.g., computers that can interpret ordinary speech) make it possible to automate many knowledge worker tasks.

More good than bad

There are clearly challenges for societies and economies as disruptive technologies take hold, but the long-term effects, we believe, will continue to be higher productivity and growth across sectors and nations. In earlier work, for example, we looked at the relationship between productivity and employment, which are generally believed to be in conflict (i.e., when productivity rises, employment falls). And clearly, in the short term this can happen as employers find that they can substitute machinery for labor—especially if other innovations in the economy do not create demand for labor in other areas. However, if you look at the data for productivity and employment for longer periods—over decades, for example—you see that productivity and job growth do rise in tandem.

This does not mean that labor-saving technologies do not cause dislocations, but they also eventually create new opportunities. For example, the development of highly flexible and adaptable robots will require skilled workers on the shop floor who can program these machines and work out new routines as requirements change. And the same types of tools that can be used to automate knowledge worker tasks such as finding information can also be used to augment the powers of knowledge workers, potentially creating new types of jobs.

Over the next decade it will become clearer how these technologies will be used to raise productivity and growth. There will be surprises along the way—when mass-produced steel became practical in the 19th century nobody could predict how it would enable the automobile industry in the 20th. And there will be societal challenges that policy makers will need to address, for example by making sure that educational systems keep up with the demands of the new technologies.

For business leaders the emergence of disruptive technologies can open up great new possibilities and can also lead to new threats—disruptive technologies have a habit of creating new competitors and undermining old business models. Incumbents will want to ensure their organizations continue to look forward and think long-term. Leaders themselves will need to know how technologies work and see to it that tech- and IT-savvy employees are included in every function and every team. Businesses and other institutions will need new skill sets and cannot assume that the talent they need will be available in the labor market.

Policy makers at all levels, federal and state and local governments, are depositing great faith in innovation as a driver of economic growth and job creation. In the knowledge economy, universities have been called to play a central role as knowledge producers. Universities are actively seeking to accommodate those public demands and many have engaged an ongoing review of their educational programs and their research portfolios to make them more attuned to industrial needs. Technology transfer is a function that universities are seeking to make more efficient in order to better engage with the economy.

By law, universities can elect to take title to patents from federally funded research and then license them to the private sector. For years, the dominant model of technology transfer has been to market university patents with commercial promise to prospect partners in industry. Under this model, very few universities have been able to command high licensing fees while the vast majority has never won the lottery of a “blockbuster” patent. Most technology transfer offices are cost centers for their universities.

However, upon further inspection, the winners of this apparent lottery seem to be an exclusive club. Over the last decade only 37 universities have shuffled in the top 20 of the licensing revenue ranking. What is more, 5 of the top 20 were barely covering the expenses of their tech transfer offices; the rest were not even making ends meet.[i] It may seem that the blockbuster patent lottery is rigged. See more detail in my Brookings report.

That appearance is due to the fact that landing a patent of high commercial value is highly dependent on the resources available to universities. Federal research funding is a good proxy variable to measure those resources. Figure 1 below shows side by side federal funding and net operating income of tech transfer offices. If high licensing revenues are a lottery; then it is one in which only universities with the highest federal funding can participate. Commercial patents may require a critical mass of investment to build the capacity to produce breakthrough discoveries that are at the same time mature enough for the private investors to take an interest.

Figure 1. A rigged lottery?

High federal research funding is the ticket to enter the blockbuster patent lottery

Source: Author elaboration with AUTM data (2013) [ii]

But now, let’s turn onto another view of the asymmetry of resources and licensing revenues of  universities; the geographical dimension. In Figure 2 we can appreciate the degree of dispersion (or concentration) of both, federal research investment and licensing revenue, across the states. It is easy to recognize the well-funded universities on the East and West coast receiving most of federal funds, and it is easy to observe as well that it is around the same regions, albeit more scattered, that licensing revenues are high.

If policymakers are serious about fostering innovation, it is time to discuss the asymmetries of resources among universities across the nation. Licensing revenues is a poor measure of technology transfer activity, because universities engage in a number of interactions with the private sector that do not involve patent licensing contracts. However, this data hints at the larger challenge: If universities are expected to be engines of growth for their regions and if technology transfer is to be streamlined, federal support must be allocated by mechanisms that balance the needs across states. This is not to suggest that research funding should be reallocated from top universities to the rest; that would be misguided policy. But it does suggest that without reform, the engines of growth will not roar throughout the nation, only in a few places.

Figure 2. Tech Transfer Activites Depend on Resources

Bubbles based on Metropolitan Statistical Areas and propotional to size of the variable

Wouldn’t it be great if complex social problems could be solved by technology? Alvin Weinberg suggested in 1967 that technical engineering could work better than social engineering; the argument advocated quick fixes to the most urgent problems of humanity at least to alleviate pain while more complete solutions were worked out. However controversial was this idea, our reliance on technology has only increased since then. Still, over the same period, we have also come to appreciate better the unanticipated consequences of technological advancement. In light of our experience leaping forward as well as our tripping and tumbling along the way, we should make two considerations in designing a technological fix.

Consideration 1: Serious attention to unwanted consequences

A consideration of first-order is the study of unwanted effects and tradeoffs introduced by the technology. Take for instance nanoparticles—particles in the range of one to a hundred nanometers—that enable new properties in materials in which they are mixed; for instance, maintaining permeability in fine-particle filtration to make available inexpensive water purification devices for vulnerable populations. Once these nano-enabled filters reach the end of their usable life and are discarded, those minuscule particles could be released in the environment and exponentially increase the toxicity of the resulting waste.

No less important than health and environmental effects are social, economic, and cultural consequences. Natural and social sciences are thus partners in the design of this kind of technological solution and transdisciplinary research is needed to improve our understanding of the various dimensions relevant to these projects. What is more, the incremental choices that set a particularly technology along a developmental pathway demand a different kind of knowledge because those choices are not merely technical, they involve values and preferences.

Consideration 2: Stakeholder engagement

But whose values and preferences matter? Surely everyone with a stake in the problem the fix is trying to solve will want to answer that question. If tech fixes are meant to address a specific social problem, those who will live with the consequences must have a say in the development of that solution. This prescription does not imply doing away with the current division of labor in technological development completely. Scientists and engineers need a degree of autonomy to work productively. Yet, input from and participation by stakeholders must occur far in advance of the completion of the development process because along the way a host of questions arise as to what trade-offs are acceptable. Non-experts are perfectly capable of answering questions about their values and preferences.

The market system provides to some extent this kind of check for technologies advancing incrementally. In an ideal market scenario, one of high competition, the stakeholders on the demand side vote with their wallets, and companies refine their products to gain market share. But the development of a technological fix is neither incremental nor distributed in that manner. It is generally concentrated in a few hands and it is, by design, disruptive and revolutionary. That’s why stakeholders must have a say in key developmental decisions so as to calibrate carefully those technologies to the values and preferences of the very people they intend to help.

Translating these considerations into policy

The federal government first funded in 1989 a program for the analysis of Ethical, Legal, Social implications (ELSI) within the Human Genome Project. The influence this program had in the direction and key decisions of the HGP was at best modest; rather, it practically institutionalized a separation between the hard science and the understanding of human and social dimensions of the science.[i]  By the time the National Nanotechnology Initiative was launched in 1999, some ELSI-type programs sought to breach the separation. With grants from the National Science Foundation, two centers for the study of nanotechnology in society were established at the University of California Santa Barbara and Arizona State University. CNS-UCSB and CNS-ASU have become hubs for research on the governance of technological development that integrate the technical, social, and human dimensions. One such effort is a pilot program of real-time technology assessment (RTTA) that achieved a more robust engagement with the various stakeholders of emerging nanotechnologies (see citizens tech-forum) and tested interventions at several points in the research and development of nanotechnologies to integrate concerns from the social sciences and humanities (see socio-technical integration). Building upon those experiences, the future of federal funding of technological fixes must include ELSI analyses more like the aforementioned RTTA program, that contrary to being an addendum to technical programs are fully integrated in the decision structure of research and development efforts.

Whenever emerging technologies such as additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, big data, or climate engineering are considered as the kernel of a technological fix, developers must understand that engineering the artifact itself does not suffice. An effective solution requires also the careful analysis of unwanted effects and a serious effort for stakeholder engagement, lest the solution be worse than the problem.

Recently the University of Massachusetts Amherst courted controversy when it announced that it would not admit Iranian students into some programs in the College of Engineering and in the College of Natural Sciences. The rule sought to comply with sanctions on Iran, but facing strong criticism from faculty and students the university reversed itself and replaced the ban with a more flexible policy that would craft a special curriculum for Iranian students in the fields relevant to the ban. It is not yet clear how that policy will be implemented, but what has become patently clear is that a blanket ban on students by national origin is a transgression of the principles of an open society including academic freedom. Very rarely will the knowledge created and taught at universities present a security risk that justifies the outright exclusion of an entire nationality from participating in the research and learning enterprise.

A controversial ban

Section 501 of the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012 explicitly denies visas to Iranian nationals seeking study in fields related to nuclear engineering or the energy sector. After the controversy and in consultation with the State Department, the university replaced the ban for a policy of “individualized study plans” for Iranian students in the sanctioned fields. Questions remain as to the practicality of crafting study plans that exclude the kind of knowledge Iranians are not supposed to learn. One can imagine the inherent difficulty of asking some students to skip a few chapters of the textbook or to take a coffee break outside the lab when certain experiments are conducted.

In a recent column, philosopher Behnam Taebi reminded us of a similar controversy when the Dutch government tried to restrict admission of Iranian students. He offers a valuable lesson from both experiences: “the Iranian academic community has traditionally been a bastion of reformism—a tendency Western governments and universities have every interest in encouraging” and correctly concludes that a ban of Iranian students is self-defeating.

Universities export knowledge and values

The costs of constraining technology transfer could indeed outweigh the benefits of study programs that entail technical and cultural exchange at the same time. American universities export knowledge and technology but also they export American values.

Surely, not all values for export are exactly the height of civilization. Skeptics may point out that conspicuous consumption and reality TV are not worth disseminating but these critics would do well recalling that neither social posing nor voyeurism were invented in the U.S.; what we see here are just new bottles for very old wine. In contrast, the best values for export are those of the American political tradition. Living in the U.S. affords international students a regular exposure to that tradition in informal settings such as community life and churchgoing, and in more formal ones, through the stupendous collections of university libraries and the campus curriculum on American history and political thought.

Aside of the lofty and the frivolous, however, there are a few values that are inherent to university life. Of course, the U.S. does not have a monopoly on those values—they are inherent to all universities in stable democracies—but they are certainly part of the experience of any international student. Consider these three:

Stability: Students appreciate the relative quietude of university life. In the U.S., most campuses are physically designed as a refuge from the frantic pace of modern life and provide the peace and safety necessary to allow the mind to concentrate, grow, and discover. Students coming from countries troubled by political instability and conflict are able to stop worrying about questions of subsistence or survival and can devote their attention to solve the puzzles of nature and society.

Meritocracy: Another value characteristic of academia is meritocracy. The system has its flaws but academia more than other walks of life assigns rewards based on clear standards of performance. There are systemic problems and no absence of prejudice, but hard work and talent tend to be given their due.

Social awareness: A third value is a collective concern with public affairs in the local, national, and global spheres. Not everyone in the academic community is socially engaged, but within campus there is a steady supply of debate on contemporary issues and ample opportunity for voluntary work. Visitors will find it easy to engage friends and colleagues in relevant debates and join them in meaningful action on and off campus.

Technology transfer is good diplomacy

Many international students remain in the U.S. after concluding their training but they also keep ties to their families and scientific communities in their countries of origin. Others return home and may seek to reproduce there the stability, meritocracy, and engagement with social issues that were constitutive of their time at an American university. Some will seek reform within their own universities and a few will go further and press for reform to their country's political system. Spreading the values of academic life in democratic societies is a legitimate and powerful approach to spreading democratic values around the world.

Technology transfer as a term of art has evolved to recognize the two-way exchange of knowledge between research and industrial organizations. Likewise, values move both ways and international students enrich American life by injecting their spheres with their own values for export. The policy of American universities of remaining open to all nationalities is both instrument and symbol of an open society. Technology transfer by means of advanced training is indeed good diplomacy.

Tuesday night, President Obama presented four critical questions about the future of America and I should like to comment on the first two:

1. How to produce equal opportunity, emphasizing economic security for all.
2. In his words, “how do we make technology work for us, and not against us,” particularly to meet the “urgent challenges” of our days.

The challenges the president wishes to meet by means of technological development are climate change and cancer. Let’s consider cancer first. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical: this is not the first presidential war against cancer, President Nixon tried that once and, alas cancer still has the upper hand. It is ironic that Mr. Obama chose this particular ”moonshot”, because not only are the technical aspects of cancer more uncertain than those of space travel, political support for the project is vastly different and we cannot be sure that even another Democrat in the White House would see this project to fruition. In effect, neither Mr. Obama nor his appointed “mission control”, Vice President Biden, have time in office to see fruits from their efforts on this front.

The second challenge the president wishes to address with technology is problematic beyond technical and economic feasibility (producing renewable energy at competitive prices); curbing carbon emissions has become politically intractable. The president correctly suggested that being leaders in the renewable energy markets of the future makes perfect business sense, even for global warming skeptics. Nevertheless, markets have a political economy, and current energy giants have a material interest in not allowing any changes to the rules that so favor them (including significant federal subsidies). Only when the costs of exploration, extraction, and distribution of fossil fuels rise above those of renewable sources, we can expect policy changes enabling an energy transition to become feasible. When renewables are competitive on a large scale, it is not very likely that their production will be controlled by new industrial players. Such is the political economy of free markets. What’s more, progressives should be wary of standard solutions that would raise the cost of energy (such as a tax on carbon emissions), because low income families are quite sensitive to energy prices; the cost of electricity, gas, and transportation is a far larger proportion of their income than that of their wealthier neighbors.

It’s odd that the president proposes technological solutions to challenges that call for a political solution. Again, in saying this, I’m allowing for the assumption that the technical side is manageable, which is not necessarily a sound assumption to make. The technical and economic complexity of these problems should only compound political hurdles. If I’m skeptical that technological fixes would curb carbon emissions or cure cancer, I am simply vexed by the president’s answer to the question on economic opportunity and security: expand the safety net. It is not that it wouldn’t work; it worked wonders creating prosperity and enlarging the middle-class in the post-World War II period. The problem is that enacting welfare state policies promises to be a hard political battle that, even if won, could result in pyrrhic victories. The greatest achievement of Mr. Obama expanding the safety net was, of course, the Affordable Care Act. But his policy success came at a very high cost: a majority of the voters have questions about the legitimacy of that policy. Even its eponymous name, Obamacare, was coined as a term of derision. It is bizarre that opposition to this reform is often found amidst people who benefit from it. We can blame the systematic campaign against it in every electoral contest, the legal subterfuges brought up to dismantle it (that ACA survived severely bruised), and the AM radio vitriol, but even controlling for the dirty war on healthcare reform, passing such as monumental legislation strictly across party lines has made it the lighting rod of distrust in government.

Progressives are free to try to increase economic opportunity following the welfare state textbook. They will meet the same opposition that Mr. Obama encountered. However, where progressives and conservatives could agree is about increasing opportunities for entrepreneurs, and nothing gives an edge to free enterprise more than innovation. Market competition is the selection mechanism by which an elite of enterprises rises from a legion created any given year; this elite, equipped with a new productive platform, can arm-wrestle markets from the old guard of incumbents. This is not the only way innovation takes place: monopolies and cartels can produce innovation, but with different outcomes. In competitive markets, innovation is the instrument of product differentiation; therefore, it improves quality and cuts consumer prices. In monopolistic markets, innovation also takes place, but generally as a monopolist’s effort to raise barriers to entry and secure high profits. Innovation can take place preserving social protections to the employees of the new industries, or it can undermine job security of its labor force (a concern with the sharing economy). These different modes of innovation are a function of the institutions that govern innovation, including industrial organization, labor and consumer protections.

What the President did not mention is that question two can answer question one: technological development can improve economic opportunity and security, and that is likely to be more politically feasible than addressing the challenges of climate change and cancer. Shaping the institutions that govern innovative activity to favor modes of innovation that benefit a broad base of society is an achievable goal, and could indeed be a standard by which his and future administrations are measured. This is so because these are not the province of the welfare state. They are policy domains that have historically enjoyed bipartisan consensus (such as federal R&D funding, private R&D tax credits) or low contestation (support for small business, tech transfer, loan guarantees).

As Mr. Obama himself suggested, technology can be indeed be made to work for us, all of us.

Event Information

Technology unimaginable at the time of the nation’s founding now poses stark challenges to America’s core constitutional principles. Policymakers and legal scholars are closely examining how constitutional law is tested by technological change and how to preserve constitutional principles without hindering progress. In Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change (Brookings Institution Press, 2011), Governance Studies Senior Fellow Benjamin Wittes and Nonresident Senior Fellow Jeffrey Rosen asked a diverse group of leading scholars to imagine how technological developments plausible by the year 2025 could stress current constitutional law. The resulting essays explore scenarios involving information technology, genetic engineering, security, privacy and beyond.

On December 13, the Governance Studies program at Brookings hosted a Judicial Issues Forum examining the scenarios posed in Constitution 3.0 and the challenge of adapting our constitutional values to the technology of the near future. Wittes and Rosen offered key highlights and insights from the book and was joined by two key contributors, O. Carter Snead and Timothy Wu, who discussed their essays.

After the program, panelists took audience questions.

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• Constitution 3.0: Freedom, Technological Change and the Law

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Although we are early in the twenty-first century, breathtaking changes in technology are posing stark challenges to our constitutional values. From free speech to privacy, from liberty and personal autonomy to the right against self-incrimination, basic constitutional principles are under stress from technological advances unimaginable even a few decades ago, let alone during the founding era. In Constitution 3.0, we asked a group of provocative thinkers to imagine the ways in which technological change will challenge our constitutional and legal values in the year 2030.

Will privacy become obsolete, for example, in a world where ubiquitous surveillance is becoming the norm? Imagine that Facebook and Google post live feeds to public and private surveillance cameras, allowing 24/7 tracking of any citizen in the world. How can we protect free speech now that Facebook, Google, and other private intermediaries have more power than any king, president, or Supreme Court justice to decide who can speak and who can be heard? How will advanced brain-scan technology affect the constitutional right against self-incrimination? And on a more elemental level, should people have the right to manipulate their genes and design their own babies? Should we be allowed to patent new forms of life that seem virtually human? And we then asked our contributors to propose ways of translating and preserving constitutional values in the year 2030, in the face of dizzying technological change.

The launch event for the book, held on December 13 at Brookings, provoked a vigorous conversation that mirrored the debates in the book itself. My co-editor Ben Wittes and I invited Tim Wu and Carter Snead to discuss their contributions to Constitution 3.0 and to debate a question the U.S. Supreme Court is now considering: should the police be allowed, without a valid warrant, to secretly put a Global Positioning System device on the bottom of a car of a suspected drug dealer in order to track his movements, 24/7, for a month? The panelists disagreed about the proper outcome: Tim Wu argued that Google and Facebook now have more power over our private data than any police agent or Supreme Court justice, and yet the Constitution, as currently interpreted, restricts private corporations far less rigorously than it constrains the police. Carter Snead insisted that it’s not enough for judges to predict how much privacy people actually expect in the face of new technologies; instead, they need to identify how much privacy we should demand in order to live in a free society rather than a police state. Benjamin Wittes dissented, arguing that Congress, rather than the Courts, should protect the privacy of our geo-locational information, whether collected by GPS devices or stored on cell phones. And I channeled the spirit of the patron saint of Constitution 3.0, Justice Louis Brandeis. Brandeis would have been impatient, I think, with the government’s statements that we have no expectations of privacy in public; instead, Brandeis would have insisted on translating the constitutional Framers’ prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures into the 21st century. Now that GPS devices and cell phones can reveal far more about our movements, thoughts, and activities outside of the home than old style home break-ins could have revealed in the 18th century, Brandeis might have insisted that long term surveillance is unreasonable without a warrant.

If you watch the webcast, you’ll get a sense of debate among the panelists about who is best equipped to protect constitutional values in the face of new technologies: the Supreme Court, Congress, administrative agencies, private companies like Google and Facebook, political activism groups, or some combination of all of the above. Regardless of where you come out on these issues, I hope you’ll find the project of trying to imagine the constitutional challenges of the next few decades as challenging and rewarding as we did in writing the book.