Technology can serve humanity if we don’t let it outpace our societies – Yurika.R

‘Progress is happening so quickly that governments and societies struggle to understand revolutionary and disruptive technology, much less mobilise effective responses.’

• This is an edited version of Justin Bassi’s opening speech at ASPI’s Sydney Dialogue taking place on September 2 and 3.

Most of you probably flew to Sydney to join us. And most of you probably didn’t think much about the shape of the windows in the plane—but let me tell you something interesting about plane windows. They used to be square.

The world’s first commercial airliner, the de Havilland Comet built in Hertfordshire England carried more than 30,000 passengers in its first full year of operation in 1953, including Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. 

But in 1954, two Comets came apart in the air, killing everyone on board in both instances. Investigations found that the fuselage around the corners of the square windows suffered metal fatigue from the stress caused by the sharp angles. And this was the cause of the crashes.

Plane makers around the world switched to rounded windows … and commercial aviation has gone on to contribute arguably as much as any technology to boost our civilisation—enabling most people to experience other parts of the world, conduct business face-to-face, share their thoughts and ideas, and learn from one another—as we’ll do over the next two days.

The point of the story is that technology improves our lives while introducing new risks. As with aviation, there’s a period of adjustment: we discover problems, we find sensible fixes, the cost comes down, the take-up rises and the technology becomes baked into our lives, contributing to our social, economic and cultural growth.

What is changing, however, is the speed at which new technologies are being developed and the impact they are having. We have galloping progress in fields such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and quantum computing—to name a few. Technological progress is cumulative and cross-pollinating, so that advances in one field tend to drive advances in others. And as that progress builds, the stakes both in terms of rewards and risks grow.

As our first speaker Eric Schmidt has written of artificial intelligence: ‘Faster aeroplanes did not help build faster aeroplanes, but faster computers will help build faster computers.’

And that’s the challenge. Progress is happening so quickly that governments and societies struggle to understand revolutionary and disruptive technology, much less mobilise effective responses.

And if we don’t roll up our sleeves and wrestle with difficult policy challenges around emerging technologies, we yield the space to others who might be motivated purely by financial gain or political power. Then, technology isn’t serving the needs and interests of the majority of people.

Things don’t automatically break our way. People actually have to ask the right questions and start the right conversations.

In September 1984, 40 years ago almost to the day, the US introduced the first Presidential Directive on cyber, titled NSDD-145, establishing a comprehensive and co-ordinated approach to information systems security.

It came about because then President Ronald Reagan, after watching the movie War Games, asked whether the cyber attacks portrayed in the film could really happen. His question was initially met with derision but, after a review, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Vessey, returned with the answer: “Mr President, the problem is much worse than you think.”

The lag period between the development of technology and our ability to manage it is where the risk is most intense and the benefits most uncertain.

And the reason the Sydney Dialogue was established was to help shorten this period—to prompt those questions and conversations by bringing together political leaders, tech CEOs and the world’s top civil society voices to talk about how we can roll out the next waves of technology in secure and stable ways.

In just three years since we held the first Sydney Dialogue:

• The lingering lessons of COVID and the deteriorating strategic environment have combined to accelerate the trend of economic derisking—especially by the United States and China.
• Generative AI has demonstrated the immense power and mystery of deep learning and massive amounts of computing—leaving governments grappling with how to regulate a technology for which there isn’t really any regulatory precedent.
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated the chameleonic dimensions of hybrid warfare—underscoring the importance of cybersecurity and of mounting defences against threats ranging from disinformation and propaganda to attacks on power grids and other critical infrastructure.
• And disinformation—including deepfake-generated disinformation—has thrown our entire infoscape into question, raising fears of personalised content created at effectively zero cost yet targeting millions of people for malign purposes. This has profound implications for democracies that depend on public trust in the integrity of institutions and elections.

The Sydney Dialogue is proudly focused on the Indo-Pacific region—the most populous, dynamic and diverse region in the world.

These are conversations for all of us—and I’m very pleased to say that we have more than 30 countries represented here.

And by the end of the Dialogue, I hope that we’re a little bit closer to finding the right rules and norms that translate across borders to foster safe and secure access to transformative technologies; help distribute the benefits equitably; earn the trust of our citizens; and protect individual rights and democratic freedoms.

As the power of technology grows—and everyone in this room knows that’s the course we’re on—the stakes are getting higher and the conversations more vital. That’s why we’re all here.