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In today’s complex and rapidly changing world, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence or genome editing generate both hope and anxiety. The promise of technological solutions to global challenges associated with health or the environment coincides with fears over unanticipated and uncontrollable impacts and the ever-increasing power of largely unaccountable corporations.
Just as technological developments before them contributed to system-level changes in economies and societies, today’s emerging (and converging) technologies bring with them new patterns of commodification (of personal data, whether genetic or digital) and the displacement of increasingly diverse forms of human labour, from call centres to laboratories or legal practices.
There is widespread recognition of the need to regulate emerging technologies, but different national socio-political contexts, cultures and values raise complex questions, with implications for international relations within the multilateral trading system and beyond. The governance of the systemic changes that accompany these technologies is thus a challenge at national and global levels.
SPRU’s 2020 residential training course focuses on these questions of governance of emerging technologies, reflecting on past lessons and analysing future trends with the aim of fostering understanding and learning across diverse jurisdictions.
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