Davos: It’s Not Enough to do Less Bad (5 Tech and Impact Trends)
Here are five key tech and social impact trends from this year’s Forum:
- It’s not enough to do less bad.
- The Fourth Industrial Revolution is the way leaders will talk about tech.
- Impact bonds and pay-for-outcomes models will dominate global social sector funding.
- “Stakeholder capitalism” is no longer niche; it’s mainstream.
- Safe harbor provisions would allow tech platforms to innovate around labor.
ROBERT STEELE: Some very good stuff here. Two comments: one, most of these ideas are not new, Buckminster Fuller, Russell Ackoff and many others have offered them for over a quarter century, what is new is that Lady Lynn Rothschild and others have seen us hitting bottom and now “get” that balance and equality are essential foundations for protecting their luxury; two: until Davos can hold three ideas in its head simultaneously, it will continue to be voyeur do-goodism. The three ideas are holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering. The digital futures concept — and India's Smart Cities project — are deeply flawed for their failure to understand true cost economics, and how that impacts on the need to return to what Melissa Sterry calls bespoke technology, what I call human-centric technology. It is stupid to create a throw-away tecnical component when a human could repair it in situ… but that is precisely where we are headed. Full employment should be the foundation for how we design technology applications in the future…along with true costs.
