Every year, FWD50 covers the hottest topics in digital government and public sector modernization. We try to push the envelope, bringing in unexpected speakers and novel perspectives to reframe how we fix government and use technology to make society better for all. Here’s how we’re thinking about our 2024 themes.
Accountability
Last year, we talked about the focus on outcomes, and the disconnect between policy and delivery. Societies collapse when the systems that govern them can no longer support themselves (which we covered in this blog post, and an opening talk.) The solution to this problem is standardization and automation, something Herbert Simon described in the parable of the watchmakers.
But standardization has a downside: Systems that automate and scale can’t anticipate every problem. As people using those systems get marginalized, their experience—and often their lives—suffer. Dan Davies’ new book, The Unaccountability Machine, talks about what he calls “accountability sinks.”
Self-sustaining systems
Any good system must be resilient. That means it can’t be gamed by bad actors, can accommodate a degradation in the tools on which it relies, and can adapt. The first rule of any resilient system must describe how to change the rules of the system, or it will be brittle and fail.
Resiliency means a system must also be self-reinforcing. Legislating compliance will only breed resentment. A new system must be demonstrably better, tipping the Nash Equilibrium into a steady state its users prefer. In fact, it must subvert the old ways, using their inertia and preponderance against them.
Ambition
You may not like the way Starlink, Uber, Tesla, AirBnB or SpaceX gained marketshare—but there’s no question they accelerated broadband-from-anywhere, reinvigorated taxis, shaved a decade off the arrival of electric cars, transformed housing, and cut the cost of space payloads by a factor of 30. Why can’t government do the same?
The hard question nobody wants to ask is whether the public sector abdicated “moon shot” projects to entrepreneurs, letting the private sector capture innovation while installing itself as rent-taker. Patrick Collison’s ever-growing list of ambitious things built quickly shows that the heady days of building big things are mostly behind us.
Generative AI
The last thirty years offer a watershed of such ideas, from cloud computing, to ubiquitous connectivity, to generative AI. Some have already transformed the public sector; others are nascent. All have upended citizen expectations of what governments can—and must—do for the citizenry.
While we fret today about the impact AI will have on the workforce and copyright, other consequences get less airtime. What happens when an onerous, high-friction process like a grant application becomes trivially easy? How does a human right an injustice wrought by an algorithm? Who assumes liability for generative wrongdoing? Does our chatbot deserve attorney-client privilege?
New thinking
Einstein is sometimes cited as saying, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them.” Whatever the source, the sentiment resonates: Fixing governments rooted in sixteenth-century concepts will almost certainly involve twenty-first-century ideas.*
Yet one of the benefits of government is caution. The public sector is the keel of society: The ship is harder to turn, but tends to get where it’s going eventually. Technology invites us to question old assumptions, asking “what is now possible?” rather than “what is the tradition.” Applying new thinking to old problems is the only way we’ll scale the public sector, create accountability, and displace existing systems with better ones.
So this year, we’ll be looking at five big themes: accountability, self-sustaining systems, ambition, generative AI, and new thinking. We’ve already confirmed some amazing speakers, and our advisory board is poring over the results of our Call for Proposals. And we’ll be developing some new activations and interactions that are the hallmark of all our events.
* He didn’t, but in the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto from the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, he said, “We have to learn to think in a new way. It’s actually a line from psychologist-turned-transpersonal guru Ram Dass, who seemed to attribute to Einstein the statement that “the world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level as the level we created them at.”