As you’ll have gathered from last week’s Lost in the Maize, I’ve been on the road this week. In fact, I am writing this on the plane back to Detroit, looking forward to a quick wash, shave, sleep, and catch-up with family, before heading off to the Society for Risk Analysis annual meeting in Salt Lake City next week. It’s been a long, busy week, but overall a good one. I succeeded in getting in and out of London, despite the snow. I had the luxury of expanding a 20 minute talk to a 40 minute lecture at the British Thoracic Society (we were two speakers down due to the weather). I even managed to get a bit of real work done.
But the highlight of the trip was probably the World Economic Forum Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai.
This is a rather unique meeting. Every year, the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Councils bring together several hundred of the world’s foremost thinkers, decision-makers and decision-influencers to grapple with some of the biggest challenges facing global society – ranging from poverty to financial and political stability to organized crime to social justice and equity. Within this eclectic mix, I chair the Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies – a council focused on addressing the potential of emerging technologies to address global issues, and the dangers of getting technology innovation wrong. We have around a dozen experts on the council from industry, government and academia, and meet via teleconference through the year to identify and address key global issues associated with emerging technologies.
And once a year, we meet in person with all the other Global Agenda Councils in the United Arab Emirates – for the past three years we have been in Dubai.
As you can imagine, it’s quite a meeting: Around 600 leading thinkers brought together for two and a half days, with the express purpose of mixing it up and exchanging ideas and perspectives – stimulating new insights into tough global challenges.
The format is split between individual council sessions, formal cross-council dialogues, and networking opportunities – with a few plenaries and summing-up sessions thrown in. Of course, the council sessions are where the hard work gets done. But it’s the networking and cross-council meetings where the fun stuff happens.
There’s something rather invigorating about talking with senior policy makers, corporate executives, civil society and religious leaders, and some rather smart academics. Especially when they are interested in what you have to say. I’m not sure whether it’s the seniority of the participants or the fact that we come from such diverse backgrounds, but there is remarkably little ego at this meeting – on the whole, participants readily acknowledge the limits of their own knowledge, and are eager to discover how they can work with others to address complex issues.
This becomes particularly apparent outside the formal meetings. There is a unique willingness at the summit for people to strike up conversations with strangers – over lunch or drinks, or just because you happen to be standing next to each other. And given the rather broad range of expertise floating around, conversations can be both enlightening and serendipitous. There aren’t too many other meetings I know of where you can talk international financing, religion, technology innovation and space tourism over dinner with the foremost experts in each area!
But of course all this activity also makes it a pretty demanding meeting – especially if you are chairing a council. On the two full days of the summit, I was working flat out between 6 in the morning and 10 at night on council business. And after that, I had the “day job” to do – making sure that the Risk Science Center was running smoothly, compiling material for upcoming presentations and keeping up with the usual flood of emails – finally falling into bed between 1 and 2 each morning.
Nevertheless, it was worth it. Beyond the stimulation of meeting with such an interesting bunch of people, the Council on Emerging Technologies has the potential to make an impact – visibility, and access to senior decision-makers is one of the great advantages of working with the World Economic Forum. Don’t get me wrong – we are only a small council and so have to choose what we focus on carefully. But we do have an opportunity to push the opportunities and challenges of developing responsible and responsive new technologies up the political and corporate agenda. And in a world that is increasingly technology-dependent, that’s kind of important.
But I must confess, after all the excitement, I am looking forward to a bit of sleep.
Before the next round of meeting madness!
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