One year on from my retirement as Professor of Information and Communication Technology Policy from the University of Sussex, January’s celebratory Edward Steinmueller Festschrift brought together talks by my colleagues and friends on my work and life with them.

Organised by Professor Maria Savona, the Science Policy Research Unit Festschrift took place on 22nd and 23rd January 2024. At the end of the event, I provided a bit of backstory of how I pursued my career with the hope of encouraging others to follow opportunities – rather than prescriptions for how to manage their careers (and lives). To this, I now add some remarks about future opportunities that I see in a few of the areas where I have made professional contributions: knowledge and economics, the individual versus the social in economics, and ICT.

Knowledge and economics: derived versus original novelty

Prosperity in ‘advanced’ economies largely stems from improvements in knowledge. This finding was a profound revision of the idea that economic progress is primarily about capital accumulation. It makes how knowledge is generated and exchanged central to the understanding of rich country economies.

A key concept in the study of economically useful knowledge is innovation, which can be defined as novel knowledge applied to economic activity. Examining novelty more closely, we find that it can either be derived or original. While original novelty may seem redundant – it is apparent that some inventions are derived directly from existing knowledge and others require combining or synthesising different types of knowledge - a few involve fundamentally new knowledge or insight. The last of these categories is what Thomas Kuhn called paradigm change; it often requires re-purposing or inventing language in order to comprehend the originality of the novelty. This helps distinguish what current AI does very well – derived novelty – from original novelty, for which current AI is ill-suited.

Although this defines a space of advantage for human imagination and expression, it is not necessarily optimistic. Much of what human scholars and researchers do today can be described as derived novelty and, likewise, much of the value generated by innovation comes from applications of derived novelty.

A potential positive, however, is that the longstanding shortcomings in ‘technology transfer’ might be alleviated by using AI to guide the use of advanced technologies to improve quality and productivity. On the other hand, with that comes the risk of a new era of colonisation and technology dependency.

As optimising innovation through AI comes into view, it has become increasingly apparent that following our current path poses existential threats to humankind. To avoid a collapse of the web of life and to forge new social contracts that allow us to flourish as a species will require original novelty.

Individual versus social in economics

Most economic analysis is based upon individualism. It is impossible to deny that individuals matter, but equally problematic to conclude that relationships between humans are only transactional. To do so leads to a Hobbesian state of nature world view, where every person lives for themself. As such, the influence of economics in public affairs has contributed to the erosion of social cohesion. Redressing the balance between the individual and the social is vital for our societies to support human wellbeing.

Examples of the impact of the individualism practiced by economists are numerous. Globalisation was undertaken on the principle that labour markets would always deliver jobs that were worthwhile to accompany the advantages provided to workers in their roles as consumers. A similar promise was that the use of management methods in industry (largely derived from economic logic) would lessen the taxpayer burden of building the knowledge and skills needed by the next generations.

Making economic policy decisions that favour social solidarity and human flourishing would benefit from a revival of the ‘old’ institutional economics. That type of economics focused on the implications of law, regulation, and political choice for how people relate to one another in society and how the public interest would be best served. We need to recognise that collective action occurs in forms other than limited liability corporations, and that action is a vital connective tissue to make liberal economic arrangements function in the public interest.

21^st century ICT

I have a mixed record as a technology forecaster. As early social media developed, my sympathies for decentralised democratic governance suggested the proliferation of virtual communities and led me to forecast vast numbers of virtual communities. Instead, we got Facebook. It is helpful, however, to follow Gibson’s adage ‘the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.’ I don’t like the technological determinist implication of the quote, but it does reflect a key innovation behaviour, the desire to upscale and diffuse novelty.

AI requires the upscaling and diffusion of social media and other uses of the internet to generate the raw data needed for AI models. This amounts to surveillance. Surveillance addresses a key human need, security, and in its more benign form, observation, it provides the raw data to understand complex phenomena. Both meanings will be developed for good and ill in the coming years as our current internet uses are augmented by the Internet of Things and related technologies. Understanding and governing these developments will be a major challenge for years to come.

What is your theory of change?

I used to believe that social change could be enacted through large scale agreement among people of like (or similar) mind. My life experience has disappointed that expectation. I now believe that the struggle to make the world better is best served by those who start small: those who experiment with alternatives and then gain influence through confederation and alignment rather than conversion.

This is a slower process with more uncertain outcomes due to the hegemonic power of those who are against what might be. It needs researchers who are willing to look for innovation at the margins and interstices for alternative practices between dominant social and economic arrangements.

All the above areas require combining insights from more than one social science, as well as an understanding of science, medicine and engineering. Long may the Business School’s Science Policy Research Unit continue as a suitable home for the interdisciplinary scholarship we need for the 21^st century. In a time of disruption, dislocation and despair, we should be looking for the lights in the darkness.

My thanks to Maria Savona for organising and Aristea Markantoni for orchestrating the Festschrift.