Simone Ross

As technology extends further through tools like artificial intelligence, we need to ensure that the people writing the software — the computer scientists — are educated in ethics.

In a satire on our tech-driven society, Simone Ross delves into the "what if" of a looming, apocalyptic future where life exists only in the Apple headquarters, and other tech enclaves. From the latest Techonomy Magazine

After last week's look at the "We're Screwed" Techonomy, Program Chief Simone Ross considers the positive, forward-looking thoughts that came out of Techonomy 2017.

The number of alarms raised on stage at Techonomy 2017 left our program chief with a sinking feeling. In this roundup of downbeat thoughts and warnings, she highlights the drama. (There were redeeming notions as well, and she promises to highlight those next week.)

With Techonomy 2017 about to begin, Program Director Simone Ross surveys our panoply of topics and themes, from the "new hegemonist" net giants, to AI and jobs, AR & VR, the future of construction, the future of food, rising waters, global health and tech, etc. etc. We are ambitious, eclectic, and global-minded, and this year's conference displays it brightly, and proudly.

A year after Mark Zuckerberg uttered his famous words that continue to reverberate despite his having repudiated them, Techonomy's program director celebrates the rich program for this year's upcoming Techonomy 2017. Will history again be made? We also just finished the print magazine that goes to our attendees and underscores our concerns and fascinations.

We're deep into Techonomy 2017, coming in early November. Program director Ross previews how she's planning to make this year's event sing. The dialogue about tech's role in business and society gets richer, and daunting. Speakers include new Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, Data & Society's dana boyd, Cisco's John Chambers, GE's Beth Comstock, IBM's John Kelly, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam, Campbell's CEO Denise Morrison, Oscar CEO Mario Schlosser, and author Dr. Dean Ornish.

Simone Ross extracts her favorite moments at Techonomy NYC, including from Union Square Ventures's Fred Wilson and The Financial Times's Gillian Tett. We're already planning how to continue it all this November at Techonomy 2017. So many great tech-related books were mentioned onstage that Ross compiled a list.

Just a few days until Techonomy Health next Tuesday May 16th and Techonomy NYC Wednesday May 17th. Among sessions at Health, we'll look at cancer, genomics, and a lot on wellness and community–the roots of genuine health. NYC tackles terrorism, Trump, corporate innovation, NY as a tech town, changing media, blockchain, and plenty more.

Our New York conference in May starts with a day on health and continues with our usual wide-ranging look at how tech changes business, and what leaders need to know. You'll hear GE's Beth Comstock, Arianna Huffington, WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey, WebMD CEO Dr. Steven Zatz, Eli Pariser of Upworthy, who coined "filter bubble," and experts on drones, privacy, media, construction, the sharing economy, the actual economy, and much more.

Idealism helped build a massive global movement of free culture and the net. It may still offer a powerful outline of cyberspace governance: an equitable and enlightened arena, a benign ecosystem that interweaves people and machines. Unfortunately we’re not even close to that today. But it's not too late to retrieve that vision.

On the Saturday after the inauguration I saw a ray of light. Was the Women’s March the start of a new movement or the evolution of existing, long-standing movements? I have no idea, but our social fabric is being ripped apart. So now what? We need to get better at listening to those removed from our bubbles. We need to figure out how to ensure the benefits of tech and globalization are more evenly distributed. We need to participate.

The plan was always to start the conference with a group discussion about the election. How could we not if our conference started the day after the election? But the triumph of Trump put a rather different spin on things. In general the mood of the room was shock and numbness. For me, it highlighted that no matter how much we talk about tech and its ability to connect us, it is degrading our ability to see beyond our bubbles.

With two weeks until Techonomy 2016, Nov. 9-11, there is lots of fine tuning underway here. The big news this week is that Mark Zuckerberg will join us. But that is just one component of a three day program with a great roster of cross-industry and multi-disciplinary speakers from around the world. The program features 78 speakers (40% women) talking about everything from the implications of the election (How can we not?) to Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, planetary-scale computation, the modernization of currency and the impact of gene modification on…well, everything.

We’re 6 weeks out from our annual Techonomy conference. It starts the day after the election, so we’ll talk intensely about what the outcome means for business, the tech industry, and tech as a tool. Much content this year relates to the continuing march of the Internet of Things. And we'll tackle longer-term questions like whether, once AI intersects with the IoT, this ultimately leads to a sentient cyber ecosystem that intuits and responds to our every move. We'll also talk about cities, shipping, and social media. It's the conference for people who want to understand tech deeply so they can be more effective.

The global biotech market is estimated to have a value of $604.40 billion by 2020. Techonomy program director Ross explains how central the theme is to us, and a bit of her own history of fascination with it. This year at TE16 we’re continuing this exploration into the industries being changed by life science, the technologies, the benefits and yes, the controversies.

One of the first things we’ll do at TE16 this year is have a conversation about what just happened in this epochal American election. That will kick off two solid days of amazing presentations and discussions. The conference theme is “Toward A Sentient Ecosystem,” or how the Internet of Things knits together signals and data from an increasingly vast connected intelligent network that can span from the depths of our bodies to outer space, and what that means for people.

In under a week, Pokémon Go has taken over phones - and lives - everywhere. As the world scrambles to catch Doduos and Bulbasaurs, our program director gives the game a try on the streets of New York City. It may be buggy, and it's certainly distracting, but could Pokémon Go be ushering in a new era of mass consumption for augmented reality? And just why, exactly, has the nostalgia-driven remake of a Gameboy classic taken over the mobile world?

I had a quick visit to Bangkok recently for some family matters: A birth, a (40th) birthday, a wedding, a death…the full circle of life. So what do these four things have in common? Photos. Lots and lots of them. In Thailand there seems to be a constant need to be taking photos, posting them (mostly on Facebook) and sending them around. Will we have access to them in the future? How will VR change this behavior?

It’s finally time for Techonomy NYC, our first conference in New York. May 26 we’ll be gathering a great group of speakers and participants to discuss how the expanding digital economy and the Internet of Things is transforming ecosystems and the underlying social and economic infrastructure of our cities.

Last week DLD was in New York for their annual shindig, and the city was treated to its first Creative Tech Week. CTW brought together artists, designers, makers, creators, entrepreneurs, developers and new media folk to show off their work. And DLD, a wonderful marriage of German and American sensibilities, included two museum curators who spoke about some digital challenges facing art.

The use of tech to preserve, reproduce and recreate antiquities and items of cultural value is not new. Apple's The Virtual Museum CD-ROM (remember that?!) came out way back in 1992. Now ancient ruins across the globe are being destroyed by war, terrorism and natural disasters. While tech offers incredible ways to recreate treasures, an article in The Boston Globe underscores the complex cultural, ethical, legal and political questions that raises.

On Thursday May 26 we host Techonomy NYC. Our diverse program covers everything from finance and banking to health, smart cities, crowd-based capitalism and the impact of tech on culture and trust. We’ve got 27 speakers, including Autodesk CEO Carl Bass, Data & Society’s danah boyd, IBM’s Blockchain expert Jerry Cuomo, Facebook’s Carolyn Everson, Bayer head of digital development Jessica Federer, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, GE Digital CEO Bill Ruh, Betterment CEO Jon Stein and NYC CTO Minerva Tantoco. Join us!

I’m writing this week's post from Civic Hall in NYC, a fantastic co-working, gathering, and events space just around the corner from Techonomy's office on West 22nd Street. There I bumped into organizers of the first NYC Creative Tech Week, April 29-May 8, a full week of programming on the intersection of tech, media, creativity, art and design. Here are some Techonomy links that demonstrate this intersection.

Oceans cover about 71 percent of the earth’s surface. We think of everything as constantly connected, yet in a world where we are drowning in oceans of data the ocean itself is a data dead zone. But there’s a transformation underway. CubeSats and drones are changing not just the way we get access to information about what’s happening on the surface of our planet—from cities to forests to the middle of nowhere—but the frequency at which we get that information.

Techonomy Program Director Simone Ross spends this time of year combing through articles, videos, arranging meetings, and generally keeping her antennae tuned for new ideas that will feed into our conferences. This year our New York event May 26 is a major focus. As at our November 9-11 annual event in Half Moon Bay, California, the Internet of Things and its many ramifications will be a major topic, along with the many other ways digital connected tech is transforming everything.

"Towards the end of 2015, our world was in turmoil. Instability, fear, and anxiety dominated the global dialogue," this essay begins. But from there it imagines what that world might look like if all the potential we at Techonomy see in tech were to become realized in the next fifty years. It's an only somewhat whimsical vision, meant to be inspiring and reassuring. It's why we remain resolute optimists.

Brought up at Techonomy 2015: Afghan social networks, algorithms, ants, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, biofabrication, blockchain, business accelerators for women and minorities, digital economy, empathy, equality, fashion, Internet of things, ISIS, justice, libraries, neuroscience, neurotech, pay parity, privacy, robots for mining, values (of people, computers and networks), voting machines that are too old, Taliban's use of bluetooth marketing, and virtual reality. Here are tidbits from some of the best sessions.

This year we call TE15 Re-Humanizing Society. How can or should tech and the tech industry credibly assert itself as a truly re-humanizing force and influence on the world? Can we reap the supposed benefits of being reduced to 1’s and 0’s and becoming mere data generators without losing what makes us human? The conference kicks off with "Human Values for a Technologized Age." It closes with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. With his recent announcement that Salesforce spent $3 million last year on gender parity in pay and his very vocal opposition to Indiana's anti-LGBT law, he's currently becoming both a business and a civic leader.

Highlights of Techonomy Detroit: CEO Mark Bertolini of Aetna on community based healthcare, inequality and the responsibility of CEOs. He dresses like a rock star and among CEOs, he is one. Talks ranged widely over tech and what it can do in places like Detroit. But local activist Lauren Hood reminded us "What's missing is that the people most impacted by this technology are not in the room, and that model gets replicated on any problem we have."

On September 15th our FOURTH Techonomy Detroit conference hosts fantastic thinkers and leaders for conversations about how tech is changing companies, work, cities and countries. Speakers include Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, Autodesk CEO Carl Bass, and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, plus leaders from Google, IBM, Microsoft, and numerous other companies. And 41% of our speakers are women!

This year's Techonomy Bio and Policy conferences examined critical fields being altered by the progress of tech. We covered everything from growing bones to decoding the brain at TE Bio in March. Then TE Policy explored the not always happy confluence of tech innovation and government. We had briefings on Blockchain and the Internet of Things, and deep dives on cyberwar and the European single digital market. We closed with Senators Booker and Fischer and the inimitable Sean Parker on tech, innovation and American progress.

It’s been amazing to watch the change in Detroit the past four years. In late 2011 when we started thinking about organizing a conference in Detroit, even Detroiters thought we were a little nuts. Eventually people responded with enthusiasm, especially those from out of town who were fascinated by the provocative location. Four years later, the entrepreneurial energy is going full force. Startups are burgeoning, cultural institutions are arising, and in general Detroit is a place to be. And we're still going strong. Our speaker line up for Techonomy Detroit on Sept. 15 includes Mayor Mike Duggan, Carl Bass of Autodesk, Mark Bertolini of Aetna, McKinsey's Michael Chui, Jennifer Crozier of IBM, Esther Dyson, Jim Fallows, Andrew Keen and Charlene Li.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks as we continue to fine-tune the program for September’s Techonomy Detroit. If you’re in Detroit September 15 you should stop by—we’ll be interviewing Mark Bertolini, the refreshing, bead wearing, yogi-like CEO of Aetna. We’ll also be interviewing Carl Bass, the wood carving, boat- and furniture-making CEO of Autodesk. Tiana Epps-Johnson, Executive Director of The Center for Technology and Civic Life, will present on “Civic Tech and the New Digital Divide,” longtime tech entrepreneur and thinker Peter Hirshberg will present on “A Maker City Is a Jazz City,” and "Edge" theorist John Hagel will talk about how companies and cities are successfully “Learning from Movements.”

I spent the long weekend in the Rocky Mountains surrounded by a bunch of very smart people, from many walks of life. It was a bit of a schlep to get to, but perhaps there’s something about the mountain air that clarifies one's thoughts. It certainly gave me ideas for our remaining Techonomy programs this year. The mountains also reinforced my affinity for cities and anything related to them. I appreciate the great outdoors, which in turn makes me appreciate cities even more. There’s little that beats seeing the Manhattan skyline after a few days away. Speaking of cities ... our FOURTH Techonomy Detroit is coming up September 15.

“What is it we want to borrow from the tech world? The tech itself? Or a fundamentally different way of approaching problems?” Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, asked in a presentation last week in San Francisco. Her question mirrored one that came up at a number of sessions at our recent Techonomy Policy in Washington, D.C. Techonomy Policy was created to probe ideas at the confluence of tech and policy. We were well aware that there are many events and demands for people’s time in the Beltway, but we wanted to bring something a little different and a little more broad in its approach. The feedback we've gotten from participants suggests we succeeded. People told us it felt like a different kind of conversation for Washington.

Our first Techonomy Policy conference takes place in Washington, DC, next week. This is our third focused new conference we've launched since the first wide-ranging Techonomy event in 2010. In 2012, we added Techonomy Detroit, and in 2013, we began our Techonomy Bio series. So why Techonomy Policy? There are many reasons. One is that in order for tech leaders and innovators to create the impact and benefit they envision, they must understand the complex ecosystem of government well enough to become valued partners and to create responsive relationships. The role of government, governance, and policy cannot simply be ignored. In addition, in a time when tech is changing everything around us at a rapidly accelerating pace, leaders of the institutions that serve us need close relationships with the techies who are changing the world.

As we put the final touches on the program for our first Techonomy Policy conference I’ve been thinking a lot about government, global order, democracy, responsibility, and communities. And of course politics. It’s hard to avoid politics when you live in the U.S. and there’s 18 months to go before the Presidential Election. Apparently it’s never too early to start obsessing over it. In our archives I came across this short talk (beginning at 11:48) from David Liu, co-founder of the XO Group.

Last week was, as usual, a busy week in New York for the tech, media, and startup community. Burda's DLD conference was in town, as was TechCrunch's Disrupt NY. And it was the Huffington Post's 10th anniversary (celebrated by Arianna and many of her editors at DLD). And, totally unrelated to anything Techonomy, let's not forget the Met Gala. On that DLD session celebrating HuffPo, the editor of HuffPo Canada gave a shout-out to someone they've recently covered—Thiel Fellow, Techonomist, inventor, and entrepreneur Eden Full (who is still only 23 years old). If you haven’t heard of her, check out this short video from Techonomy 2012.

In June we’re launching a new conference, Techonomy Policy. It will focus on the pressure and friction points created when the speed of tech butts up against the ability of government, governance, regulators, and institutions in general to keep up. We’re trying to regulate things that are completely new, be it the technology itself or the applications it enables. And by the time we start thinking about implications, it’s already too late. Can policy become less reactive and more proactive? And how do you navigate such ethically and politically complex issues with huge economic, social, and moral implications?

As we wrapped our second Techonomy Bio conference a couple of weeks ago, it got me thinking about how many interesting “bio” related 180s we've produced in recent years. Our “180° Talks” are three-minute presentations in which the speaker aims to change the audience’s mind about a generally accepted paradigm, or tells us about something they’ve reversed their thinking about. My all time favourite is from Techonomy 2011. Andrew Hessel, then at Singularity University and now at Autodesk, spoke about biotech, procreation, computer-assisted genetic design, and his decision to get a vasectomy.

I think of our conferences as a live version of my favorite magazine. I want information and intelligence, style and substance, blending short and long form to pace the experience and narrative. Our programs are not simply about the intersection of tech and the economy. They are about the application of tech, and its global economic and social impact. Ultimately we explore whether or not tech moves us towards a better world and consensus on the values of society.

Amazon predicts what you want to buy, political pundits predict who you'll vote for, search engines predict what you're looking for. And now researchers and social scientists are looking to similar techniques to predict mass violence and atrocities like war, civil unrest, and genocide. The "GDELT" Project (Global Database of Events, Language and Tone), created at Georgetown University, is updated every morning and catalogs more than a quarter billion event records from across the globe since 1979. The hope is that by mapping and tracking human societal-scale behaviors and beliefs we can learn from the past and better forecast the future.