THESE VITAL SPEECHES

secret meetings in Oman, far from the
public eye.
It led to a breakthrough and then an
agreement. Not a perfect one. But much
better than no agreement.
If you want more jaw-jaw and less
war-war, sometimes transparency has to
sit back and give diplomacy a chance.
Suspending cynicism. Trusting
the government to do an honest job
properly.
Wait. What did that former Chief
of MI6 just say? Trust the government!
Was he having a laugh?
That sort of cynical response gains
traction across the Internet, playing into
every nutty conspiracy theory.
When technology allows non-stop
sneering and jeering against people in
public life, everything gets more stupid.
That makes it ever harder to attract
good honest people into politics and
public service.
Final problem. Disruptive change
Every leader everywhere, good or
bad, wants to reap the benefit of new
technology and big data.
What if today’s turbulent technology
is just too disruptive for free societies?
What if democratic societies start to
look weak, uncertain?
What if autocratic systems or oppressive
systems somehow avoid the worst
disruptions?
Autocratic systems can think strategically
and act decisively, because they
don’t worry about transparency. Because
they close down debate and argument,
and become skilled in manipulating
public opinion.
What if George Orwell’s 1984 becomes
reality?
No country is more strategic than
China. I’ve met some of China’s leaders.
They think in decades, even centuries.
They find it curious that we appear not
to do so!
As we are seeing in Ukraine and
now Syria, President Putin is projecting
power and his ideas of global order to
create new realities.
What if autocratic states start to look
stronger, more effective, more orderly
than democracies?
For all their fumbling and scandal
and confusion, democratic societies have
one huge advantage as technological
change races ahead.
They are flexible. Open. They embrace
new ideas and opportunities.
It’s our greatest strength.
But we can’t take success for granted.
We are at a moment in history like
the industrial revolution. Who gets first
mover advantage, as Britain did in the
18th and 19th centuries?
Societies that work out how to master
and use big data sets will enjoy a massive
head start, whether they are democratic
or otherwise.
They’ll lead the way in artificial intelligence
and robotics.
They’ll reap exponentially growing
benefits in health and education, simply
by knowing more.
They’ll learn faster how to adjust to
new skills and ways of doing things.
Nations that veer away from new
technology will fall behind.
Radical new inequalities in wealth
and power and capability will emerge
fast.
A Bank of America report:
The pace of disruptive technological
innovation has gone from linear to
parabolic … a whirlwind of creative
disruption.
Robots and artificial intelligence will
transform the world beyond recognition,
as soon as 2025.
As soon as 2025? That’s only 500
weeks away!
Pioneers of science like Stephen
Hawking urge us to consider now the
ethical questions posed by self-learning
computers displacing people, not to wait
until these questions are right upon us.
They’re right. And it’s not just the
moral questions. We need to think
through the implications for our politics
too.
To think hard about how technology
can support freedoms won over centuries,
and not erode them.
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We don’t want the next generation to
face a ghastly choice between keeping
our freedoms with much less security,
or retaining our security at a cost to our
freedom.
We must think ahead now, so we
protect the order that is essential for our
free societies.
This takes us back to the beginning
of my presentation.
Exponential growth in computer
power is changing everything. The accelerating
ability of computers to learn
from all those oceans of data is set to
re-model everything.
Our health. Our education. Our
travel, our streets, our sense of space.
How we’re born. How we die. Our
government. Our safety. Our sense of
responsibility.
Back in 1973 I went to Nottingham
to study physics.
I soon swerved to avoid computer science.
I took philosophy modules instead.
That took me into my career in foreign
affairs and security.
I drew on my nuclear physics when
negotiating with the Iranians.
Foreign policy and intelligence work
have echoes of physics. Balance of
forces. Momentum. Pressure. Optics.
Parallel worlds. Things working on one
scale, but not another.
The issues raised by the new technologies
for our long-cherished freedom
and security are really hard.
None of us knows where all this is
heading. But in a free society we have
dynamism and flexibility.
Let’s do what we’re good at. Let’s
shape our own destiny intelligently.
I started with Charles Dickens. I finish
with another great writer. A Nottingham
alumnus, D H Lawrence:
If only we could have two lives. The
first in which to make one’s mistakes,
which seem as if they have to be made.
And the second in which to profit by
them.
With clever DNA engineering from
Nottingham’s labs, perhaps we’ll soon
have that luxury?
CICERO 2016