Bottom-up regulatory innovation’s key to adapt ossified international structures to evolving existential risks.

We are needlessly allowing technology to take the world to the brink of disasters from accidental climate disruption, nuclear war, and pandemics— at the same time that we are allowing the means for controlling these technologies to erode. In effect, we are edging closer and closer to cliffs from which we have removed the guardrails. Fortunately, people are beginning to develop— or at least to think about— protections against some of these dangers.

A technology-based model of authoritarian government is being promoted and exported as a technological, economic, and political challenge to Western liberal democracies. The Internet and social media, conceived as vehicles for free exchange of information and platforms for untrammeled innovation, in some countries have become instruments of repression. At the same time, a systematic, worldwide campaign of misinformation and disinformation, spread via social and mass media, has deliberately sown distrust in the democratic process, in government, in international institutions, in science, in expertise of all kinds, and in the very idea that there is such a thing as truth. In the United States, the scientific consensus concerning climate change has been overwhelmed by misinformation and disinformation spread by political and business interests that it threatens, while public messaging regarding the CO VID-19 pandemic has been at best mixed. All this has made it difficult for people to understand the complex and dangerous new threats to the environment, to their health, to their security, and to democratic government.

Stimulating and Guiding Technological Change

Science and technology have much to contribute to the resolution of all these issues. We need better scientific understanding of the climate, of the ways in which diseases spread, and of the likely impact of gene drivers and geoengineering. We need technological innovations to prevent or cure non- communicable diseases, alleviate malnutrition, conserve resources, defend against cyberattack, and restructure our economies along more sustainable and equitable lines.

But we cannot depend on science and technology to address these issues on their own. We also need policies and institutions that not only support research and encourage technological innovation but also guide scientific research and technological change in responsible directions. This will require both “top-down” measures by national governments and “bottom-up” pressures from public opinion, from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and from state and local governments that are often more directly responsive to public pressure. It will need ideas and inspiration from businesses, universities, research institutes, individual inventors, and ordinary citizens, and support from public opinion and from the actions and advocacy of individuals and communities. In some cases, it will require sustained effort to resist commercial, political, and military pressures to ignore broader social and environmental problems when investing in research and innovation and to deploy technologies before at least some of their consequences are understood and anticipated. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the denial of the reality of climate change in a number of countries show how even the best scientific advice can be undercut by the words and actions of shortsighted, self-interested political leaders.

We need to devise limits on technological innovations like autonomous weapons and hypersonic missiles that can lead to unintended nuclear war. We need to restructure our economy and redesign our cities to end, or at least to limit the use of fossil fuels and to increase the efficiency of our use of energy and materials. We need controls on technologies like artificial intelligence, gene drivers, and geoengineering, all of which both promise major benefits and involve great risks. We need to defend ourselves against technology-based attacks on the values of freedom of thought, communication, innovation, and access to information that were embodied in the original design of the Internet and social media but are now under attack.

At the same time, we need new science and technology to develop novel approaches to environmental sustainability: improved sources of renewable energy and innovative approaches to efficient energy use. We need both to expand and to restructure our electric energy grids to electrify our economy and to improve their efficiency, reliability, and security. We need to restructure our agricultural economy, our urban infrastructure and our transportation systems. We need explicit measures to ensure that everyone can participate in the benefits of technological change. We need research and development on orphan technologies, and vaccines and cures for the diseases that mainly affect people in low- income countries. Not a small menu.

Some of these issues, like climate change, nuclear weapons, and global health, are governed by long-standing regimes, norms, and institutions that now need strengthening and refurbishing to meet new political, economic, and techno­ logical challenges. Nonproliferation and anti-missile agreements need to be restored and extended to limit or ban development and deployment of hyper­ sonic missiles, destabilizing weapons that are now under rapid development in many countries. Voluntary national limits on greenhouse gas emissions need to be urgently increased. Time is running out, and costs will be much greater the longer we take for effective action to mitigate and adapt to climate disruption. In the global health sphere, the system for emergency preparedness and pandemic control needs increased and sustained political and financial support to replace the long-standing pattern of crisis-to-crisis, feast-or-famine funding. Most low- income countries still need basic health infrastructure, both to provide health services to their population and to identify and control epidemic disease that could spread beyond their borders.

Cyberweapons, too, can quickly get out of control and wreak enormous damage on critical infrastructure, including the systems of command-and- control on which we would depend to prevent accidental escalation of a localized conflict to full-scale war. Like hypersonic missiles, the response to these weapons depends on artificial intelligence. Unlike hypersonic missiles, cyberweapons do not lend themselves to the type of verifiable arms control regime that has so far been successful for nuclear weapons. What is more, many governments op­ pose any limits on the use of cyberweapons, despite the risk they pose of acci­ dental escalation. Continued research and international discussion on how these weapons can be controlled are urgent priorities.

Geoengineering and gene drivers also take the world into uncharted terri­ tory. Their governance is complicated by the fact that they are accessible not only to governments, but also to private businesses, NGOs, and individuals. It is far from clear how decisions should be made as to whether and under what circumstances these technologies should be developed, and what criteria should govern any such decisions. Advocates for these technologies have developed roadmaps for deploying them in a way that minimizes risks. Still, there are fundamental disagreements over whether geoengineering and gene drivers should be developed and implemented at all, and there is substantial support for the idea that one or both should be banned outright. Critics have called for moratoriums until the broader questions can be explored by a broad range of worldwide stakeholders, disciplines, and cultures. However, the disagreements we have outlined will probably never be totally resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and deployment decisions will eventually have to be made one way or the other.

The governance of the Internet and social media involves measures to pre­ serve the global Internet and to address those issues of cybersecurity that are of common concern to countries with very different political systems and very different ideas concerning civil liberties and human rights. The competition be­ tween authoritarian and democratic governments over freedom of information and innovation is likely to go on for a long time, but both sides have a strong in­ terest in maintaining a functioning global Internet and in avoiding catastrophic damage to information and telecommunication systems.

Several academies of science, research institutes, NGOs, and religious organ­ izations have proposed codes of conduct and declarations of principle to deal with the difficult philosophical, ethical, and practical issues involved in all these issues. These represent a useful beginning, and one may hope that they will reach the level of consensus that would allow them to be codified into national legisla­ tion or international agreements.

Dealing with these issues will require respect for expertise in the fields to which we have often referred: science, technology, politics, economics, business, law, and culture. We will need to incorporate scientific advice into decision­ making processes, and to acknowledge and manage the risks and uncertainties in our understanding of the science and the technology we are trying to manage, as well as in their ramifications for the larger society. There is also a need to edu­ cate governments and the public, both on the underlying science and technology and on their links to the broader context. Finally, I would urge that there is a need for an international obligation to identify areas for scientific research and technological innovation that can help to resolve these issues and to support this research with adequate financial, human and institutional resources. This last re­ quirement should become a general principle that should become part of the ac­ cepted framework for thinking about global issues and incorporated into formal agreements on these matters as a matter of usual practice.

Dealing with complex global, technology-intensive issues like these is a tall order, especially when they require democratic countries to find common in­ terest with countries with whose governments they are otherwise deeply at odds. Nevertheless, the world has faced such issues successfully before under the arguably more difficult conditions of the Cold War, which pitted two ideologically opposed superpowers against each other that nevertheless managed to agree on elaborate and technically demanding measures to avoid nuclear holocaust.

There have been major innovations since the days of the Cold War that will help with these new challenges. Civil society is a source for new ideas and new institutional arrangements. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and epistemic communities provide scientific advice and education on climate to international negotiators and to the public. Multi-stakeholder meetings develop “bottom-up” codes of conduct, norms, and standards that sometimes make their way into more formal government and international declarations and eventually into national legislation and international agreements. State and city governments combine forces across borders to deal with issues when their national governments shrink from action. Flexible, informal, or voluntary arrangements facilitate international cooperation in situations where binding obligations and formal agreements would be cumbersome or slow moving. Pragmatic, informal institutional arrangements arise to manage international resources when more formal institutions or agreements would be cumbersome or impractical. Private foundations support research in areas neglected by governments and intergovernmental organizations. “Innovative developing countries” like India and China develop and market profitable products for low- income people. Multinational corporations and NGOs support innovations to meet the needs of people without market power. And a billion-dollar network of agricultural laboratories develops improved technology for small-scale farmers in low-income countries.