The annual Technology-Enabled Disruption (TED) conference was created to give economists, business leaders and policymakers a better understanding of how technology is enabling change, and specifically how it is disrupting existing business practices and changing the environment in which they take place Consumers, who are the reason we care about business in the first place, take action.
This year, our conference focused on uncertainty in technology in three sectors:
- Macroeconomic uncertainties and technology investments
- Uncertainty and the way forward for the technology sector
- Market volatility and energy transition
With that in mind, our goal was at the event, which drew about 100 participants from across the country and featured presentations by Tom Barkin, President of the Richmond Fed, Raphael Bostic, President of the Atlanta Fed, and Lorie Logan, President of the Dallas Fed , is stimulating discussion on how to appropriately explore the transformative activity in technology and how to address these issues in a stressed macro environment. Despite high levels of uncertainty, academics, policymakers, business leaders and citizens still have to make decisions about important investments – in equipment, technology, business practices and people.
Throughout the conference, speakers and panelists emphasized how fast things are changing, particularly in the areas of climate and technology. They made it clear that we as consumers need to increase the pace of decision-making in order to keep up. Here are a few more highlights from the event:
On day one we were invited to a keynote by anthropologist by training and now Head of Financial Press Gillian Tett, who encouraged attendees to step outside of our traditional frames to better understand the other ‘tribes’ who typically need to work together to find solutions find real-life issues: Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and policymakers, each with potentially different norms, languages, and customs. Andrew Young, Chief Financial Officer at Capital One, further reiterated that the past pandemic years have forced us to move out of the typical way of doing business and that now that we are normalising, we need to think about how to keep the best of what we have have learned. He helpfully spoke of companies working to “earn the commute,” which they might now be asking more of their employees to do.
Rather than letting uncertainty threaten them, a consistent theme from panellists was the need to embrace a rapidly changing world. This became clear when it came to ensuring that the expertise of both traditional and alternative energy producers is harnessed to create a smart ‘all above’ path to a cleaner future that would stave off the worst impacts of emissions, without imposing excessive costs on consumers, both here and elsewhere. One issue has been more negative here: consumer resistance to accepting prices that better reflect the impact on global commons has proved extremely difficult to manage, with the consequence that vulnerable populations here and elsewhere are likely to be harmed.
AI was another hot topic, and we heard from the Federal Reserve System’s Chief Innovation Officer, Sunayna Tuteja, who joined Tyson Tuttle and academic Anton Korinek in discussing the potential “Cambrian moment” we may be standing on the brink of. It was a sobering discussion, with Korinek believing that the impending shift in AI is likely to be quite harmful for many groups of workers, even though new and cheaper products and services are likely to mushroom.
At any conference where technology and disruption are at the forefront, innovation needs to be at the core. The evening’s keynote speaker, Eric Budish, explored key research findings addressing whether the ‘rules of the game’ allow for the right types of innovation or reward what we all recognize as wasteful. Examples came from financial markets, where the “need for speed” in trading – to take full advantage of specific trading protocols – led to rat races that drained resources from productive activities, and in oncology, where the rewards of marginal life extension dominated at times much more powerful early-stage prevention. A theme of Budish’s remarks was that human ingenuity, both at the individual level and at the level of teams running businesses, is very powerful in generating privately beneficial benefits, and if society as a whole is to benefit, so too Policy makers – who set the rules for competition – should know that the stakes are high to get things right.
Interested in the content presented at the conference? Recordings of the sessions and a summary of the event by Beth Anne Wilson, Director of the International Finance Division of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, from the 2023 TED Conference are available on the conference website.
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