Converging on an Understanding: Emerging Tech, Our Communities & Delicious Desserts
This is the first blog post in our series on technology convergence, cybersecurity, and the implications for policymakers. The second installment in this series will be available on Tuesday, September 5th.
Key takeaways
Convergence is the combining of technologies to create a capabilities sum that is greater than its parts (much like pairing chocolate with peanut butter)
Whether talking about food or technology innovation, this concept helps us to avoid vague discussions that lead to more confusion than actionable outcomes.
In a renewed era of great power competition, technology innovation will be a key economic and geopolitical focus. Policymakers must understand emerging technologies better and have a framework to evaluate progress.
To that end, policymakers should use the following evaluative criteria to better understand particular technologies: speed (or level of ubiquity), reliance on advanced materials, complexity and vulnerability of supply chains, cybersecurity, and convergence.
To bring this to life, future posts will apply the framework to a key real-world example of technology convergence with significant policy implications – connected communities.
What is convergence?
Any conversation about the concept of convergence should start in the logical place: chocolate and peanut butter. Convergence is when two (or more) things layered together create a capability that is greater than the individual components. This concept is extremely important in the budding field of emerging technology, but its roots are in the happiness that is chocolate and peanut butter. Sure, we could use other analogs like lemon and basil, figs and bleu cheese (seriously, try it), or gin and tonic, but convergence in technology demands the biggest and best and for that we turn to chocolate and peanut butter.
Both chocolate and peanut butter come in a variety of flavors and forms such as chunky or creamy, dark or milk. While both are culinary delights in their own right, something special happens when you put them together. Whether a peanut butter cup, ice cream, candy bar, or other wonder of human culinary innovation, the result of the convergence of chocolate and peanut butter is greater than either dish individually.
Moving from desserts to technology, convergence is also one of the defining factors of technology innovation today. More than that, emerging technology is one of the central factors over which nation-states compete in an era of great power competition. Using the cyber domain as the attack vector of choice, nation-states are engaged in a constant state of cyber war with a goal of gaining an advantage in technologies that impart new statecraft capabilities.
We hear about these technologies all the time; AI, quantum, IoT, telecommunications, outer space, biotech, wearables, and more. And while the innovation around any of those technologies individually remains of strategic importance to national, homeland, and economic security, there is a second angle to consider in a lesson we can take from our culinary example.
In the technology world, convergence is when two or more technologies are layered together to create a capability that is exponentially greater than any of the components individually. A great way to think of this is a drone or an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). A UAV is an impressive piece of technology, but it represents a convergence of many different technologies such as aerospace, AI, telecommunications, robotics, optics, quantum, and others. It is fair to say that most technologies can be broken down into other discrete technologies, but convergence is a different conversation. Especially in a world driven geopolitically and economically by emerging technologies, convergence is both a way to understand technologies better and a way to evaluate their progress.
Toward a framework for evaluating emerging technology
Until April of this year, I was the Director of Emerging Technology Policy at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a role I held for over three years. From this position, I had the opportunity to work on policy issues surrounding technology and to communicate with a wide variety of audiences from the White House to large companies to local governments. One of the lessons I learned quickly was that sometimes talking about technology can suffer from an unintentional vagueness. The best example is AI. The question, “What are you doing about AI?” is so vague that it borders on destructive. It is hard to have a meaningful conversation when talking about a technology like AI in the abstract.
The same is true for the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT can encompass so many “things” that speaking about it in the abstract leads to conversations that want for actionable outcomes. Instead, I found it more effective to speak about concepts like AI or IoT as they related to convergence. It was better to talk about a hypothetical (or actual) system that employed a series of IoT sensors that collected data and sent it to a cloud where it was analyzed by AI. That flow created a better and clearer understanding of issues that might require policy attention.
In the same way, I directed my team to use a series of factors to evaluate emerging technologies that I also teach in my classes. Convergence was a primary factor, but the rest are provided below as they are informative to the ongoing conversation about emerging technologies on the GoTech blog.
Speed: How quickly will this technology be in ubiquitous use? Or is it already?
Advanced Materials: To what extent does the technology rely on advanced materials that are expensive, rare, or difficult to procure?
Supply Chain: To what extent does the technology rely on complex international supply chains and how vulnerable is it to disruptions based on geopolitical events?
Cybersecurity: To what extent is the technology connected to the open internet during its development or deployment?
Convergence: In what ways can the technology converge with other technologies to create a greater capability? What other technologies might it converge with?
This framework provides a way to capture the development and deployment of emerging technologies in a way that includes the factors most likely to influence its movement. These questions can be asked as research questions when analyzing emerging technology in a geopolitical context or as it might apply to local governments considering implementing municipal technology solutions. Convergence is a primary factor and when added to a framework creates an avenue for understanding both technology development and risk. However, convergence here acts as an amplifier of these and other factors making it critically important in discussing emerging technology.
Convergence is also susceptible to the vagueness problem as instead of talking about one technology category, we are talking about many. Therefore, it can be helpful to bring convergence conversations into the realm of the applied. Instead of speaking about convergence as a concept, we can speak about specific ways convergence impacts our lives and build useful theories that can be molded into effective policies.
One of the most obvious and possibly impactful examples of convergence is in the concept of smart cities or connected communities. Connected communities are not themselves technology but a technology concept that brings together IoT, AI, telecommunications, cloud, and much more to provide enhancements in a variety of community services. In fact, a connected community architecture on the scale of a large city would not have been possible prior to the rollout of 5G because the deployment of IoT at scale required higher bandwidth over broadband than afforded by previous wireless generations. Applying the above framework, we can see how convergence accelerated a technology concept that impacts communities of all sizes.
Some thoughts
Bringing together two or more technologies that creates a sweet outcome is perhaps not as amazing as chocolate and peanut butter, but it runs a close second. As innovators all over the world cook up new technologies and enhancements to existing technologies, we are going to see convergence. Convergence is an effective measurement of technology progress and there is no better example than in connected community architectures.
In the remainder of this series, we will talk about connected communities and how the concept creates a way for us to better understand emerging technology and its impacts at high levels and at the community level. Convergence is the first step toward understanding this piece of the emerging technology puzzle and is now something that you may think about anytime you take a bite of your chocolate peanut butter ice cream.
