Beyond Disruption: Technology’s Challenge to Governance

In Beyond Disruption: Technology’s Challenge to Governance, George P. Shultz, Jim Hoagland, and James Timbie present views from some of the country's top experts in the sciences, humanities, and military that scrutinize the rise of post-millennium technologies in today’s global society. They contemplate both the benefits and peril carried by the unprecedented speed of these innovations—from genetic editing, which enables us new ways to control infectious diseases, to social media, whose ubiquitous global connections threaten the function of democracies across the world. Some techniques, like the advent of machine learning, have enabled engineers to create systems that will make us more productive. For example, self-driving vehicles promise to make trucking safer, faster, and cheaper. However, using big data and artificial intelligence to automate complex tasks also ends up threatening to disrupt both routine professions like taxi driving and cognitive work by accountants, radiologists, lawyers, and even computer programmers themselves.

Jim Hoagland is a Pulitzer Prize winner and Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. For five decades he has been an editor and reporter for the Washington Post. George Pratt Shultz has had a distinguished career in government, academia, and the world of business. Shultz was sworn in on July 16, 1982, as the sixtieth US secretary of state, serving until January 20, 1989. James Timbie is an Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution.