OECD Deputy Director Science, Technology and Innovation Jens Lundsgaard will welcome participants and open the event. The first plenary panel session will offer a diverse set of perspectives on how future technologies can be expected to shape human experiences. This session will consider different technological futures, their diverse impacts across different communities, and why desired futures may be less viable without addressing barriers to finance and international cooperation, among others. The session will lay the foundation for discussing values-based technological futures that achieve common goals and mitigate divides.

In a world where technology landscapes are rapidly evolving, understanding the key drivers behind such changes is crucial for both technologists and policymakers. This session will examine the profound and observable long-term trends that are shaping the human future. These include climate change, ageing populations, and the rise of geopolitical tensions. Understanding these and other megatrends is essential for navigating the complexities and uncertainties that lie ahead. Megatrends are not mere predictions; they offer critical perspectives on how past data can inform our assumptions about what the foreseeable future might hold. They create common ground for understanding among individuals with diverse perspectives, fostering a collective vision for the human future.

The last decade has witnessed remarkable development of health-relevant technologies in an array of areas, including the manipulation of biological processes (e.g. gene editing), personalised medicine and drug discovery, crisis and pandemic response, the rise of self-monitoring (wearables), and new hybrids of bodies and machines (machine-computer interfaces or 3D-printed tissue). This session will explore how this diverse suite of technologies for health and human bodies will usher in new understandings of ourselves, new avenues for health care, and new paradigms of global health.

Transformative impacts of advances in nano-, bio-, digital, and material technologies on human health and well-being are shaping neurotechnologies and enhancing learning and cognitive functioning. Brain-computer interfaces offer potential therapies for individuals with disabilities and mental illnesses, as well as enhancement of sensory and cognitive experiences. Start-ups around memory and learning are quickly entering the market, raising ethical, legal, and social considerations. This panel will explore some of the technologies that will usher in the future of the brain, examining their economic, ethical and social implications.

Policymakers grapple with the difficult task of fostering innovation enabled by new technologies while safeguarding against their risks. The session will delve into case studies of past technology developments—such as the advent of the Internet, biotechnology, and mobile communications—to extract valuable lessons and consider these in view of technologies on the horizon. Leveraging the GFTech’s diverse and insightful community of governments, business, academia and civil society perspectives, the discussion will draw on experiences from different continents and sectors to identify applicable wisdom from the past to: • Leverage international cooperation so ethics and human rights guide developments through norms, standards, and best practices at the right time; • Identify strategies for striking the right equilibrium, including managing the role of public and private sector in empowering competitive markets with sustainable investments that scale in line with societal interests; • Consider the role of citizen engagement in shaping policies that facilitate digital and technological literacy required to foster inclusiveness; and, • Anticipate priority policy areas with higher risk and ensure these are not given equal or lesser attention by default.

Emerging technologies, their convergence and potential dual use, carry uncertainties about and risks to privacy, security, equity and human rights. The emergence of generative AI and its sweeping functionality took many by surprise, underscoring the challenges of governing powerful new technology and highlighting the need for anticipation. This double-edged nature of emerging technology requires policies and tools to better anticipate disruptions and enable technology development for economic prosperity, resilience, security and address societal challenges. This session will explore the challenge of how to enhance societal capacities to govern emerging technology well and set up appropriate guardrails to align technological developments with human values. The session will draw on the OECD Framework for the Anticipatory Governance of Emerging Technologies welcomed by ministers at the OECD in April 2024, a resource meant to facilitate deliberation with diverse stakeholders and build deeper capacities to anticipate and shape technological development.

Large shares of the population already spend more waking time in digital environments than not. Previously offline activities are evolving with digital dimensions, from mobile payments, tickets and identification verification, to congregating for cultural events, meetings and entertainment in virtual spaces. Surgeons are already achieving complex procedures enabled by AI-assisted telemedicine and augmented reality. Developments in connectivity and technology convergence will propagate digitally-augmented environments and the ensuing economic and social impacts. This session will bring together technologists and policymakers to scope how emerging technologies (AI, IoT, 6G, digital twins, autonomous vehicles and smart, data-enabled environments) can be expected to converge and change the spaces people will occupy in the future. It will explore governments’ priority considerations to orient these technologies to develop sustainably in line with shared goals. Technologies will be considered in terms of their anticipated impact on human spaces, while raising issues around scalability and associated costs. In addition to resource management, interdependencies and technological architectures and enablers that must be trusted to be adopted by users will also be factored.

This facilitated exchange will glean from participants what was learned during the event and identify key takeaways, including what questions or gaps warrant discussion. It will also surface participants’ views on priorities and provide an opportunity to collect wisdom and perspectives directly from the group to inform future deliberations and activities for the OECD and GFTech.

OECD Director Science, Technology and Innovation Jerry Sheehan will provide some closing remarks on the path forward and conclude the event.