FSI Hosts Inaugural Carnegie Forum on Technology
Secretaries Rice & Albright anchor joint event with the Carnegie Endowment
At FSI in May 2016, Washington DC met Silicon Valley and the results were enlightening.
On May 11 and 12, FSI director Michael McFaul welcomed the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to Stanford for a series of in-depth discussions on technology and international affairs. Anchored by appearances from Carnegie president William Burns, LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, and former secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright, the inaugural Carnegie Forum on Technology, Innovation and International Affairs offered a close examination of the intersection of geopolitics and technology.
The invitation-only event opened with a fireside chat between Burns and Hoffman, covering questions from China’s digital future to European privacy concerns with U.S. trends in between. Despite waves of nationalism and violent extremism worldwide, Burns struck a note of long-term optimism about the ways in which technology affects individuals’ and nations’ relationships to one another.
On the second day, a lineup of regional and subject-matter experts from Stanford, Carnegie and beyond addressed longstanding concerns in the Middle East, new challenges in Asia, and the myriad opportunities for both connection and conflict offered by rapid technological advances. “We tend to have just one narrative for the Middle East, and that is crisis and conflict,” said venture capitalist Christopher Schroeder, who moderated a discussion among Carnegie and FSI senior scholars on the region. “But I would submit that something else is happening too. Last December I went to a gathering of 5,000 entrepreneurs – the type of event that you would all recognize here in Silicon Valley – but it was in Cairo.”
It was a familiar theme throughout the day, from a forward-looking panel on the growth of Asian economies to a comparison of privacy and cybersecurity issues around the world. Moderated by World Affairs Council CEO Jane Wales, the final panel on “Disrupting International Affairs” featured Carnegie visiting scholar James Rothkopf and Matthew Stepka, the former VP of Google Special Projects.
In an off-the-record keynote conversation, Rice, Albright and Burns discussed the foreign policy highlights of their own tenures and offered candid thoughts on today’s challenges. “In many ways, the digital age poses similar challenges to the nuclear age,” said Burns. “Scholars at Carnegie and at Stanford made profound contributions to the international response to nuclear proliferation. The challenges of the 21st century require the same focus and discipline, the same commitment to understanding divergent international perspectives, and working toward shared solutions.”