Event Summary
Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs’ Technology and Public Purpose Project (TAPP) and Harvard Business School’s Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship co-hosted Reimagining Investing in Frontier Technology on May 15, 2019. This workshop convened over 70 investors (Limited Partners and General Partners), entrepreneurs, technologists, and others investing in and building frontier technologies in areas including artificial intelligence, genome engineering, advanced computing technologies, and more. The workshop explored the challenges investors and entrepreneurs face in bringing products to market in ways that maximize their benefits to society while minimizing harms.
Opening Remarks
Tom Eisenmann, Faculty co-Director of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, opened the event with an interactive exercise in which participants were asked to reflect on nine facts about venture capital and frontier technologies (See Figure 1). Several aspects of venture capital investing make it challenging to incorporate considerations for ethics and public purpose. The failure rate among start-ups is very high, and fund returns are earned from a small percentage of companies. This leads to immense pressure on entrepreneurs to build, scale, and attain returns quickly. Investments are raised over several rounds with different VCs, and senior leadership teams in start-ups can turn over quickly. This turnover in capital and leadership leads to challenges in mission continuity and in accountability. At the same time, venture capital-backed startups also have opportunities to better integrate ethics and public purpose considerations. Partners sit on company boards and provide active management and advice, which is an opportunity to provide direction and support. Among frontier technology ventures, initial funding often comes from governments and technologies are often licensed via university technology transfer offices, both of which provide opportunities for additional checkpoints to consider societal impacts.
Former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Belfer Center Director Ash Carter gave an address on the challenges of the next wave of technological development. He noted that the stakes will be much higher for society as AI moves from applications in ads and enterprise software to making decisions in health care, military, policing, and justice administration. The seriousness of these implications means that technologists, entrepreneurs, and investors must be more cautious going forward in ensuring that AI systems ‘get it right’ and are explainable and accountable to those impacted. At the same time, the coming wave of biotechnological innovation will also bring new societal challenges. The biotechnology field historically has been a relatively slow-paced field, led by scientists with PhDs, high regulatory oversight, and long product development timelines. The next wave will be characterized by fast-paced investment as the field intersects more with AI and digital technology developers. Community biolabs are also opening access to a new type of biotech entrepreneur without advanced scientific training.
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