Technology plays a fundamental role in 21st century society, enabling communication, finance, industrial development and much more. But this role requires multistakeholder commitments.
It involves numerous actors in society, from policymakers and grassroots campaigners to technology companies and their customers. These actors often exist in siloed communities. Bringing all these actors together will be increasingly important to map out the future of technology, to set standards and common frameworks and to ensure these technologies embody the societal values we want them to have. A key goal for this kind of diplomacy will be to find ways to balance competition against strategic co-operation. This is important because the potential fragmentation of some of the most important technologies threatens to limit international co-operation and stability.6 For example, the political conflict over Huawei’s 5G infrastructure threatens agreement on standards for 6G and beyond, raising the possibility that China and its allies could take a different technological trajectory in future. The same could happen for gene editing technologies, brain-computer interfaces or climate-altering technologies. Gathering the information and technology nous to tackle these issues and then bringing together the relevant stakeholders to establish global governance frameworks would be key goal for science diplomacy.7
