The Future of Frontier Technology in Development
What are the frontier technologies that are likely to have the biggest impact on international development in the next 7 years?
How are things like AI, synthetic biology, and edge computing going to affect your work?
How will you contribute to strengthening the rights of women and girls, preventing the next global health crisis, and improving global food security?
What potential futures for development might emerge as frontier technologies evolve, expand and interact with the real world?
Welcome to Futures
7 years ago, DFID commissioned the Institute of Development Studies to produce the report: Ten Frontier Technologies for International Development. It was 2016, the Sustainable Development Goals had just been launched, and the world was excited to see how technologies like 3D printing, IoT and drones could help us achieve them.
Ever since the Frontier Tech Hub was launched we’ve used the insights and recommendations from that report to work collaboratively with the FCDO to test the potential impact of these technologies.
Now the 2030 deadline for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals is fast approaching, and technologies like AI and synthetic biology are evolving at pace. As FCDO continues to explore how it can adapt to meet the challenges and opportunities that these technologies might bring, we thought it was time to take stock and think critically.
Our Method - SCAN
Futures is the tool that the Frontier Tech Hub uses to explore the possible. We don’t make predictions. Instead, we support FCDO to think critically about the future and form proactive policy and programming, which accounts for the risks and possibilities that technological development presents. In this cycle, we asked ourselves:
Between now and 2030, what are the most exciting frontier technologies from a development perspective and how might the next seven years of technological change impact the way we do development?
To approach questions like this we’ve developed SCAN - a methodology to break down big and often complex questions about the future into a tangible research process:
Surface: Through a combination of literature reviews and consultations with experts, we surface key areas where technologies are likely to develop over the next 7 years, the trends affecting their development, and emerging use-cases in different sectors. By surfacing the trends we can think about how they will shape what’s needed, and what’s possible.
Cluster: With various trends, use-cases and issues surfaced, we collaborate with colleagues at the FCDO to cluster them into cross-cutting themes and areas of interest. We learn a lot from where the clusters are and also the outliers.and use this step to identify which aspects of our research are most pertinent to their work. We use these workshops to establish speculative scenarios, each representing a provocative look at how the future might play out for different frontier technologies in development.
Add: These scenarios are a tool for us to ask difficult questions to spark different perspectives we can add into the mix. If the world looked like this in 7 years, what would we have wanted to do differently now to mitigate its risks? What could we be doing to facilitate the potential impact they present? To explore this, we reach out to FCDO experts within each sector and get their take on how FCDO could better meet the opportunities, and address the challenges raised by each scenario.
Network: With these recommendations in hand, we produce a catalogue of content we share with a network of FCDO staff so they can bring that back to their own work and teams, and begin to question what can be done to amplify the potential positive impact of technology in development and address key uncertainties about emerging risks.
This is a brief snapshot of how horizon scanning can help us think clearly about the future, and address questions that can seem daunting at first glance. If you’d like to learn more about how we approach horizon scanning on the hub, you can find out more in our methods toolkit.
What did all this amount to?
Throughout the cycle we’ve spoken to agriculture experts, AI thought leaders and dug into reports exploring things from the future of work to how quantum computers might be crucial in the fight against climate change. Instead of rattling off everything we’ve learned, I’ve decided to share with you three key takeaways from the cycle and why it's crucial to start thinking about them now. If you’d like to learn more about the technologies we surfaced and explored, head here.
1. AI’s potential as a social leveller
Many of the conversations we had about AI had an interesting polarity. People were excited about the potential for AI as a social leveller, and simultaneously aware of the urgent need to make it accessible to avoid a digital divide. The combination of high skill requirements to enter global job markets in emerging industries, and the high cost of developing those skills, keeps people living in LICs from accessing opportunities. LLMs can both reduce the skills required to access these jobs, e.g . by giving people a simple tool to develop code, and, through personalised learning, develop the skills needed to access opportunities. However, it will only be in the countries where people have access to the technology, an understanding of how to use it, and the devices needed to take advantage of it, that this benefit will be seen.
To address this issue, we’ve found that there needs to be capacity building on the ground so that people know how to use the technology, both to take advantage of the opportunities explained above and to develop their own solutions which are tailored to their context. There are also key biases that need to be addressed, especially with the use of LLMs, to make sure they are usable in multiple languages, trained on data drawn from the Global South, and adapted to the needs of different communities.
2. Access and the importance of knowledge sharing
Building on the previous point, the potential impact of the use-cases presented in our five scenarios is based on a crucial assumption: access. Whether it be the use of wearable sensors for remote monitoring of patients' health or genome-edited crops to improve food security, the scale of their impact only extends as far as the infrastructure, skills and connectivity which facilitate them.
But to understand barriers to access, we need to go beyond these factors. For the use-cases we’ve explored to genuinely meet people’s needs, solutions need to be tailored to local contexts, by developing them in collaboration with the people who intend to use them. By building a strong ecosystem of different actors engaging with one another and sharing knowledge of best practices, we can develop an enabling environment for innovations tailored to the unique needs of different contexts. These kinds of networks can ensure that we’re supporting access not just to the technologies themselves, but to the value those technologies can bring about.
3. More about the “how”, than the “what”
The technologies we’ve explored in this futures cycle are quite different from those explored in the Top Ten Frontier Technologies for international development report. AR, Edge Computing and Digital Twins, all present unique opportunities and challenges. What’s striking is that much of the discussion about how they should be applied to development is similar. We’re still asking ourselves how to create equitable access, build capacity for users, protect data, tailor solutions to local needs, and foster effective regulatory environments.
That’s not to say that there won’t be unique challenges presented by transformative technologies like AI, synthetic biology and sensors. Through a combination of horizon scanning to understand the emerging landscape and a strong grounding in how technologies have been used to approach international development challenges, we can start to leverage these technologies to meet the opportunities that the next 7 years will present.
If you’d like to learn more about the work we’ve done through the cycle, you can:
Watch this 20-minute video summarising everything we’ve learned
Read some of the reports we’ve produced, all available on this webpage:
In-Depth Desk Research Summary
Emerging Use-cases for Frontier Technologies
Five Scenarios for the Future of Frontier Technologies in International Development
Reach out to ftlenquiries@dt-global.com to learn more about how we can work with your team, to collaborate on an exploration of the future of technology in your work.