Why are companies racing to build dancing robots when human dancers are fighting harder than ever to earn a living? Why does it feel like technology is becoming rapidly more powerful, but so few people seem to actually gain anything from it?
Institutions large and small are central to all democracies, and they’re anything but simple. A great institution can protect and increase knowledge across generations, but the very thing that keeps them alive can also make them stagnant.
Sir Geoff Mulgan knows institutions better than almost anyone. He’s Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London, and from 2011 to 2019 he was Chief Executive at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. He explains why our biggest and most important institutions so often seem averse to innovation, and outlines how groups of people can be more (and sometimes less) than the sum of their parts.
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