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Emerging Epicenters and a New World Order

A New World Order is emerging, says business and public policy professor and CID faculty affiliate , and its epicenters – Dubai, Jakarta, Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), Nairobi, Kigali to name just a handful  –  were a few decades ago undeveloped desert terrain, struggling with urbanization, or locked in conflict.  

25 years ago, Rwanda was fighting a brutal civil war, noted Esposito  about his book, AI Republic: Building the Nexus Between Humans and Intelligent Automation. “Today, it is one of the most Internet-penetrated countries in the world.” Its capital, Kigali, will host the next meeting of the World Economic Forum’s AI Governance Alliance. France and Spain are turning to Morocco and Tunisia for renewable energy, he adds. India is forecast to become the world’s third largest economy before 2030.

“What used to be a two-world system – a club of elite, industrialized countries,” a First versus a Third World, “is a reflection of the past,” he says. The future is unfolding before us, and it is “interdependent, multilateral, and polycentric.”

Esposito, who has witnessed the “sense of vibrancy and excitement” of rising economies on one hand, and the “decay and decline” of once dominant regions on the other, sees this shift as a historic opportunity to create more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable systems – to redesign governance, from the ground up, to value human thriving and collective resilience. 

He is on a mission to build a better future, starting from the institutional and economic frameworks underlying labor, education, health, food, and finance systems. “Two decades into the twenty-first century, and we haven’t migrated from outdated industrial models [...] built largely on a zero-sum game mindset,” he says. Those models created unprecedented wealth and progress, he notes, but the twenty-first century requires entirely new paradigms.

Driven by political polarization, today’s narrative often “reinstates the past as the only thing that worked well,” and glorifies its return, he says. “We need to dream bigger.” What if, instead of taking the past as our point of departure, we started from zero and imagined something brand new? Similar to how the invention of zero redefined mathematics, this “zeroth principle thinking,” Esposito says, can help redefine who we are, what we stand for, and what we want the future to look like.

Leapfrogging Legacy Systems

Precisely because many of the new epicenters do not have legacy systems to, in a sense, hold them back, they can “leapfrog” and implement new solutions more quickly. Rwanda’s public sector, for instance, has started using blockchain technology while most governments in Europe and North America still operate on analogue systems. Through his policy work in the Gulf, Esposito has seen governments becoming more experimental and agile, trying new policies designed to get societal feedback, then quickly fine-tuning them.

In The Great Remobilization: Strategies and Designs for a Smarter Global Future, Esposito and his co-authors propose a strategic framework (FLP-IT) to help government, business, and community leaders redesign systems for an uncertain future. Perhaps more important than the decision-making guidelines it sets forth (assess macro trends and their impact, then triage existing resources to address those impacts across plausible future scenarios), is the book’s ethos and call for leaders at all levels of society to become “design activists,” able to envision new systems, in part by shifting how we define value, from measuring profit to “[measuring] human growth as driven by purpose, empathy, community, and [a shared human] identity.”

Bridging Academia, Technology, and Policy

A systems thinker whose early aspirations to become a professional hockey player were sidelined by an injury, Esposito has spent his career examining, in essence, why some countries and organizations prosper and thrive, and others do not, with a view to advancing knowledge that people can use. In the last decade, he has become a prominent academic futurist, an expert on the impact of technology and geopolitics on macro trends, publishing both rigorous scholarship and Amazon best-sellers (his forthcoming books, due to launch in late 2024 and in 2025 are Digitizing the Emerging Economies, Tectonic Shifts: How Technology is Remaking Global Power Dynamics, and Becoming AI Native: A Playbook for Businesses).

After earning a doctorate in business administration (with an emphasis in technology and ecosystems) at the École des Ponts ParisTech, he worked at UNESCO and the UN Global Compact, and served in advisory roles at the National Bank of Malaysia, and for local and national governments. In addition to faculty appointments and affiliations at Hult International Business School, the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government in Dubai, Harvard Business School, Harvard Center for International Development, Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Davis Center for Eurasian Studies, and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, he is a founding fellow of the Circular Economy Center at Judge Business School (University of Cambridge), and co-founder of Nexus FrontierTech, an Asia-based machine learning startup and research lab, and the Circular Economy Alliance, an EdTech firm. He currently serves on two technology and policy groups at the World Economic Forum, and advises policymakers in several Gulf countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, on a range of issues from climate technology implementation to AI governance.

Working at the intersection of academia, business, technology, and public policy has afforded Esposito a birds-eye view of shifts in world systems, and grounds his thinking in applied experience. Collaborating frequently with policymakers, business leaders, technologists and data engineers, for example, drives his fundamental belief in the human ability to problem-solve, adapt, and innovate.

While the threat of generative AI accelerating manipulation of individuals by corporations and governments may be real, and requires regulation (as he writes ), there is a sizable gap between discourse and reality. “AI is oversold for what it is not,” he remarks. “It’s statistical learning and computational power that replicates some cognitive functions,” not intelligent thinking. For Esposito, artificial intelligence is a misnomer.

“Human imperfection is intelligent,” he stated at a Google talk. “Our ability to generate bonds, relationships, to create, and even, to obstruct ideas [...] the ability to think of something that doesn’t exist and make it reality, to convert ideas into projects, to suspend a decision for something greater than ourselves, to surrender to something greater than ourselves,” that is extraordinary.

The real danger, Esposito insists, is “the mismanagement of the conversation [...] the ill-conceived equivalency between humans and machines that we are creating.” That false parity represents a missed opportunity to use technology to “rethink who we are, to rethink the social contract, to rethink what is the purpose of a person integrated into global processes of production,” beyond economic utility.

Educating Future Leaders

Since 2011, he has been teaching courses on machine learning in business through Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, and its Professional and Executive Development programs. In spring 2025, he will be teaching a graduate seminar on AI and international development at the Kennedy School.

“I’m excited to spend time with this community, to see where our discussions take us, and equally, to see what they will do with the education they get from ����vlog����” – what kind of future they will design, he says.