The Future(s) of Big Tech

The Rui Cunha Foundation presents today, Thursday, May 2nd at 6:30pm, a session of the series Circle of Ideas, entitled “The Future(s) of BIG TECH”, with guest speaker Prof. Sandro Mendonça from ISCTE Business School, Lisbon, and recently appointed Fellow Economist at the European Commission, Brussels, in 2024.

Passing through Macau, the renowned economist returns to give FRC the honor of another lecture, this time on the influence and regulation concerns of large technology companies, one year after presenting the talk about “The Change in Communications: From 5G to AI through Digital Platforms” at the Gallery, in April 2023.

«Big Tech are here to stay. But they do not stay the same. They have a hunger for innovation. In terms of R&D (Research and Development), the top 5 US Big Tech spend in a single year more than the double of what the EU-27 committed collectively to the Horizon Europe, which runs for seven years», says Sandro Mendonça.

«Big Tech corporates leverage cloud infrastructure, digital platform businessmodels, and increasingly AI technologies to capture expansive market positions and to achieve superior performance. Another obvious fact is that these economic titans are not from Europe». We are talking about brands like Apple, Amazon, Facebook (Meta), Google (Alphabet), and Microsoft, the most prosperous and influential in the USA and the world. With other international giants approaching, such as Alibaba, Tencent, etc.

A set of questions is thus suggested: «In a market-driven economy, does it matter for Europe? If it matters, will conventional remedies like regulation and competition policy be enough to cope with the ramifications? Is it time to go post-neoliberal phase and engage in informational industrial activism of a disruptive kind? Or, on the contrary, will bottom-up decentralized entrepreneurial incrementalism sort out any temporary European competitiveness and governance failures?», asks and will attempt to answer Sandro Mendonça, the researcher and academic who has coordinated the study ‘The Futures of Big Tech in Europe’, published in 2024 for the European Commission (Directorate-General for Research and Innovation).

This session will be held in English.

Admission is free.
Don’t miss it!
For Macau, Further and Higher!

CV:
https://ciencia.iscte-iul.pt/authors/sandro-miguel-ferreira-mendonca/cv

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