About The Sydney Dialogue
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Sydney Dialogue is the premier policy summit for critical, emerging and cyber technologies.
Technology is developing much faster than societies can regulate it or even fully absorb its implications.
The remarkable surge in the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence (AI), and the lack of any agreed roadmap on what the next breakthrough will be – much less how governments might respond – is just the latest and most profound demonstration of the growing gulf between the advances of innovators and the ability of policymakers and societies to understand and confidently adopt them.
The Sydney Dialogue (TSD) was created to help break down silos and bring together political leaders, senior officials, technology industry innovators and civil society leaders. It aims to promote diverse views that stimulate real conversations about the best ways to seize opportunities and minimise risks and bring more diverse voices into public debates.
While the positions of the United States, China and Europe tend to dominate the global conversation, the world hears too little about policy thinking taking place in India, Japan, Southeast Asia and Oceania. TSD is also a place where new partnerships are built between governments and with industry, and where existing partnerships are deepened.
TSD 2024 will explore the trends dominating international technology, national security and geopolitics. We will discuss technologies that are disrupting workforces, upending economic and strategic power, splintering supply chains and transforming militaries. We will tackle the increasingly sophisticated nature of cybercrime, online disinformation, hybrid warfare and electoral interference – risks to our societies that now benefit from the use of AI technologies. We will also address how technologies, when managed in partnership, could accelerate climate security and green energy transitions.
In a year in which more than 80 national elections will affect more that four billion people, TSD 2024 will also focus on the importance of political leadership, global cooperation and the stable development of technologies amid these power transitions and at a time of geopolitical uncertainty and ongoing conflict.
In addition to public sessions, TSD 2024 will also include a series of closed-door discussions, smaller roundtables and media engagements.
Now in its third year, TSD 2024 builds on the momentum of previous dialogues, which included contributions from India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japan’s former Prime Minister, the late Shinzo Abe, Samoa’s Prime Minister Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa, Estonia’s Prime Minister Kaja Kallas and Chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project and former Chief Executive Officer of Google Eric Schmidt.
Organisations and governments can find out more about partnership opportunities for TSD 2024 here.
Explore TSD 2021 and TSD 2023 here to find out more about the speakers, sessions, side events and supporters that were involved in previous dialogues.
What is ASPI?
The annual Sydney Dialogue is convened by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) – an independent, non-partisan think tank that produces expert and timely advice for Australian and global leaders.
ASPI generates new ideas for policy makers, allowing them to make better-informed decisions and is one of the most authoritative and widely quoted contributors to public discussion of strategic policy issues in the Indo-Pacific region.
ASPI was established by the Australian Government in 2001 and is partially funded by the Department of Defence with other sources of revenue including from overseas government agencies, corporates and civil society groups.
