Today, we continue to live in magic. Scientific and technological advancement have indeed lifted our everyday lives to wonderment, but these advances have also introduced magical practices to governance. Our book has been about the magic taking place in knowledge governance, the processes of steering and governing state information, and has been the key to national competitiveness. We referred to this magic as knowledge alchemy, which we defined as a generic process of transforming mundane practices and policies of knowledge governance into competitive ones following imagined global gold standards and universal symbolic formulas. Through this reclassification, an object, be it an individual, higher education institution, city or country, has been integrated into a value production chain, a series of actions (a syntax, script, narrative or storyline) that produced value. In this concluding chapter, we summarize the multiple processes that have ushered in alchemy into knowledge governance, the mechanisms through which these processes have been taking place, and how our book connects with major debates in the social sciences and policy circles about social transformation.

The rise of quantification and governance by indicators found a parallel process in automation through machine-based reasoning. Here, automation refers to a process that involves limited or no human agency in predetermined models and patterns of governance. Societies have been increasingly governed by algorithms, ranging from the digitalization of our daily lives to algorithmic reasoning in market activities and public governance. Quantification and automation depend on and, in effect, feed into one another. Based on logical rules in weighting of different attributes, rankings themselves are algorithms and thus the numerical objectifications of reality embodied in indicators have rendered complex social institutions comparable and suitable for rules-based reasoning. These developments have strong implications in how we design policies and practices to govern our interactions and tackle global challenges.

Our book argued that governance of innovation, higher education and human capital are being transformed by processes of commodification and quantification that now intersect with automation. For us, automation imposed strong future imaginaries and presupposition of policies based on, interestingly, the past.