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AnonTechie writes:

Tech pioneers in the US are advocating a new data-based approach to governance - 'algorithmic regulation'. But if technology provides the answers to society's problems, what happens to governments ?

What is Algorithmic Regulation? Well, here and here are two attempts to explain it. For example: the "smartification" of everyday life follows a familiar pattern: there's primary data - a list of what's in your smart fridge and your bin - and metadata - a log of how often you open either of these things or when they communicate with one another. Both produce interesting insights: cue smart mattresses - one recent model promises to track respiration and heart rates and how much you move during the night - and smart utensils that provide nutritional advice.

In addition to making our lives more efficient, this smart world also presents us with an exciting political choice. If so much of our everyday behaviour is already captured, analysed and nudged, why stick with unempirical approaches to regulation? Why rely on laws when one has sensors and feedback mechanisms? If policy interventions are to be - to use the buzzwords of the day - "evidence-based" and "results-oriented," technology is here to help.

This new type of governance has a name: algorithmic regulation. In as much as Silicon Valley has a political programme, this is it. Tim O'Reilly, an influential technology publisher, venture capitalist and ideas man (he is to blame for popularising the term "web 2.0") has been its most enthusiastic promoter. In a recent essay that lays out his reasoning, O'Reilly makes an intriguing case for the virtues of algorithmic regulation - a case that deserves close scrutiny both for what it promises policy-makers and the simplistic assumptions it makes about politics, democracy and power.

To see algorithmic regulation at work, look no further than the spam filter in your email. Instead of confining itself to a narrow definition of spam, the email filter has its users teach it. Even Google can't write rules to cover all the ingenious innovations of professional spammers. What it can do, though, is teach the system what makes a good rule and spot when it's time to find another rule for finding a good rule - and so on. An algorithm can do this, but it's the constant real-time feedback from its users that allows the system to counter threats never envisioned by its designers. And it's not just spam: your bank uses similar methods to spot credit-card fraud.

Algorithmic regulation, whatever its immediate benefits, will give us a political regime where technology corporations and government bureaucrats call all the shots. The Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, in a pointed critique of cybernetics published ,as it happens, roughly at the same time as The Automated State, put it best: "Society cannot give up the burden of having to decide about its own fate by sacrificing this freedom for the sake of the cybernetic regulator."