| Title | To Fix Tech, Democracy Needs to Grow Up | |
| Date | Tuesday August 16 2022, @04:03PM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the dept. | ||
To Fix Tech, Democracy Needs to Grow Up:
There is growing recognition that rapid technology development is producing society-scale risks: state and private surveillance, widespread labor automation, ascending monopoly and oligopoly power, stagnant productivity growth, algorithmic discrimination, and the catastrophic risks posed by advances in fields like AI and biotechnology. Less often discussed, but in my view no less important, is the loss of potential advances that lack short-term or market-legible benefits. These include vaccine development for emerging diseases and open source platforms for basic digital affordances like identity and communication.
At the same time, as democracies falter in the face of complex global challenges, citizens (and increasingly, elected leaders) around the world are losing trust in democratic processes and are being swayed by autocratic alternatives. Nation-state democracies are, to varying degrees, beset by gridlock and hyper-partisanship, little accountability to the popular will, inefficiency, flagging state capacity, inability to keep up with emerging technologies, and corporate capture. While smaller-scale democratic experiments are growing, locally and globally, they remain far too fractured to handle consequential governance decisions at scale.
This puts us in a bind. Clearly, we could be doing a better job directing the development of technology towards collective human flourishing—in fact, this may be one of the greatest challenges of our time. If actually existing democracy is so riddled with flaws, it doesn't seem up to the task. This is what rings hollow in many calls to "democratize technology": Given the litany of complaints, why subject one seemingly broken system to governance by another?
At the same time, as we deal with everything from surveillance to space travel, we desperately need ways to collectively negotiate complex value trade-offs with global consequences, and ways to share in their benefits. This definitely seems like a job for democracy, albeit a much better iteration. So how can we radically update democracy so that we can successfully navigate toward long-term, shared positive outcomes?
The existing data economy (mirroring the digital economy as a whole) is a primary engine of shared growth and progress—and a leaky, power-concentrating, fractured mess. Data brokers sell and resell personal data with little oversight. Huge networks like Facebook and Google capture the information of billions of people and use it in the service of a few shareholders' narrow interests. It is only during brief moments of generosity during a crisis, like when Google provided mobility data to cities during the Covid pandemic, that the public can even see how vast these data stores are, and how helpful they might be in building shared safety and prosperity.
[...] From my vantage point within the tech governance ecosystem of the US, the situation often feels as polarized as our broader political system. Techno-solutionists eschew democracy while techno-pessimists eschew technology, resulting in a tech ecosystem increasingly divorced from the collective interest and a politics of technology increasingly against even the possibility of shared progress. But in reality, we are as far from the best democratic systems we could have as we are from the frontiers of technology-enabled flourishing. And we can't have one without the other—at least, not without embracing either a technocratic dystopia or a stagnant one.
This means we need to not only "fix democracy" and "fix technology," but find ways to leverage each toward the pursuit of the other. Getting there will require policymakers to initiate and finance positive alternatives, not just enact regulation to curb the harms of the current system. It will require political systems willing and able to raise and deploy funding into collective intelligence experimentation, via subsidies, sandboxes for fast innovation, and investment into basic research funding and digital public infrastructure. It will require technologists and researchers to develop metrics beyond artificial benchmarks or maximizing engagement; in turn, it will require funders and journals to reward research breakthroughs that augment collective intelligence and collaboration. It will require civil society organizations to expand beyond (necessary) criticism of existing technology ecosystems into convening communities to imagine and contribute to actionable, better futures. And it will require collective intelligence experiments of all kinds—from the local to the global, from the digital to the physical, from theory to practice. This isn't just a job for institutions; it's a job for all of us who are invested in both participation and progress.
For all its flaws, the early internet, the foundation of many Collective Inteilligence instances today, was built with public funding, research, civil society input, and private innovation. It has gone on to restructure our age. The almost insurmountable challenges of this century will require coordination on an even more massive scale. But the rewards are likely to be even greater. We should invest accordingly.
| Links |
printed from SoylentNews, To Fix Tech, Democracy Needs to Grow Up on 2024-05-14 09:01:08