We can learn from political and societal strategies dealing with ecology how to shape our digital lives. We need clear regulation, incentives for innovation, and empowered citizens.
We may be getting tired of hearing it - but it is true that digitalization will change every aspect of our lives. Medication that sends out information from inside our bodies, fully connected townhouses that autonomously regulate energy consumption, and robots that no longer assist us in our work, but make us their assistants: what seems like a dystopian horror scenario to some sounds like a bright new future to others.
But we should all feel compelled to discuss what this digital world should be like. If the changes of the coming decades will indeed be as sweeping as anticipated, society should agree on the goals and values associated with this technological change and lay down the rules of the game - now.
Applying environmental legislation to the digital world
In the past few decades, environmental legislation has developed a triad of instruments: clear regulation, innovation targets and incentives, and activation and mobilization of citizens, especially in their roles as consumers. This triad must now be applied to the digital world in order to set the regulatory framework of the future. We need clear regulation of what is permitted and what is prohibited. For instance, we ought to legislate that automated decision-making systems, often colloquially simplified as “algorithms”, may not make judicial decisions, for example over whom to place in provisional detention. Such technologies are already in use, for example in the United States.
As a society, we should determine in which cases we want to allow transparent automated decisions, and in which cases we do not want to allow them at all. We know such regulations from environmental legislation: Certain substances are completely forbidden, others permitted for limited use only, some must be labelled or are subject to other conditions.
Secondly, we need incentives for innovation. These could trigger a long overdue competition needed to achieve major social objectives with the help of new applications and products. In Japan, the top-runner approach makes the current best-in-class energy consumption the future standard. For digital applications and offerings, we might use encryption standards or security procedures as quality benchmarks for future standards. Today, we are discussing emission-free mobility. In the future, we will be discussing decentralized and privacy-friendly artificial intelligence systems.
A digital world worth living in
The key to successful regulation is activation, based on educating and mobilizing individuals. The best data protection laws are of no use if they don’t matter to people in their everyday lives and if users mindlessly click on consent buttons as if they were playing pinball. It is crucial to encourage each individual to lead an autonomous, safe, and open digital life. Again, environmental policy, which has had a similar effect in the past decades, can serve as our blueprint. The international dimension of digitalization and data is quite similar to oil and coal in terms of the involved actors’ financial power and the complex web of interwoven interests at the government level, nationally and even more internationally.
In order to implement these instruments, however, we need to have a common notion of which goals and values should be preserved, strengthened, or newly created in the age of digitalization. In environmental policy, sustainability was the overarching concept that drove people to take action and consume differently in order to create a world worth living in, for all people, and especially for future generations. Right now, the digital discourse does not heed future generations at all. Digitalization is closely linked with the idea of innovation; it’s about improving our individual lives here and now. We don’t yet have a notion of progress associated with digital change.
But that’s exactly the issue here: It’s not about technology as such, but about social progress, better education, more political participation, or higher incomes for all people. Right now, we aren’t even considering the impact that a full datafication of our everyday lives will have on future generations. Yet we know that young people, in particular, need spaces where they can develop away from prying eyes, where they can experiment without risking direct, major repercussions on their future lives. Yet that’s precisely what we’re taking away from them if every emotion, every action ends up being captured as a data set, be it health data, location data, or every digital social communication. Instead of just thinking about the impact digitalization has on us, we should also be mindful of future generations.
There’s an old saying that also applies to our digital future: Where there’s a will, there’s a way. We must overcome the sense of helplessness we often feel in the face of digitalization, shake off that speechless awe that strikes us as we witness rapid developments, and instead decide for ourselves how we envision our digital future. We get to determine how our society will evolve. To do this, we must define common objectives and implement them in a comprehensive regulatory framework, like the three-pronged approach described earlier- at least in Europe, and better still, internationally.
Note: A German version of this article was first published on January 25, 2018 in Böll.Thema 1/2018: digital ist okay!
