Principles for a Digital Republic

With tech increasingly becoming ubiquitous and intrusive day by day, at what point do we cease becoming engaged citizens and transform into mere consumers of information? The rights, liberties, and privileges that we derive from citizenship are a fruit of centuries of engagement around the ideas of justice, ethics, freedom, equality etc. Today, when our lives are increasingly controlled and moderated by algorithms, what should be our guiding principles for ensuring that we remain citizens and not mere consumers? I had earlier written about the concept of Freedom to Think in a digital era.

Jamie Susskind, in ‘The Digital Republic’ mentions four guiding principles to anchor a society’s engagement with Tech. These are

1. The Preservation Principle: No technology should become an existential risk to democratic societies. (In day to day life, this is the least mentioned issue since no State would in principle allow any technology to pose an existential threat to their functioning)
2. The Domination Principle: Societies and Governments should work to reduce the unaccountable power of digital technology and keep it to a minimum. The clamour to bring in Anti-Trust laws to break down Amazon, Facebook and Google would fall under this principle.
3. The Democracy Principle: The advent of each new digital technology must be met with a corresponding upgradation of government regulation and laws. The evolution of laws to tackle online harassment, digital financial frauds, revenge porn etc are all examples.
4. The Parsimony Principle: The State should be given no more power than is absolutely necessary to perform its regulatory functions. For a libertarian society, this is critical. Excessive regulation can stifle innovation, distort market mechanisms and result in sub-optimal outcomes. India’s regulatory excesses over the years are proof for this. So the parsimony principle needs to be kept in mind each time regulation of tech is discussed.

Earlier this week, the non-profit Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling for a temporary pause on the development of all advanced AI for a period of six months. It’ll be interesting to see how governments and societies respond to this new explosive tech.