IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 16

they are still important drivers of soci-
ety. We can build and scale networks
to meet an almost endless demand,
and build applications and services
that address our business, entertain-
ment, and social requirements. But
the capacity of humans to deal with
this expansive set of resources is lim-
ited. So decisions are made to opti-
mize the balance between the scarcity
of human attention and sub-optimal
technology solutions.

The tragedy is still with us, alive
and kicking.
Just like "Zombie Economics"
[6], there is an unshakable faith in
our industry that we can do any-
thing and that everything we do
must be good and beneficial to soci-
ety, and more importantly, for the
advocates of the mainstream ideas.
Our industry has had similar crises
before, such as dot-com busts, that
exposed our assumptions, but the
ideas are still here and speculation
continues unabated.
As an industry and society, can we
continue to develop solutions that
unduly amplify human behavior - so
that we provide and support a way
for harm to be normalized? As an
industry and society, can we con-
tinue to promote solutions based on
long-held and dominate theories - so
that the wider community is misled
by influential advocates? The answer
is a clear "no" to both. Some exam-
ples highlight these concerns:

Social Media is Fraught with
Amplified Social Discourse
While there are clear benefits of
connected communities formed
socially and professionally, there is
also a dark side that flourishes and

16

grows deeper and stronger. Social
media systems simply cannot han-
dle human behavior of this kind.
They are not designed to deal with
such ramifications, and the services
ignore pleas to provide better con-
trols for negative experiences.

of anti-social/professional behavior;
promote our services/systems to the
wider community rooted in clearer
reality and not false hope; and
break down the sharing economy
by insisting that a truly distributed
design be supported for both deci-
sion making and sharing of benefits
for all participants.
The ICT community drives some
many aspects of our lives today and
we must recognize that our digital
society does not warrant technical
solutions alone, and that human
behavior (for those that design solu-
tions and those that exploit them)
must not be left unchecked. As a
community and a profession, we
must now face these challenges
directly, move forward from past
ideas, and foster and engender gen-
uine trust with society so that there
will be no tragedy of the digital com-
mons in our coming future.

Artificial Intelligence is an
Example of Our Zombie
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had a
modest 60+ year run at becom-
ing one of the industr y's
highest achievements. But
AI has never achieved its
own objectives and those
objectives are unlikely to be
fulfilled without a better
understanding of how our
brain actually works [ 8 ] .
Only solutions that sim-
ply require computational and sta-
tistical prowess have shown prom-
ising outcomes. However, this has
not stopped the industry from laud-
ing AI through media-driven events,
such as AI challenging and defeating
the best chess and Go players. These
systems are discrete brute-force
algorithms tailored specifically at
these esoteric areas.

Author Information
Renato Iannella is Principal Archi-
tect, Semantic Identity (ri@semantic
identity.com), Visiting Professor, The
University of Hong Kong (renato@
hku.hk), and Adjunct Professor,
Queensland University of Technology
(r.iannella@qut.edu.au).

The Sharing Economy is an
Example of Our Tragedy
of the Commons

References
[1] G. Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Com-
mons," Science, vol. 162, no. 3859, pp.
1243-1248, 1968.
[2] V.G. Cerf, "Revisiting the Tragedy of the
Commons," Commun. ACM, vol. 56, no. 10,
Oct. 2013.
[3] R.W. Lucky, "Tragedy of the Commons,"
IEEE Spectrum, Jan. 2006.
[4] K. Toyama, "Technology is not the
answer," Atlantic, Mar. 28, 2011.
[5] K. Toyama, "Global computing The
Internet and inequality," Commun. ACM,
vol. 59, no. 4, Apr. 2016.
[6] J. Quiggin, Zombie Economics: How
Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us. Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012.
[7] H.J. Levesque. "On our best behaviour,"
presented at Twenty-third Int. Conf. Artificial
Intelligence (Beijing, China), Aug. 3-9, 2013.
[8] S. Paul-Choudhury, "Outsmarted?," New
Scientist, p. 18, June 25, 2016.

The sharing economy has hit us with
brute force, disrupting industry after
industry and threatening to be as
pervasive as the Internet itself.
There are positives to this approach
in that the wider community can
now participate more in economic
activities. But there is misplaced
truth that these "sharing" systems
are actually hidden monopolies and
are making decisions over our
scarce resources that ultimately will
only benefit a few in the long term.
What can we do as the ICT com-
munity? In the examples covered
here, we can: design systems to
detect and dampen amplification
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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SEPTEMBER 2017
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