IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 70
cycle, while rejecting technology not featuring such
essential characteristics.
Fundamentally, this approach must rely on a deep
understanding of the nature and role of the cyber-world(s)
that we have been creating, in extending (and replacing
some of) the traditional world - e.g., how do people perceive who they and others are; how can they interact; what
artefacts do they produce, exchange, and employ; how can
they organize or seek protection; what values become
important and obsolete.
A better balance between
transparency and privacy may
be achieved by relying on opensource systems.
Based on such insights, society should gradually
move towards implementing and experimenting with
various changes, within core technologies, and towards
reacting to observed effects progressively, guided by
collective mutable goals (piecemeal engineering [3],
[8]) - rather than blindly adopting all technology based
on immediate benefits (giving-up control), and rather
than attempting to determine the "right" policies for
guaranteeing desirable outcomes (ideological revolution). Since the identified pathologies do not stem from
technical problems, but rather from regulatory choices
and associated power struggles, there should be better
support for democratic institutions to adapt regulations
and balance power distribution processes, when pathologies become obvious.
For instance, special-purpose technology can be
developed to strengthen transparency, promote responsible engagement and critical thinking, and provide perceptible feedback 6 for contributions to collective
action. Most importantly, such technology should be
designed to support the (participative) adaptations necessary to (collectively) react to unexpected side effects
and to follow societal, technological, and environmental evolutions.
This, in turn, could facilitate small-scale experiments
such as micro-payment schemes for individual data usage
[8], user privacy policies, or peer-production systems based
6
This does not imply the predictable achievement of objectives, but merely
some retroactive traceability of effects to actions, over "appropriate" time
spans, these being essential to knowledge management and responsible
engagement.
70
on qualitative values rather than monetary exchanges [28].
Enabling collective involvement in such matters can
improve responsible engagement, and better (re)distribute
power towards "ordinary" citizens. This can be achieved
progressively by giving citizens more control over local
issues, and seeking bottom-up solutions instead of imposing top-down policies [16].
A better balance between transparency and privacy
may be achieved by relying on open-source systems,
which can be permanently scrutinized and evaluated by
users (e.g., ensuring the same level of transparency for
e-voting as for paper-based voting [26]). A complementary
approach is to rely on decentralized systems that may
be less prone to being taken over, corrupted or disrupted (if not completely resistant, as revealed in case of
Wikipedia and various digital currencies, due to accumulation of resources and authority [8]). When reliance
can be placed on such technology, it can actually
increase the transparency of democratic processes,
especially when institutions become increasingly complex, large-scale, and distributed - e.g., broadcasting
debates among representatives in real time, or providing relevant information on the current state and evolution of societal processes.
Another critical factor for such technology is its ability to provide access to relevant verifiable information in
a comprehensive format, and the necessary levers for
enabling user participation in knowledge creation and
dissemination. Automated processes for analyzing raw
data and providing meaningful indicators for targeted
domains are useful, but the ability to provide knowledge at progressive detailed levels, requiring increasing
expertise, is essential (e.g., designing participatory sensing applications as a knowledge commons [29]). Technology can also allow revealing of the knowledge base
used and the computations performed.
On the issue of perceptible impact of actions, it is
essential that the human-machine interfaces provide
seamless access and intuitive cues to technical capabilities, their meaning, and significance, rather than promoting unfiltered low-level information flooding and/or
requiring technical expertise (e.g., employing principles
of interactive governance [30], and incentives, such as
social capital, to encourage participation).
Finally, although space constraints preclude a
detailed discussion, we note that support for scalability,
selective knowledge granularity, and better adaptability
of democratic institutions, via seamless member participation, is also essential. This allows to better keep in
check power distribution processes, on concerns that
matter to (and are selected by) members, even as the
community size and geographical distribution increases. We contend that extending value-sensitive design
[31] - so that socio-technical systems for knowledge
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE
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SEPTEMBER 2017
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