Government and politics Social and economic change

Government and digital technologies: the collision of two galaxies

Mark Foden

This is thinking at epic scale.

Consider the Milky Way crashing into Andromeda in about four billion years from now, taking another billion years to establish some form of stability.

Now consider the unstoppable force of technological (and social change) colliding with the established cultures and practices of government.

Now reflect on how good a metaphor the first is for the second. There’s probably less than four billions years to wait until we find out.

Ethics

Ethics won’t make software engineering better

Rachel Coldicutt – Doteveryone

The subtitle of this post lays down a challenge:

Why a social scientist could be the most important person on your product team

Leaving aside the point that it might be an even better challenge if ‘philosopher’ were substituted for ‘social scientist’, this is an important issue. There is much talk (and much writing) about the need for ethics in data and software – though curiously rather less so in service design, where it is no less important.

But ethics is not some esoteric form of quality assurance added as a final overlay to activities otherwise devoid of any moral compass. It is perhaps better understood (in this context) as the encapsulation of a deep and pervasive view that technology should work for humanity, not the other way round.

What would computer science look like if it included the perspective of humanities and social sciences from the outset? And what if that perspective came not from some thinker in residence, but from people who brought a fusion of perspectives and understanding to problem solving?

And whatever the answers to those questions might be, there is a wider one still: where does that fusion not have a place? The Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and Other Professional Thinking Persons may be due for a resurgence.