Day: 21 February 2019
How will government and politics be transformed by technology?
This is the recording of an event at the Institute for Government this week, in which Jamie Susskind starts by briefly introducing the arguments of his book, Future Politics, and then discusses them with Gavin Freeguard – and as the book weighs in at over 500 pages, this might be a gentler way in. Susskind approaches the question of the title from the perspective of politics and law, coming back to the question, how much democracy is the right amount? That’s a harder – and more important – question than it first appears. Answers to it have been evolving for several thousand years, but digital technology gives it a new urgency, for reasons which range from the manipulative power of social media, the elimination of leeway, to bot-driven perpetual voting.
In the last century the fundamental question was, what should be done by the state and what should be left to the market and to civil society? … In our time, the key question will be this, to what extent should our lives be governed by powerful digital systems, and on what terms?
The city is my homescreen
Dan Hill – But what was the question?
This is quite a demanding essay. It demands some time to read, at about 6,000 words, and it demands more time to reflect, not least because it is subtly challenging. How do we design our interaction with our urban environment in a world of new technologies? How do we balance optimisation for individuals against optimisation of wider systems? How, more broadly, do we ensure that social objectives drive the adoption and deployment of technology rather than being driven by them? Or to step back from the detail (and in some ways from the specific subject), there’s a pretty strong consensus on what user centred design means for individuals; much less so on what it might mean for groups of people whose lives and activities intersect and affect one another.
There are clear examples of what new approaches to design might look like and of how they have been applied. But there isn’t much here about the social and political approaches which create the space for those design approaches to flourish. It’s unfair to criticise this essay for not doing something which it makes no claim to do, but the concept of ‘strategic design’ it introduces perhaps has a further level still.
Arguments against the autonomous vehicle utopia
Alexis Madrigal – The Atlantic
It should by now be beyond obvious that technology is never just about the technology, but somehow the hype is always with us. This article is a useful counter, listing and briefly explaining seven reasons why autonomous vehicles may not happen and may not be an altogether good thing if they do.
It’s worth reading not only – perhaps even not mainly – for its specific insights as for its method: thinking about the sociology and economics of technology may give more useful insights than thinking just about the technology itself.