The dangers of digital democracy
Personalising products and services using data streams challenges liberal democracy
Rana Foroohar
Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada, had a great line in his Davos speech last week: “The pace of change has never been this fast, and yet it will never be this slow again.”
For me, that was the key message of the World Economic Forum. The headlines may have talked about President Donald Trump’s “America first” speech, but the back story was the fragility of nation states in a time of technological change.
The topic of “the digital economy and society” was the most popular this year at the WEF in terms of the number of sessions and social media buzz — and no wonder. The dirty secret of Davos is that the much-lauded “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — shorthand for the rise of ubiquitous automation, big data and artificial intelligence — is making most people less, not more, secure, at least in the short term.
The ability of a range of companies — in insurance, healthcare, retail and consumer goods — to personalise almost every kind of product and service based on data streams is not just a business model shift. It is a fundamental challenge to liberal democracy.
Consider the changes being wrought in the insurance business. For 200 years, it has been based on the notion of risk pooling: average the cost of insuring individual homes, cars and lives, and then divide the cost among the collective. In the age of data, insurance groups will be able to take information from tracking boxes in our cars or sensors embedded in our homes and use it to craft hyper-personalised policies.
For example, you might be rewarded for putting a new plumbing system into your own old house (the sensors will measure how well it works), or stopping more quickly at red lights. But you might also be blamed when your 16-year-old puffs weed in his bedroom (smoke detectors will relay the message to your insurer in real time) or if you fail to shovel the snow off the front stoop before it ices up (now insurers could know exactly when and if you did, and limit their own risk of liability if a passer-by slips).
Of course, you’ll be able to opt in and out of all this, though probably not very transparently or cheaply (consider that on commercial platforms such as Facebook or Google, you basically have to forfeit your rights to use the product or service easily). But the more disturbing implication is that there may now be an uninsurable underclass who can no longer be floated by averaging. Who will insure them? Most likely subprime lenders or the state.
Which brings up another dirty secret of the digital age. Just as the US government has for years subsidised low-cost retailers that do not pay their workers a living wage, so the government will probably be asked to underwrite the safety net for a new digital underclass.
The problem is that the public sector does not have the capacity to do this. It is coping with trillions of dollars of debt that has been created since the financial crisis, not to mention more partisan politics that make it tough to create consensus on much of anything. As digital bifurcation grows, it is very likely that disenchantment with the state will increase as well, fuelling the vicious cycle of political disenchantment and dysfunctional economics.
The other risk is that rather than demanding more, not only of governments, but of the companies that are monetising our data, citizens will remain passive.
It’s a topic that financier George Soros addressed in his speech at Davos, where he noted that technology groups were “inducing people to give up their autonomy . . . it takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called ‘the freedom of mind’. There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it.”
Mr Soros noted the risk of “alliances between authoritarian states and these large, data-rich IT monopolies that would bring together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance”.
It sounds Orwellian, but it is the state of play in China, where the country’s big technology groups and the government are closely aligned. Indeed, some of the digital scientists I spoke to in Davos professed envy for the ease of data gathering even as they expressed their concerns about the political implications.
This is why the most optimistic moment I had in Davos was with Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon, who, having become quite worried about the points I have just made, launched a project to educate elementary school children about the power of data, its risks and rewards, and how to use it to advocate for themselves.
Under the scheme, children might track, say, the number of cars idlingoutside their school, calculate the potential pollution generated, then call a family meeting to discuss how to “challenge the incumbent power structures”, as Mr Nourbakhsh says (translation: push their principal for new parking rules).
The idea is to create a new generation of citizen scientists who understandthe power of data. I predict that if they truly do, they will start to demand a lot more ownership and control over it themselves.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario