Brian J. A. Boyd in The New Atlantis:
In America today, we are bad at conscious decisionmaking about technology. Our best efforts lately leave much to be desired: a decade of zero-sum argument about whose speech norms will prevail on social media, a long-delayed and fragmented debate about smartphones conducted through research about a teen mental health crisis, and scaremongering and special interests determining the fate of what was once the promise of “too cheap to meter” nuclear energy.
Our tech debates do not begin by deliberating about what kind of future we want and then reasoning about which paths lead to where we want to go. Instead they go backward: we let technology drive where it may, and then after the fact we develop an “ethics of” this or that, as if the technology is the main event and how we want to live is the sideshow. When we do wander to the sideshow, we hear principles like “bias,” “misinformation,” “mental health,” “privacy,” “innovation,” “justice,” “equity,” and “global competitiveness” used as if we all share an understanding of why we’re focused on them and what they even mean.
But which research studies will decide the scientific “consensus”? Who anoints the experts? Whose ethics will be encoded in regulations, laws, and algorithms?
More here.
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