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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Monday, July 5, 2021

Politics will be very different in the AI age

Political parties may now be using algorithms and selectively targeting citizens with their messages – but, fundamentally, lack the courage to offer the public the sort of programme which would actually make a difference for voters.  Such a programme would consist of such things as

-       Breaking up monopolies

-       Ensuring that the rich (and multinationals) pay escalating rates of taxation

-       Returning privatized public utilities to the public – preferably to municipalities or “mutuals”

-       Reinstating the requirement of media balance

-       Restricting corporate funding of parties

-       Citizen juries

-       A neutral civil service

The UK Labour Party was exceptional in its 2019 and 2017 election manifestos offering this sort of programme – and see where it got them I hear a lot of you saying…..

There is apparently a project which compares the election manifestos of some 1000 political parties in 60 countries. Unfortunately it’s one of these highly academic websites with impenetrable prose. It did, however, put me on to what looks a useful collection of recent articles Why the Left Loses – the decline of the centre-left in comparative perspective Rob Manwaring and Paul Kennedy (2018) which I should add to the reading list on social democracy I recommended some 4 years ago

I’m currently in the middle of Future Politics – living together in a world transformed by Tech by James Susskind (2018) which must be one of the first popular books to explore the likely impact of the new world of algorithms and artificial intelligence. 

The premise of ‘Future Politics’ is that relentless advances in science and technology are set to transform the way we live together with consequences that are both profound and frightening. We are not yet ready for the world we are creating. Politics will not be the same as it was in the past.

For Susskind, three changes are of particular note: increasingly capable systems that are equal or superior to how humans function; increasingly integrated technologies that are embedded in the physical and built environment (the internet of things); and an increasingly quantified society, whereby details of our lives are captured as data and processed by digital systems. Those who control the technologies will exercise power over us, set the limits of our liberty, and determine the future of democracy. One of the problems is that the engineers devising and implementing these technologies rarely engage with consequences of these developments.

So, it is up to the rest of us to correct this deficiency and take responsibility for understanding and analysing the implications of this transformed world. We must, says Susskind, engage with political theory if we are to think critically and develop appropriate intellectual tools to tackle these digital developments. With this as the agenda, Susskind sets out to examine this future under the headings of power, liberty, democracy, justice and politics itself, devoting sections of the book to each of these subjects in turn.

 In Part Two, Susskind devises three categories for discussing future power: force, scrutiny and perception-control (p. 89). The big tech companies, and government agencies who work with them, will be in control of developments and thus possess the power, while the rest of us will be relatively powerless.  Susskind writes: 

“[T]he shift from law enforced by people to law enforced by technology means that power will increasingly lie in force rather than coercion, with self-enforcing laws that cannot be broken because they are encoded into the world around us.” (p. 105)

This is a really important insight. The following chapter on scrutiny is also perceptive and helpful as Susskind brings more distinctions into play: this time between scrutiny as intimate, imperishable, predictable and rateable (p. 127). The cumulative impact of this scrutiny will construct a world unlike anything we have experienced hitherto. Where we go; what we do; what we purchase; what we write, read and say; let alone who and what we know, and our work and ambitions will all be the subject of scrutiny (p. 129).

Further Reading

How to Run a City like Amazon and other Fables; ed M Graham…. J Shaw (2019)    

The People v Tech – how the internet is killing democracy (and how we save it); Jamie Bartlett (2018)   

https://williamtemplefoundation.org.uk/blog-review-future-politics/

http://bostonreview.net/politics/clara-hendrickson-jamie-susskind-future-politics-review

https://www.e-ir.info/2019/02/21/review-future-politics-living-together-in-a-world-transformed-by-tech/

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