The world around us is changing rapidly due to software, AI, robots and digital (data) platforms. For our society, philosophical and ethical questions then quickly arise. Who is allowed to have what data? How good should the robot be? Is it allowed to make as many mistakes as humans or should it be better? And if so, how much better? And how do we want to implement this in our work and our society?
Author: Patrick Spigt
In an interview in DWDD, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari passionately and logically explains to Adriaan van Dis the enormous challenge we face. Erasmus University and the Monnet Center of Excellence, under the leadership of Klaus Heine, have taken up this challenge so that with Digital Governance we can build checks and balances locally, nationally and Europe-wide.
The conference The Roundabouts of Digital Governance in Rotterdam explored these challenges and provided a starting point for a multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, governments and entrepreneurs. Philosophers, lawyers, economists, IT and data specialists focused together on some of the interesting issues surrounding software, AI, robots and digitization.
Christof Engel of the Max Planck Institute kicked off with the issue of AI. It is clear that AI will change our work enormously in the coming years. Machine learning and AI can help humans with a lot of tasks. However, we should not overestimate this, because for now AI cannot match humans in all areas. Where humans can see multiple interactions and causal relationships, AI sees mainly correlations for now. This is not the same.
Klaus Heine and Evert Stamhuis then made the connection between robots, responsibility in the digital world and ethical and moral issues. Who has what responsibility when two robots interact? Can we punish a robot? And what consequences does the cloud have for property law?
Wouter Verheyen (University of Antwerp/Leuven) presented his analyses on (private) contract law. He noted that data platforms (such as Airbnb and Uber) currently keep the positive elements in their business and transport all negative elements to the chain below. Therefore, it seems to make sense to intervene, as has been done before in the international transportation industry.
Pinar Akman (University of Leeds) then showed in great detail that the current ecosystems of (data) platforms are rapidly evolving into monopolies or oligopolies. This makes it necessary to review legislation in this area. It is also unclear what algorithms are used and what data is collected. Offering free services is not free if you pay with data. The consequences can be very big. Therefore, transparency is desperately needed.
Oran Perez, Ittai Bar-Siman-Tov (Bar Ilan University) and Freek Bomhoff (TNO) then showed the audience what digital capabilities already exist to help the government work faster and more effectively, using the technology already available and without violating the GDPR (AVG) in the process.
I myself got to participate in a panel discussion on the urgency of using a framework for Digital Governance. The discussion started with a definition, based on Lisa Welchman's book. Government, business and citizens must get the digital presence right with each other. Responsibility, roles and decision-making authority must be organized on the themes of strategy, policy and standards/processes.
If we look at the public and especially the younger generation, it appears that the majority do not care about privacy. However, this is changing as the dialogue gets going. A nice example is the issue of how young people view the physical equivalent of cookies and trackers. Digital convenience combined with wanting to participate and and a sense of powerlessness mean that young people have little concern about online cookies. However, they were very responsive to an experiment in which people continuously physically look over their shoulder and write down when the young person buys something in a store; the physical equivalent of an online cookie.
And that is where the role of government comes in as legislator, regulator and implementer.
If we are honest about the functioning of government, we must conclude that we are not adequately implementing our goals. We are not prioritizing enough, so we are struggling to achieve our goals. This is even though Michael Porter has long been telling us that strategy begins with identifying what we are not doing.
On top of that, we are not using digital capabilities enough to increase our effectiveness. Together, we can achieve much more in this regard if we bring our services more into a transparent Government as a Platform, similar to Estonia, Singapore and the United Kingdom. This helps to increase trust in government. This does require more digital power in the primary process. For example, the policy officer then becomes more of an information advisor, who can achieve the intended goals faster and more effectively with better information (data).
More multidisciplinary collaboration in networks within and between layers of government is crucial in this regard. To avoid ending up in a status quo (see also The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge), connectors between silos are now very important (Burt, R. 2004, Structural Holes and Good Ideas. American Journal of Sociology, 110, 349-399). A focus on digitally agile leadership is also required so that we can continuously provide improvements in the capillaries of the organization. This will take us to a higher maturity level.
Finally, the quality of our standards and (work) processes is complex due to the many tasks. Therefore, roles and decision-making authority must be simple, clear and straightforward, focused on the citizen. The foundation stone has now been laid, on to the next iterations to realize a bright digital future!
source: Platform Government
This article can also be found in the Digital Transformation and Big Data dossier
