American legal scholar Brett Frischmann presented the 2019 Sir Graham Day Lecture in Ethics, Morality and the Law at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.
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Brett Frischmann says our increasing dependence on technology is putting our very humanity at risk. He warns humans are heading down an ill-advised path that is making us behave like "perfectly predictable and in some cases programmable" simple machines. How we engineer ourselves, or are engineered by others, is one of the most important questions of the 21st century, according to Frischmann.
As part of his talk, he asked the audience to set their smartphones to use gps tracking. Then he asked them to cancel gps tracking on the same phones. Setting gps tracking on many smartphones is a one step “settings” option that is confirmed by a green screen! Cancelling gps tracking often requires 3 steps with a red background screen warning the user about reduced functionality if they cancel the tracking. This subtle programming difference is a nudge to accepting the preferences of the owners of digital technology on our gps tracking option.
A recent article by Hillary Hartley, Ontario’s Chief Digital and Data Officer, and Alex Benay, the former Chief Information Officer of Canada and partner at KPMG responsible for digital and government solutions, comments that “Attitudes are shifting,”Hillary Hartley said. “It’s a moment where we really need to ask ourselves and ask the public how we should proceed.” It comes down to two core pillars.
One is ensuring policies and regulations adapt quickly to enable proper sharing of information.
The other is having the right digital infrastructure to support a new model of service delivery. At the heart of the two is balancing a digital first mindset with appropriate privacy protections.
Perhaps there’s no better example of a digital-first government than Estonia.
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Both Hartley and Benay point to two specific innovations that paint a picture of what a future Canadian digital infrastructure could strive for.
The first is Estonia’s X-Road or as Benay describes it, “their railroad of the Industrial Age, but for the digital age.” It’s a decentralized server that allows thousands of businesses, governments and people to connect and exchange information. The other is a secure digital identity issued to every Estonian, which might arguably provide better privacy protections than what’s available in Canada today…2
Wolfgang Drechsler, professor of governance at Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia warns countries should be careful not to emulate Estonia's approach too closely, says Drechsler, due to the country's unique nature, with its small size and trusting relationship between the citizens and government.
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"It's very interesting for European countries to look at Estonia, but it's very hard to transfer things from Estonia because Estonia is a very specific environment. You can learn a lot from Estonia on a very technical level, how to do certain things, but it's just not feasible to just take the same approach of [government] doing what the engineers tell them to do."Estonia's success in reinventing itself as an e-government powerhouse is testament to the work it did putting the building blocks in place in the late 1990s and early 2000s, says Arthur Mickoleit, senior principal analyst at Gartner who specializes in digital government."Countries like France and Italy were inspired by what the UK and the Nordics have been doing in bringing design thinking into the public sector."Mickoleit describes this design thinking as "inviting users to give their views on how a service is functioning", combined with experimentation and iterating on prototypes to improve that service.
"It's about embracing the data culture of innovation and experimentation, that's a big thing in public administrations at the moment and it's showing good results," he says, referring to Germany recently launching its government portal in beta.3
Should the world’s problems be solved by unelected elites? Surely these are decisions we all need to be part of. Anand Giridharadas argues if we don’t trust the institutions we have for fixing the world, then it's time to build better institutions — from the bottom up. He describes the problem in a CBC Ideas Podcast that was originally aired on January 27, 2020, How elite do-gooders 'fixing' the world are part of the problem: Anand Giridharadas This article sheds some light on the possible motives of the “lords” of high technology who are “on the case” to deal with the world's problems.
We may debate the wisdom of allowing engineers to decide on the design of the increasing number of “aps” that have a role in small and large digital systems in our everyday life. Did “smartphone engineers” design the code for the deactivation of gps location or were they following the instructions of others controlling the technology. Did Volkswagen engineers “design” the software to cheat emission measuring or were they being directed by financial bosses within the organization. Did Boeing engineers “design” software to compensate for the change in weight distribution on the “Max-8” or were they being directed by bosses concerned with losing business to Airbus? If the ethics of engineers is to design according to the parameters set by their employers, we need to create systems to allow “user” input to the design process as part of the “beta test”. Failure to test the effect of “digital aps” on users is to take another step toward the subtle and not so subtle control of our decisions as we face the danger of becoming “wards” of digital technology.
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