In fairness to the author of the essay highlighted today the work is advertised as a ‘Think piece’ which gives them some latitude in terms of making a taught argument (they don’t!). Despite the long ramble there’s some serious thinking here and some very serious issues raised.
Let me try and condense Larry Catá Backer of the Pennsylvania University’s piece for you (as best I can) in bullet-point form:
- The 21st Century is a place in which the old notion of borders, and who controls laws within a specific geography, will need to be radically rethought
- We’re getting a taste of that with China’s experiment in ‘social credit’, a public initiative. The West though is playing with various private initiatives i.e. credit scoring
- Governments will not be able to legislate the geographic limits of their authority in the future and will have to think of ‘borders’ in a new and more holistic sense
- Old notions of ‘property’ and ‘privacy’ are already being re-imagined. Big-data, AI and machine learning will become essential tools for regulation and enforcement
- China’s social credit experiment is a response to old ‘sticks’ not working. Commercial swindles, tainted product issues and etcetera were not being prevented by the existing legal system. The new system is metric and algorithm driven not legalistically
- The West has developed various private control initiatives that have produced a “governance, risk-management and compliance” patchwork. ‘Ratings’, in all their various forms, are the most obvious manifestation of this process at work
- A new notion of ‘The State’ is likely to emerge. Observation is key to all analytics but should the algorithm runners be tasked with promoting good behavior or preventing bad actors? Most likely it’ll be some dynamic combination
- When does data become information? Who gets to see it? Who decides how it can be used. The West has an advantage because most questions have a market-based answer. In China the problems are more nuanced. Small actors (countries, individuals, businesses) may be left out altogether.
- No government is going to allow machines to interject ‘efficiencies’ into models. Real power in any systems then will be, ultimately, in the hands of the algo-wranglers
- Such systems, where algos are controlling behavior are then hybrid legal/geographic/moral ones and best thought of as ‘Operating Systems’ with people the components
- For centuries ‘laws’ have been understood as things that exist in a language and lawyers being people very skilled in the use of that language. In future this may be a redundant feature of law-making
- As data collection and analytics become ever more sophisticated governments will increasingly seek to combine this date into ‘an algorithm to bind them all’. In this process ” ..when the state is a container for accountability systems through data driven algorithms” who is in the best position to govern these systems? Mr. Backer, in conclusion, posits “In a world of algorithms, those who would devise them will be king. And those who would be kings in Western democratic republics may well soon be scientists and not lawyers” (My italics and bold)
Mama’s, don’t let your babies grow up to be lawyers? [Apologies to Waylon fans]. You can read the essay in full via the following link An Algorithm to Bind Them All?
Happy Sunday.