Establishing A ‘Tech-Wise Council’

How can we steer technology for good in the modern age? For centuries, there have been tensions between technology and society, but there is a broad new challenge in today’s digital age: technology evolves faster than society’s traditional mechanisms to respond and adapt. The normal Government regulators’ processes aren’t agile enough. By the time they regulate a challenge posed by a new technology, it has often already made a large scale impact. Further, governments struggle to understand the increasingly complex technology, and do not have appropriate jurisdiction, given that most technologies are instantly global in nature.

Meanwhile, technology companies are not well placed to self-regulate. They are neither incentivized nor impartial. They also have an understanding deficit: though technically smart they’ve been challenged in thinking through the sociological consequences of their technology. The technologies these companies are developing — from the Internet to smart phones to machine learning — are transforming our lives in a variety of positive ways. But they also bring dangers, such as mismanaging users’ personal data, the spreading of misinformation or radicalized content, powered by machine learning, that can warp elections. We lack an adequate system to avert these.

How do we design an institutional mechanism that identifies and mitigates risks to society’s well-being without impeding technological innovation? In an ideal world, we’d have a fast acting, technically competent, global governance institution. However, we simply do not have these institutions today. Indeed, the very concept seems to involve antithetical components.

Society needs a new mechanism to bridge this gap.

We recommend forming a “Tech-Wise Council” — a group of highly eminent, independent and global thought leaders who would gather to create smart policy recommendations for technology companies to adopt. Members would include experts in technology, but also experts in society (e.g. history, politics, sociology, psychology, law etc.) and ethics. The members would be high-level so as to carry weight by their recommendations, and held in high regard for their ethical standards. They would take input from but importantly be independent of any major tech company.

Members would convene regularly to write policy memos on current and emerging technology​, and make suggestions on how to respond to issues surrounding technological innovation — both promoting principles​ to guide more detailed action, and minimalist, specific self-regulatory policies ​to guide immediate decision making. Their intended audience would primarily be technology companies, but also government regulators, news media and the wider public.

There are myriad technology policy advisory enterprises in both academia and NGOs as well as expert working groups with industry participation. The purpose of the Tech Wise Council would not be to replicate such work, but to collate and elevate it through endorsement and be independent.

The concept is not entirely new. During the Cold War, a group of scientists recognized the dangers of nuclear war and formed the Pugwash Council on Science & World Affairs. It began in 1955 with a manifesto by Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, and was signed by 11 eminent scientists (all of whom either had or would later receive a Nobel prize). The manifesto spelled out the dangers of nuclear war and called for scientists to convene to help prevent it, imploring that they be guided by their humanity. Throughout the Cold War, this forum of primarily nuclear physicists from both sides of the Iron Curtain met even when their governments were at an impasse. Though the group is not well-known, we can thank their activities for much of the limitations on arms today, including the Partial Test Ban Treaty, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, and the Chemical Weapons Convention. In 1995, the organization was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts.

The policy recommendations of a Technology Wise Council would be purely advisory, as Pugwash’s were, but they could have weight within the tech companies for four reasons: (1) the respect for esteemed Council members by tech company leaders and their employee base; (2) the close participation and input in developing policy ideas (but not decision making on texts); (3) the potential of actual regulation by government along the lines suggested if they don’t self-regulate; and (4) because compliance would be a public symbol of their positive intent to their customers.

Today, technology development is outpacing society’s traditional mechanisms to adapt to any challenges they bring — and this is no minor issue. Personally-targeted, psychological-based advertising of Cambridge Analytica have been implicated in the Brexit & Trump democratic elections. Soon, deep fakes may be far more disruptive, and many other issues are rapidly coming down the pipe. Society needs a new institutional mechanism. In the 1950s, scientists solved an analogous challenge with an informal council called Pugwash. We need the Pugwash of the digital age: a TechWise Council, focused on companies rather than governments, to rapidly respond to the societal challenges that digital technology can bring.