Understanding “Human Agency” and the Need to Guarantee Responsible, People-centred and Climate-aware Systems for our Common Good in a Decentralised and AI Driven Digital Age
This lecture relies on the hypothesis that current challenges associated with increasing uncertainties of modern western societies must lead us to safer, cleaner and more resilient forms of digital governance and forms of institutional innovation that must necessarily be centred on people but, above all, be oriented through our collective knowledge. Recent unexpected threats to our common safety and public goods, including public health, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the increasing activity of individual digital terrorism or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have shown that our societies are not as safe as we thought. In association with other recent political decisions and movements, such as Brexit among many other nationalistic movements and trends, we are facing unprecedented threats that should foster a clear call for action.
Evolving forms of technology governance, including the regulation of digital platforms and digital standards, should be oriented to promote “digital humanism” and guarantee a transdisciplinary approach to collective behaviours and the consideration of “human agency”. They should ensure that citizens, at large, have better knowledge of digital services and digital providers, together with improved user responsibility in an emerging decentralised digital age and AI-enabled innovations. Although most of the current debate is dominated by new technological advancements of products and services in the financial industry (i.e., Fintech), as well as related issues associated with blockchain in the context of cryptocurrencies, the acceleration of decentralisation and AI affects a quite diversified set of actors and sectors of activity and all of our daily life, from industry and critical infrastructures to the arts (e.g., NFTs, non-fungible tokens).
We focus this lecture on the need to guarantee our collective responsibility towards carbon neutrality, avoiding a climate disaster, as well as promoting our global safety. This requires new research on emerging forms of knowledge production and diffusion, together with the need to understand “collective behaviours” through new transdisciplinary approaches, moving beyond a dialogue between the sciences and the arts. Above all, these issues should contribute definitely to technology governance of decentralised digital networks and an increasingly massified use of AI.
A few case studies are provided, including sustainable land management for carbon neutrality, the preservation of coastal areas and the protection of space assets in the era of “New Space”.
Empowering users and citizens, at large, will promote the need to educate and train every single citizen, while ultimately avoiding dominant economic or political interests, as well as digital terrorism and related individual malfunctions. The rules of governance must boost research and innovation, foster growth and competitiveness and help smaller companies and start-ups to compete with very large players, in particular those who have the ability to copy their features, acquire them or block their business. New governance models must facilitate access and use of data by consumers, while providing incentives for them to invest in ways to generate value through data in association with “human agency”. It includes the combination of anonymized data from different sources to produce new and valuable insights and services. In addition, rules should evolve in a way to fight against “mendacity” and, in contrast, to foster "fact-checking". Also, to promote safeguard situations of illegal transfer of data without notification, for example by the “cloud” service provider without traceability, while promoting the development of interoperability standards so that data is reused across sectors.
Read presenter's biographySample references
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