IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 64

As the "digital society" develops, the underlying technologies may disrupt the mechanisms that ensure a relative balance of power and opportunity among society
members. They may introduce new pathologies for
which no such mechanisms to maintain a balance of
power exist. Disruptive factors include increasing operational speed and expected response times [6], decision
and choice limitations [7], [8], system opacity, and overall complexity [9]. These factors may, in turn, seriously
undermine comprehensible transparency, discourage
reasoning and action, and impede traceability (i.e., retroactive cause and effect correlations). General unawareness of this emerging technological power [9], [10] may
take its control well outside the scope of current democratic institutions.
We argue that technology itself can be, and should
be where appropriate, used to reinforce and/or develop
social protection mechanisms, to enhance comprehensible transparency, enable social contribution, facilitate
impact evaluation, and encourage critical thinking. Hence,
there is a pressing need for a design methodology to
provide transparency-by-design, responsible-engagement-by-design and, where applicable, perceptible-impactby-design.

General unawareness of emerging
technological power may take
technology's control well outside the
scope of current democratic institutions.
While such recommendations necessitate further
research, discussing them here aims to raise awareness
among both engineers and "ordinary" users about the
social impacts of key design decisions and product
employment - for instance, the accumulation of illegitimate power by technical system owners, and the reduction in user abilities to understand, question, and control
the socio-technical systems in which they live. We propose no silver-bullet solution, but rather a general (re)
direction of technological design and adoption, away
from the pathological cycle of increasing opacity, digital
thinking and disempowerment, and towards a more sustainable cycle of transparency, diversity, and responsible engagement.
In short, we argue that the continuous process of
power (re)distribution in democratic societies may be
significantly disturbed by current technologies - not
only via changes in the social medium of knowledge

64

management and action, but also via impacts on the
users' knowledge, reasoning, and engagement. If
unchecked, this can lead to a vicious circle of user disempowerment and disengagement. Progressive reengineering of such technologies is required and should
be matched by demand and adoption from responsible users.
We first highlight some key societal processes driving
the ever-shifting balance among individual and collective
interests, and the regulations required to manage them.
Then we discuss classic pathologies leading to power
imbalances, which are incompatible with democratic
societies, and known defense mechanisms. We continue
by considering how current technologies can disrupt
such mechanisms, or introduce new pathologies. We
propose a (re)direction towards responsible technology
design and adoption, to avoid such outcomes.

Essential Elements of Society
Any society involves the dynamic creation and evolution of informal relationships, and increasingly, of
formal contracts, as well as a particular trade-off
between individual freedoms and collective interests.
These concerns apply at different scales, e.g., relations and contracts between individuals and between
communities; autonomy trade-offs between each individual and the community; and between a community
and an external authority, e.g., [11]. Different ways of
managing such relations and trade-offs, at various
scales, lead to different kinds of societies, with various benefits and costs.

Individual Autonomy versus Collective Interest
The progress of human thought within a socio-economic context has led to community-related needs and
expectations, as well as to shared culture and values,
like fairness and morality, and to commonly-agreed
rules of conduct, like conventions, norms and laws. At
the same time, society is always pluralistic [12], [13],
and preserving member individuality and diversity is
crucial, in terms of independent thinking, existential
identity, and personal responsibility.
Maintaining the right balance between beliefs and
behaviors that benefit individuals (unilaterally or via
exchanges) or the community overall is a key aspect of
a healthy open collective. This is emphasized, for
instance, by Koestler's insights into the importance of
balancing one's self- and community-oriented tendencies [14]; by Arendt's explanation of massive anti-social
acts stemming from the individuals' surrendering of
thinking and responsibility (i.e., "banality of evil") [15];
and by Popper's blaming such acts on individuals' blind
following of philosophical ideologies or prophecies (i.e.,
"historicism") [3].

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

∕

SEPTEMBER 2017



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