IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021 - 5

Editorial
Governing in Bad Faith: Suppressing
Democracy in Pretense of
" Saving Democracy "
Jeremy Pitt
Imperial College London, London SW7 2BT, U.K.
 Artificial Intelligence for Equity (AI4Eq)
[1] is proposed as an interdisciplinary field of study
and action that aims to promote the ethical development and use of autonomous and intelligent systems
for the advancement of mankind [2], especially for
the United Nations' sustainable development goals.
In this regard, AI is no different from any other
technology, in which there is no inherently " good "
or " bad " AI technology, but there are " good " and
" bad " intentions and so the design of AI technology
is never neutral-unintended consequences aside,
it can be skewed toward one or the other of these
directions. Therefore, there can be seen remarkably
beneficial applications of AI, for example, in health,
intelligent transportation, sustainable infrastructure
and resource management, industry and logistics,
and agriculture.
At the same time, there have been warnings over
the potential misuse of AI-not necessarily of the
" singularity " or " Terminator " type, but altogether
more quotidian, creeping, and insidious, (e.g., [3],
[4] among others) as well as ethically dubious applications (e.g., deepfake videos [5], digital dependence [6], and election manipulation [7]) and those
that entrench or exacerbate economic disparity
between or within nations (e.g., asymmetric distribution of added value in participatory-sensing

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2021.3056289
Date of current version: 16 March 2021.

March 2021

applications, private ownership of the means of
social coordination and technological innovation,
neocolonial wealth extraction by transnational corporations, and so on).
Given this, it seems pertinent to revisit Marshal
McLuhan's dictum " the medium is the message "
[8], by which he meant that the significance of any
technology can be determined by the magnitude of
change it induces in the scale, pace, or conduct of
human affairs or organizations. By any metric, the
impact of AI in the last decade has been " significant, " but perhaps as significant is the impact of AI
on the dictum itself. AI is somehow both reflective
and introspective: just as it shapes a new society, the
new societal forces reshape it; moreover, in particular, through machine learning, it is even capable of
reshaping itself. Consequently, the rate of change of
the medium is faster than the rate at which message
can be processed: by the time we have received and
understood the message, the medium has already
changed. This means that we have to understand
that the impact of AI is not as a quantifiable transition between discrete states in a point space, but as
a trajectory, which is continuous and, therefore, has
to be anticipated (rather than measured) if it is to be
controlled.
In this regard, the AI4Eq program is absolutely right
to stress interdisciplinarity, because understanding
the societal trajectory induced by AI, and anticipating
its directions and dimensions so that we might control and apply AI for achieving equity, is not a purely

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2021

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