by Simone Steel CITP FBCS
Abstract
"We are akin to the inhabitants of a small isolated island who have just invented the first boat, and we are about to set sail without a map or even a destination", wrote Yuval Noah Harari in 2016 in his book Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow. He made this statement in the context of our techno-humanist society and our ability to understand and manipulate experiences in the brain. But I believe it to be true in many fields of human endeavour explored in his book.
Only a few years after publication, many of his conjectures have become reality. We have set sail into the digital society. Not only do we still lack a map and a destination, but we also lack the seafarer's principles. It is not too late to create the code of conduct for human behaviour in the digital world, whatever its destination. This paper is about setting a charter for this new reality of human actions and interactions.
We must acknowledge that our citizenship in the physical world, bounded by arbitrary country borders and political structures, has long been eroded and maybe even superseded in many ways. The use of technology is weakening social fabrics, with the attention economy and the surveillance economy creating winners and losers that are drifting further apart than ever before.
There is a new and stronger citizenship concept emerging, which I would define as the Data Citizen.
data citizen
noun [ C ]
UK /ˈdeɪ.tə ˈsɪt.ɪ.zən/ US /ˈdeɪ.t̬ə ˈsɪt̬.ə.zən/
a person whose data is stored in an ecosystem of computers that can produce, derive, or infer information about them, and who has rights and obligations related to the use of data.
Digital Constitution
Our actions and interactions in the physical world are now subsumed by what we do online. How we communicate with friends, family, and in the workplace, how we conduct financial transactions, how we carry our boarding passes and COVID vaccine certificates, how we shop, how we watch films at home, how we research information, how we take pictures - need I go on?
In 2019, Harvard Business Review published an article entitled "The Era of 'Move fast and break things' is over" [a]. It proposed that if innovation is to survive into the 21st century, we need to change how companies are built by changing the questions we ask of them. We are those stakeholders that need to ask questions about the virtue of products for individuals and societies, the responsible use of data and Artificial Intelligence, and the accountability for how businesses scale, including sustainability and diversity concerns. I would go further than that: We are not just stakeholders, we are agents that also have accountability for how our society evolves.
We still watch the unfolding of pernicious social and economic developments without any sense of responsibility or accountability. My provocation is that we have developed an unhealthy dependency on free and immediate services. We have become comfortable with the idea that it is someone else's job to verify the benefits and safety of those services. This is not a cry for more regulation to be crafted on a country-by-country basis. It is a call for citizens to become responsible data citizens and demand that our digital interactions respect basic principles.
I propose these three laws of data citizenship to guide us in our increasingly digital and virtual lives:
A data citizen must be a fair representation of a physical person participating in a digital society.
A digital society must protect data citizens from harm that may occur through action or inaction.
A digital society must not compete for resources with the physical society.
In the true spirit of standing on the shoulders of giants, I am borrowing this quote from Arthur C. Clarke, "As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there"!
The First Law
Data Citizen
A data citizen must be a fair representation of a physical person participating in a digital society.
The first law of data citizenship ensures that the rights of a physical person are not eroded when they interact in a society that has become enabled by and dependent on digital information exchange.
It aims to address the most fundamental issue of our time - who are we in digital form? Decisions about our lives are based on the data collected, voluntarily or not, about us. From personal relationships to job applications, life begins online. We try to control online privacy and simultaneously create an online persona that embellishes the self - or at least does not expose personal flaws. Are these ethical contradictions that have always existed in our physical lives? Is this simply the tension between private and public lives? If so, have we learned to live with these contradictions by creating a collective agreement of their boundaries?
We have developed legal systems that embody the ethics of civil society - the concept of citizenship and the sense of right and wrong. Citizenship, as we know it, evolved over at least two millennia. It is now missing from the digital society.
Individual Rights and Obligations
We have moved from a society where data was managed by people to one where people are managed through data. Our social behaviour travel seamlessly between our virtual and physical lives. Therefore, we must expand our citizenship roles and responsibilities by being stewards of the data we create and that represent us: the data citizen.
Some may think that data privacy and data protection regulation are enough to guide data citizens's behaviour online. Surely we can learn to make cookie choices and can sue organisations that misuse our data. But what common values are regulations based on? They state what can or must happen in processing personal data, but they have no influence in the rules of engagement between people. We must explore how to guide people's digital behaviours and establish fundamental obligations to respect others (not to attack or cause harm), to act with honesty (not to deceive), and to identify oneself (not to abuse anonymity), for example. The absence of rights and obligations has led us to rules and regulations that are fragmented and even conflicting.
Digital civic education must include rights and obligations of every person that participates in the digital society, and become part of regular education curriculum and adult-life learning. We must move on from being mere users of applications and products to be monetised to being citizens who participate in virtual life.
As the data citizens take shape, how will they make decisions and act with autonomy? The ability to self-govern, free from external control or influence, depends on one's own objective morality. In the digital society, how information reaches us to help form our own sense of morality has changed dramatically over the last 20 years and will change even more in the years to come.
Human knowledge is advancing increasingly fast thanks to easily and conveniently accessible information with rather opaque delivery mechanisms, such as search engines and generative AI. These mechanisms are solely driven by the data provided to them, which is - in the vast majority of commercial applications - unknown by the user and tailored specifically to each user.
In order to retain our autonomy, we would benefit from developing habits of multiple searches for every question, actively formulating them from different angles, using different search and chat engines, and weighing the merits of selecting a few sources over others. In short, we must not abandon dialectics, critical thinking and analytical faculties in the name of convenience and speed, unless we consciously choose intellectual subservience. As education systems became digitised to various degrees, from embracing new tools in the classroom to attaining global reach, I fear they may fall victim of reducing research to search.
The data citizen must also be educated in managing their data. Disciplines like indexing, labelling, and cataloguing books, articles, and magazines, may never be required or relevant again. However, a new version of these practices have taken a more prominent position in the digital age with the growth of data within organisations. Deciding what is and isn't important, confidential, secret, or even barely useful is essential if most of our lives have digital representation.
Digital identity theft and impersonation, for example, are facilitated by the carelessness of message exchange and document management. The education system needs to be adapted to this new reality and include these new basic life skills into the curriculum. Deep understanding of information management is as needed in the classroom as other life skills, such as financial literacy, environmental awareness, and health education about drug abuse. As technologies evolve and new services are provided digitally, adults also must become life-long learners beyond simply being competent application users. The days of resting on degrees from prior decades are over.
As you enter the workplace or start your own business, data becomes an even more serious concern because you are now handling other people's data. Data citizenship in the workplace must include rights of workers to use systems that promote, rather than hinder, the creation of accurate data. It must include rights to well-designed performance incentives that go beyond departmental short-term goals that drive shortcuts and workarounds in handling data today. It must include an obligation to follow data standards and rules, even when systems are not fully automated. It helps to keep in mind that the standards and rules are for the benefit of all, not just the individual. Adhering to standards is analogous to obeying the traffic rules and regulations, even when there are no traffic officers around.
Education systems must prepare the data citizen for the realities of work. From early years to senior school, the computing curricula has perhaps rightly focused on coding skills. Although important and likely to be essential for well paid jobs, coding is a small part of working life. Everyone, including people who choose not to engage with coding, must be introduced to data processing.
Data processing is fundamental to business operations in all sectors of the economy and to all jobs, given that they will either create or use automated systems. For instance, thinking about data as inputs and outputs of processes, just like a manufacturing production line, can help people visualise and understand what is going on in the virtual chain of complex systems.
Everyone involved in business operations, from front-office and innovation teams to back-office and control teams, has a role to play in the data production line.
Finally, as new ways of using data are constantly emerging, we expect that some might lead to bad or disastrous outcomes, very much like any other field of invention or innovation. When harm to individuals happens as a result of using their data inappropriately or incorrectly, the search for accountability is unavoidable. We want people to pay for their mistakes, carelessness, incompetence, and malpractice. Unlike physical catastrophes, data-led problems may be opaque or even invisible to us. We are already in an era of widespread availability of applications built on Artificial Intelligence, where data is consumed and created at astonishing speed and volume for objectives that are not always clear. Our current understanding and treatment of data colours our perceptions of what is individual (citizenship) responsibility and what is corporate or societal responsibility. Pushing all accountability to businesses and governments may seem the shortest route, but is not the long lasting solution. Individual (personal and professional) accountability has not been sufficiently explored or defined in our digital society.
The Second Law
Digital Society
A digital society must protect data citizens from harm that may occur through action or inaction.
To live in an organised society has meant that a group of people can share common culture, customs, and values. Individuals in the society interact with one another, forming relationships, working together for common goals, and abiding by rules and laws that govern behaviours. In return, societies provide individuals with opportunities to fulfil their basic needs, including stability, protection, security and access to resources that would be difficult for each individual to obtain on their own - education, healthcare, utilities, waste management, legal support, and cultural and recreational services.
As societies are now enabled by and reliant upon digital means of interaction, some of those expectations have broken down. Whether in nominally democratic or openly totalitarian countries, digital surveillance by private and public institutions has been normalised and has outpaced society's ability to control it. Legislation against indiscriminate surveillance powers, online abuse, and biased treatment are attempts to deal with the effects of behaviours, and not the cause. The cause is the lack of a unifying foundational principle of doing no harm, by placing societal purpose ahead of self-serving technological innovation.
The second law of data citizenship is the ground rule for societies to expand into the digital world and adapt to the reality that geography no longer defines societal borders. Societies and institutions are currently, by and large, mimicking their physical world behaviour - paper forms became online ones - rather than understanding the new needs of the data citizen.
The future of digital societies
Perhaps there has not been a time in history where technologies were homogeneously distributed across the world. Innovation, in leaps-and-bounds or in small increments, occurs in different locations, different activities, and different times. Therefore, there is also an uneven distribution of technology benefits - it happens in pockets before wider adoption and before we consider it normal part of life. Certainly now, we can see the extremes of technological sophistication more clearly than previous generations because of the ease of communication across the globe. Significant amounts of investment, intellectual power, and resources are being applied to creating virtual worlds for education, work, and entertainment. These are technologies already adopted by large numbers of people in parts of the world. I will use the generic term metaverse to describe these virtual worlds enabled by spatial-computing platforms that offer a version of the internet, in which users can create their own avatars, explore virtual worlds, and engage in social activities, like commerce and recreation, through tracking of hand gestures and eye movements.
The metaverse epitomises the rapid technological advances in how humans interact digitally. At the same time, poverty still affects billions of people around the world, with basic human needs like clean water, food security, and access to health services and education are still not met. The many emerging forms of digital interactions may be perpetuating or exacerbating inequalities and creating the digitally rich and the digitally poor.
We don't need to just consider the metaverse. In the most simplistic interpretation of a digital society, most of our documents are now stored in digital form and that defines who we are and our access to public services. Being on the wrong side of those public digital systems will most certainly result in exclusion from parts of social life and services. The second law of data citizenship places the wellbeing of individuals, rather than the mechanics of digitising services and products, as the core purpose of the digital society. Societies need to evolve to serve emerging needs of online life of their data citizens rather than follow the doctrine of economic growth above all else and spawn surveillance states.
The second law must govern and guide the professions that are building the new society.
The information technology codes of conduct and guidelines in existence today are voluntary and not enforceable. There is a disproportionate amount of public attention to the frontier of technology development, say artificial general intelligence or quantum cryptography, rather than its purpose. If we compared the field of information technology with the field of medicine, for example, it would be like having a public debate about the ethical use of radiotherapy to treat cancer in post-surgery patients before doctors were even able to mandate basic hygiene procedures for any type of surgery. Or even before they could agree that they have an obligation to take the Hippocratic Oath to be allowed to practice as doctors of medicine.
We do not mention Margaret Hamilton's name very often, and perhaps we should. She is the American computer scientist who was NASA's first "software engineer" (the term that she coined to describe her work) and developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. I wonder what she makes of the profession she created today.
Software developers and engineers can enter the workplace by earning degrees in computer science, information technology, or a variety of science and engineering fields. Some develop targeted skills in coding bootcamps, or are self-taught in fashionable and marketable programming languages. Others build their skills by working as testers and quality assurance analysts before moving onto coding roles. Many employers value hard skills over formal credentials. As a result of all this, unlike other engineering jobs, software engineers do not require rigorous foundations or a license to operate in a field that deals with billions of people's data. Consequences of badly architected, designed, implemented, and maintained software systems range from minor inconveniences or critical service failures, to illegal or unethical societal outcomes.
I wonder if Hamilton is proud of how these professions evolved, or worried that these jobs have strayed away from their roots in systems theory and mathematical rigour. I fear it might be the latter, given her concerns even back in the 1980s that the industry had descended into a "test-to-death" path [b]. Poor software engineering leads to unreliable and vulnerable systems. They might look impressive and behave well under the right conditions, but most cyber threats we see today are relying on their fragility.
Business leaders and law makers have not yet made the link between lack of professional rigour and the business and societal outcomes (and risks) associated with digital systems. Our laws may be clear on executive accountability for data leaks, but nobody is the least curious about why new graduates were never taught that testing software with real customer's data is unethical and must not be done! It is time to seriously professionalise IT and the emerging data jobs, like data scientists.
Setting aside how society views and treats technology and data professionals, we must now examine the goals of the institutions themselves.
What makes digital businesses successful and what are their benefits to society? What is the purpose of work in the 21st century? Do people still work to improve their lives, to achieve a higher personal goal, or to help others?
The digital society has been shaped by the attention economy, the convenience economy, and the surveillance economy [c]. It has certainly not propelled large parts of the population into the higher purposes of human existence. If anything, it is automating more sophisticated and complex work with the same efficiency that it eliminated manufacturing and logistics jobs. The invention of the zero-hour contract [d], for example, is a clear evidence of humans working for optimised scheduling algorithms rather than the other way around. Perhaps the most known abuse of technology without societal benefit is the conversion of entire generations into products of the attention economy, where business models compete for "eye balls" enabled by infinite scrolling and unlimited data plans. There is no shortage of serious studies on digital addiction - we just need to be responsible citizens and not ignore them.
Without clarity of, or at least some reflection on, purpose of technological progress, the digital society will succumb to a self-serving data economy. The more data there is, the harder it becomes to find, interpret, trust, and gain value from it. It is, therefore, not surprising to see that new business opportunities emerge to deal with the data explosion and associate data policies and regulations. If you are thinking about the Wild West, you are on the right track: there could be a lot of money to be made for striking gold (businesses today call it "value from data"), but there is certainly a lot of money to be made from selling picks and shovels (today's data technologies.)
Finally, within the second law of data citizenship, we must consider the role of senior leadership. What happens when senior leaders in an organisation are relying on hierarchical supervisory structures of the past to guide a digital institution into the future? I found the story of Jack Teixeira illustrative of how leadership is unprepared to deal with data explosion. Teixeira, a 21-year-old low-ranked military serviceman, was accused of leaking hundreds of classified US intelligence documents, The story [e] shows how difficult it is to classify and control access to information using traditional means designed for a pre-internet era. Even if the purpose of digital institutions is clear, executing them remains a challenge. A digital society must adapt to the continuous learning needs of its citizens. Traditional education models and hierarchical corporate structures may need to be reimagined and reinvented to be fit for purpose in the digital world.
The Third Law
Digital Sustainability
A digital society must not compete for resources with the physical society.
The third law of data citizenship creates the foundation for sustainability. It is beyond doubt that digital technologies have unlocked a new era of civilisation with near-instant communication across vast areas of the globe. Collaboration in business, science, and academia has never been easier. Education, entertainment, and commerce have been transformed and brand new industries have emerged. It would be naïve to assume that this new lifestyle comes at a zero environmental cost. Some technologies replaced physical goods and services, such as the production and transportation books, CDs, and DVDs, for example, with data stored somewhere else.
Those were the early stages of digitisation. What lies ahead is a deeper transformation that depends on greater capacity to produce, process, consume, and store data. The capabilities of Artificial Intelligence are becoming widely used from marketing micro-targeting to self-driving vehicles. As a result, computing needs continue to grow exponentially.
As data citizens, we must understand that the natural resources that are needed to expand data centres and to increase capacity for telecommunications - on land and in space - are limited. Renewable energy sources will become more accessible, but the demand for energy is currently growing faster than the development of new sources. While other industries reliant on fossil fuels struggle to transition to greener alternatives in an economical manner, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry is putting even more pressure on the energy supply.
Energy consumption is only one facet of the sustainability challenge. The full lifecycle of physical equipment for the ICT industry is opaque. We care more about phasing out plastic cutlery than we care about the "cradle to grave" journey of electronic devices all around us.
The big picture
We must make greater effort to understand complexity. It is only natural to have a desire for right or wrong answers, or to be pro or against something. However, we all know that things that appear full of virtue to some can also be detrimental to others. The blind belief that "digital is green" is a harmful illusion.
To make the concept of complexity real through an example, as of 2021, Brazil was second in the ranking of countries that use the highest proportion of renewable sources of energy (32%), behind Norway (45%) and ahead of New Zealand (25%). This sounded great to me until I looked into the type of renewable energies preferred by each of those countries. Brazil was a pioneer in the development of ethanol as an alternative to oil and complementary fuel option for road transportation. This is good news for a country that has no railway infrastructure and needs to bring goods and services to a population geographically dispersed through vast areas. It is tempting to continue on this path and use the renewable source metric to claim progress towards green credentials, ignoring complexities of how ecosystems behave. Because most of this renewable energy is biofuel produced through intensive sugar cane plantations, the drawbacks range from loss of natural habitats and intensive use of water, to heavy use of agro-chemicals and, notoriously, deforestation of the Atlantic tropical forest.
Information Technology is no different from other industries. What you can see is the user interfaces: what you interact with in your devices. What you cannot see is the infrastructure that makes those services and products work for you. IT has built a reputation for being environmentally friendly since the 1970s and 1980s, when replacement of paperwork with electronic records was experienced by office workers across the globe. This is experiencing IT at the point of consumption of services. It is the equivalent of, for example, driving an electric-powered vehicles. Although we may see uncontested benefit at the point of consumption, we only have a vague understanding of the environmental impact of the complex chain of production, transportation, and energy delivery to the equipment we use. Where do the raw materials and components come from? How is the equipment made? How is it powered? All of these concerns are hidden from view of the consumer [f]. Therefore, it is increasingly important to include the full lifecycle of production and use of digital technology into education curricula and professional training.
IT products and services depend on physical buildings and equipment, connected by an unimaginable network of terrestrial and lower space telecommunications infrastructure. Consumption of IT products is growing in addition to everything else we consume in the physical world. IT is no longer replacing carbon-hungry, tree-cutting human needs like printing newspapers and magazines. If anything, it has fuelled the culture of disposable personal possessions, throw-away fashion, and a compulsion for taking digital photos. It has created new perceived needs, best illustrated by the new culture of video streaming. In 2019, researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK published a study in the journal "Resources, Conservation and Recycling" about carbon emissions associated with streaming videos on popular platforms, such as Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime. The global emissions from video streaming in 2018 were estimated to be around 300 million tonnes of CO2, which is equivalent to the carbon emissions of Spain.
Photos, videos, feature films, TV series, books, music, games, documents, emails, money, and all the data breadcrumbs that represent our interactions online take up physical space in a data centre somewhere. More likely than not, they are copied over multiple data centres to provide a high level of operational resilience and performance optimisation.
As a data citizen, do you know how much data you create and communicate to others? Do you know how much energy and physical materials are required to perform those digital actions? How much of it is needed, how much is convenient, how much is accidental, and how much is frivolous? Once again education, from early-years schooling to professional courses, is essential to prepare generations of data citizens to act responsibly.
Citizens in wealthy and developing countries have come to expect to always be connected to the magic of the internet. Our expectation of a 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week availability is now the norm for most services. Unlimited communication plans (for voice calls and data) are offered at relatively modest prices in markets where there are multiple suppliers competing for business. Low prices are also the result of incredible engineering and manufacturing achievements.
When we combine new needs and wants of many generations, with unlimited connectivity wherever you are, and with low prices, we should not be surprised by its unimaginable success and exponential growth. But we shouldn't be careless data citizens: the side-effects of this complex system are considerable.
There are significant disparities between the societies that benefit from the creation and use of digital products and services, and the societies that experience the beginning (sources of physical materials) and the end of the lifecycle of digital equipment (e-waste disposal). These disparities are economic externalities - things that we value as human beings, but are not accounted for in the price of the products and services we buy. So, for example, what is the value of the ecological and social damage associated with mining of "coltan" (short for columbite-tantalite), which is essential to make your phone vibrate? Would you condemn the trade of "conflict phones" in the same way you condemn the trade of "conflict diamonds" [g]?
The design of electronic devices somewhat masks how complex it is to produce them. The extraction and transportation of materials, the component manufacturing process, the assembly process, and the distribution of the final product are all part of the physical supply chain competing for global resources. We must not forget that it is not only personal devices that enable the digital society. The combination of personal devices, with computation and storage provided by data centres (private and public), and with the telecommunications infrastructure, creates a digital ecosystem that is competing for resources with other physical industries.
The utopian predictions that technology always enables a more sustainable use of natural resources are far from reality. Technology has contributed to the increase of demand for paper-based products and it has increased demand for raw materials and energy. It has not been a net-zero transition. The low recycling rates of electronic equipments are a much larger problem than the paper-filled wastelands of the past. Although manufacturers of personal devices are taking more responsibility for the full life-cycle of equipment, this is a relatively new development compared to over 20 years of promoting a culture of "always upgrade".
This is why we must educate new generations not as consumers, but as people in charge of their digital futures. While so much effort goes into convincing governments and businesses to committing real effort to the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, very few people seem to be noticing the growth in energy demand from the emerging digital societies. We must remember that, at a point in time, energy is finite and resource exploration is fraught with unforeseen social and environmental side-effects.
I hope these anecdotes show you that we do not live in a world where things are simply good or bad. We live in a complex ecosystem of interconnected parts. The IT industry has been largely hidden behind a veil of mystery. There is very little popular understanding of its internal workings, which makes the data citizen vulnerable to eco-friendly propaganda.
In short, information technology is not all clean and green. If the data citizen has an insatiable appetite for digital products, we will continue to struggle to consume natural resources in a mindful and responsible manner. The Third Law of data citizenship is an essential ground rule if we are to develop a coherent balance between economic prosperity and societal and environmental sustainability. But, of course, you might prefer to buy a one-way ticket to Mars instead!
Conclusion and call to action
When the Magna Carta was signed by King John of England in 1215, few would have imagined that this Great Charter would become one of the most important legal documents in history. It established the principle that freemen (nobility, at the time), including the king, are subject to the law and protected from arbitrary imprisonment, unreasonable taxes, and swift justice. It also established a council of barons to oversee the king's actions. However foundational or symbolic this early constitution was beyond the English-speaking world, it still took humanity over six centuries to abolish slavery, with Brazil's Golden Law (Lei Áurea) only signed in 1888.
The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [h] by the United Nations in 1948 marked the start of modern human relations at a global scale, with its 30 articles covering a wide range of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. It continues to be a vital reference for the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide, emphasising the fundamental principles of human dignity, equality, and justice.
Digital technology has changed the nature of societies, and perhaps now we have the opportunity to bring the Magna Carta and the Universal Declaration to the digital era. The new king is AI. Technologists, entrepreneurs, academics, oligarchs, and governments are our current nobility.
Humanity's self-proclaimed superiority is surely being challenged and some of us are fearful that we will become a lesser species, whose desires will not be relevant to new masters [i]. We have a chance to prevent that if we agree to share basic universal values and honour the three laws of data citizenship.
I hope this article has been able to spark some curiosity about facets of our digital lives that are largely ignored or assumed to be "the new normal" and "someone else's problem to fix." If the three laws are indeed sound principles, our daily decisions and law making can share common purpose and direction. Without them, we are passengers on an uncontrollable vessel.
In the upcoming book of the same title, I explore each of the three laws in more detail. I build on familiar life experiences to show that there are opportunities for all citizens to become responsible data citizens.
For now, I invite the reader to reflect on the emerging rift between the so-called technical people and the others. Humans have an immense ability to learn, which will diminish if the digital world is presented to us as if it were the Enigma machine: A mysterious device with inexplicable processes inside it, and only comprehended by the greatest minds. Responsible data citizens are curious and embrace learning as a life-long habit - not learning in the classroom sense, but learning as a five-year-old that never stops asking “why?” and “how does it work?”
Fortunately, the digital age has provided us with many free alternatives to fulfilling our curiosity, from eBooks and podcasts to video tutorials, documentaries, and TED talks. When we become enlightened data citizens, we can engage in meaningful discussions and elect enlightened representatives into government. We can participate in reforming education to develop stronger learning-to-learn skills for existing and future generations.
Further Reading
and References
For the keen readers, here are some of the books that inspired me to write this article. They may offer you a respite from breaking news, tweets, threads, and blogs, and allow you to experience deeper reflection and enjoyment!
Asimov, I. (1950). I, Robot. Gnome Press.
Azhar, A. (2022). Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It. London: Random House.
Harari, Y. N. (2016). Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harvill Secker.
McGovern, G. (2021). World Wide Waste: How Digital Is Killing Our Planet and What We Can Do About It. University of Chicago Press.
Sagan, C. (1997). The demon-haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark. Ballantine Books.
Taplin, J. (2017). Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. Little, Brown and Company.
Footnotes
[a] Taneja, H. (2019). The Era of 'Move Fast and Break Things' Is Over. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-era-of-move-fast-and-break-things-is-over
This article is referring to Taplin, J. (2017). Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. Little, Brown and Company.
[b] Margaret Hamilton's USL (Universal Systems Language) is a systems modelling language and formal method for the specification and design of software and other complex systems. It was designed based on her experiences writing flight software for the Apollo program. The USL and its accompanying 001 Tool Suite were described as a groundbreaking approach to systems thinking and a new way of conducting business. It incorporates HTI's Development Before the Fact (DBTF) theory, aiming to eliminate errors before they occur. Unlike the prevailing test-to-death philosophy, USL-001 follows a preventive philosophy.
HTI. (n.d.). HTI - High Tech Innovations. Retrieved from http://www.htius.com/
[c] The attention economy thrives on monetising people's time in front of particular pages by selling advertising space on those pages. The convenience economy thrives on offers of free and immediate services in exchange for gathering data about the user. The surveillance economy has two facets: A business facet where user's data to profile people, which is then used to influence their behaviour. Addressing criminal activity must not be used as a reason for indiscriminate collection of data on the entire population.
[d] Zero-hour contract is mostly used in the UK and is an agreement where the employer does not have to provide any minimum working hours to the employee and the employee is also not required to accept any work offered by the employer.
[e] Schwartz, F. (2023) 'Air Guardsman charged over US classified document leak', Financial Times, 19 April. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/4c724d50-a942-4242-b08c-cccf83ac6bee (Accessed: 4 July 2023).
[f] Simply put, being in favour of nuclear power producing clean electricity for your car or home does not mean you support a new plant being built near your city.
[g] The mining and trading of coltan have been linked to issues such as human rights abuses, environmental degradation, and armed conflict in some regions, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and surrounding countries. Efforts have been made to establish responsible and sustainable supply chains for coltan and other minerals used in electronics.
[h] United Nations. (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Available at: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights (Accessed: 3 July 2023)
[i] Harari, Y. N. (2016). Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harvill Secker.