Protecting the digital child

This month I was invited to participate in the Royal Society of NSW (RSNSW) and Learned Academies Forum on the topic of the “power and peril of the digital age”.  We were asked to imagine a child born a day earlier who we dubbed our “digital child” and think about how we would seek to protect their future.  The following were my opening remarks in response.

Good morning and thank-you.  I want to add my acknowledgement of the indigenous owners of the lands on which we all attend today. For me, that is the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation and I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.

I’m a technologist, and that means I have spent my career working to advance the use of various technologies throughout business and society.  I’m a technology optimist, in that when I see a new technology, I am instinctively excited for the possibilities it can bring.  But I’m also a technology realist in that I know that all technologies have consequences, and our hSistory in this regard is not always one we can be proud of!

Thousands of years of agrarian technology has left much of our soil infertile; hundreds of years (and more) of weapons and transport technology have enabled invasions which have left entire cultures displaced; two hundred years of industrial revolution has choked our atmosphere and some decades of an information and digital revolution has threatened our very self-identity and privacy.  We can and must do better for the digital child that was born yesterday!

The very term “digital child” will likely be much like the identify of millennials, generation Y and all those that go before.  Even before our digital child is an adult, the “quantum child” will likely already have been born and the worries we have today will seem to be from a kinder and gentler age given the dangers that they could be facing.

The quantum child will face a generation of artificial intelligence that will make today’s data-driven algorithms look like they were from pre-school.  The quantum child may encounter chemicals and drugs designed with quantum computers in record time, with or without proper testing.  The quantum child might even be embedded at birth with an operating system to support their learning and growth.

So, let’s do better than add a digital Band-Aid to today’s problems and learn from history to create a template for the future.  We can design the governance of technology into the very processes that adopt it into our society going forward, starting with the digital society of today, keeping an eye to the quantum future of tomorrow and a determination to be stewards of a cleaner world.

We should use all the tools available to realise the best of our digital lives while minimising the downsides.

The first tool is yet more technology to manage the technology.  Typically, humanity has invented its way out of many of the disasters of its own making from fertilisers to recover from over farming to catalytic converters to replace the lead in petrol that was poisoning the brains of last century’s children.  We have the opportunity now to architect technology transparency, constraints, security, and sustainability into the solutions that are brought to market through better collaboration between inventors, technologists, and the community.

The second tool is the culture we build around the products we surround ourselves with.  From our expectations of privacy to a demand for fairness we can all influence the society that our digital child grows up in.

And finally, the tool that we always need but should constantly use with caution, is regulation and legislation.  We do have the right to ask our governments to put boundaries around the use and intrusion of technology even if they are more in the form of speed limits to allow our first two tools to catch-up.

So, let’s insist that rather than just quietly tracking our activities, we get control of our own data, protection of our privacy, transparency of algorithms and even an open curriculum for the training of artificial intelligence!  We must also combine our digital revolution with a green technology transformation.

Let’s agree the community expectations, not only for those of us producing and implementing digital solutions but also our expectations of each other in how we all behave, engage, and transact in our digital society.

And let’s engage in a properly informed debate about the regulations and laws we need from cryptocurrencies to social media, in the full knowledge that every decision made now likely needs to be reviewed on a cycle that is much shorter than any government is used to.

If we do our jobs properly, as the stewards of society while our digital child grows-up, we can be confident that they will inherit a world that is better than ours.  Fail and I truly fear for the quantum child!