Here is something I did last year about which I missed out on sharing so far. I taught a Cyber Law and Policy course at the Jamia Hamdard Law school in New Delhi. My first formal foray into tech policy, which I have followed up with working on a tech and political risk consulting project with a UK-based firm. I had been a deliberate outsider to the tech policy field so far. But not anymore.
(As a Cyber Law Faculty at the Jamia Hamdard Law School, Hamdard Institute Of Legal Studies and Research)
I had a lot of curiosity around tech policy and had been following some conversations on the sideline. I have always been one of those who have had a balanced and moderate perspective on Tech policy. And for many years, I can perhaps even say I actively avoided deep diving into tech policy despite the fact that there has been a lot of hullabaloo around it.
In fact, I remember that as the Editor in Chief of the Cornell Policy Review, I received an article from Matt Chessen who was a tech policy advisor at the Obama government. Matt had argued that tech policy is something that should be taught in policy schools and back in 2017 almost no top public affairs school had a tech policy concentration. CIPA (Cornell) did have a Science, Technology, and Infrastructure policy concentration though, so was as usual ahead of the curve, but even there the focus on tech policy was from a slightly different angle and perhaps not at that time plugged into the core tech policy debates which have become so important and have become an important part of the Brooks School Curriculum.
I was fascinated by Matt’s article and its discussion around how AI is as good as the data you feed into it and how AI based judicial judgments had been racially biased (as was found in some experiments). Cut to 2022, almost all major policy schools including the Brooks School have a tremendous focus on Tech policy and even a dedicated tech policy concentration, certificate programs etc.
Somehow, I still chose to sit on the periphery of the conversation if not totally outside of it. At Global Policy Insights, my cofounder Uday Nagaraju had started AI Policy Labs and I joined its Advisory Board mostly offering strategic advice but learned substantially in that process.
Perhaps the reason I did not want to jump in at the core of the tech conversation was that I generally have some sort of an aversion to things that everyone is obsessing about at any given time. In most cases this predisposition has served me well. I look at the emerging topics which become core later on and try to aim an early mover’s advantage. The core is crowded and most often fades out to give way to the periphery. That’s probably why I have been kicked about ideas such as geriatric care, which will be a core policy concern for India in a decade or two to come, or space policy, as I was at one point passionate about water policy which has somewhat become a core issue of interest now. Besides I have always been a “politics first” type of a policy analyst, to borrow Ian Bremmer’s tagline from the Eurasia group.
Hence, I sat out of the tech policy debate for a long time. Yuval Noah Harari was talking about it. Then came a spate of books that essentially copied or closely followed Harari’s format. And then, in India when I started teaching at Indian School of Public Policy, I realised that most or nearly half of the of the people working in the field of public policy are simply employed in the tech policy space. New tech policy think tanks cropped up and existing ones set up their tech policy specialisation. It was as if the only debate worth having in the policy field in India was around tech policy and other issues such as agriculture, poverty, energy, healthcare, climate change, social justice or any given traditional policy issues for that matter were dwarfed or swept aside by the tech policy tsunami.
Indeed incentives aligned in this manner. In a country where there is a lot of interest in public policy, for a young practitioner who wants to make a career in this field and not go hungry or live in slightly better conditions than abject poverty, tech policy offered a great prospect. Plus in India we are still in that phase where corporate jobs hold some charm. Moreover, it is the country where tech giants and mobile manufacturers alike, are invested heavily. So they fund the think tanks, NGOs, hire young folks to conduct advocacy I their behalf, and interface with the larger community.
For the field of public policy in general and for non-bureaucrat policy professionals in particular, the growth of tech policy in India has been a boon. But I still had that lingering feeling that eventually all of the policy debate around tech is really just about serving some business interests and it should be more than just that.
The cost of this has been that any issue in any policy area has been swamped by the tech policy aspects of it. It is as if agriculture policy, or policies around MSMEs, or sustainability etc. have solved all of their long pending problems and the only problem worth dealing with is: how to make technology work to improve that policy issue or how to manage some of the negative externalities cases due to technology and it’s implications on a given issue. There is no debate or topic worth discussing in the policy discourse besides these two - leverage or mitigate implications of technology. Single-issue discourses are quite intellectually stale, at least for me. But I do remember a mentor at the GPODS Fellowship saying that in the 21st century, either you are being people to the technology or bringing technology to the people and all the rest is a sideshow. Again, a very dissatisfying, almost gloomy perspective of the world. It becomes a single-issue world.
And such considerations kept me on the ring fence of the tech policy debate. In most of the Indian media, it seemed like the tech policy debate is essentially a debate around determining responsibilities of a data fiduciary and beyond data privacy, the Puttaswamy judgment, and cybersecurity, there was nothing more in the whole debate even though the tech policy wonks would endlessly repeat and extol the intricacies and variety of issues in tech policy. I always felt it’s really about privacy and cybersecurity anyway and all the rest was either a failure to acknowledge the limited core or wilful inflation of the intellectual juice in one’s topic in pursuit of economic sustenance.
On many of these fronts, I was proven wrong. On the one hand, I have come to realize that tech policy has somehow swamped all other policy issues and whether it is about climate change, or public participation in government, or civil services reforms, or urban management, all of these debates and deliberations happen from the lens of tech policy: Want to save forests? Use blockchain. Want to transform healthcare or avoid pandemics? Use an IoT testing device. Want to have more well-functioning cities? You have a whole smart city utopia, basically manufactured by forms to sell a lot of their products to or through the government. It can all sound very manic and short-sighted. And people who get extremely excited about it, seem helplessly naive, such as a lot of my friends in social media who are posting about Chatgpt not realizing they are already quite late in the game (posting about Chatgpt in February 2023 isn’t cool anymore, at least not as much it used to be in December 2022 and yes that is the pace of change we are talking about now).
But as I said, in some aspects, I was proven wrong. I have, over the last few years, reflected on the nature of technology. As to what is it fundamentally? This inquiry was in part a result of being a non-tech person living in Fremont California in 2019 when I was teaching at the San Francisco State University’s School of Public Affairs and Civic Engagement, then located at Market Street in SF, not too far from the Twitter headquarters. My realization of the nature of technology came when I was watching a video of zebras crossing a river during the annual great migration in Serengeti. The zebras would be waiting to cross the river and there would be crocodiles in the river, literally with their mouths open waiting to grab the zebras as their herd would eventually cross the river. Typically, the way it works is that after much hesitation, one zebra takes a leap of faith and rushes into the water despite the crocodiles. And then the whole herd of zebras races through the river trusting their luck. While many of them cross over to the other side, many of them get eaten by the crocodiles. It is purely a probabilistic game where each zebra somehow hopes that they are not among the 10% (I’m just making a number up) who get eaten.
(Credit: Dr. Adam Norton, https://www.youtube.com/@Dr_Adam)
I wondered, what would forest-dwelling humans do in such situations? Well, there are plenty of trees around, for starters, they could chop down a tree and use it as a bridge to cross over to the other side. That reduces the probability of being eaten up by a crocodile substantially. And of course, they could make weapons from trees, sharp stones, etc. to ward off the zebras. Essentially, in the knowledge and humility of their own limited abilities in front of a force of nature (the crocodiles in this case), human beings use the nature around them (the trees and the stones) to deal with the problem and thereby substantially increasing the chances to their survival. And human beings have been doing that for ages now! Through various evolutionary pathways, we have developed the capability to use elements in our environment to survive the more dreadful aspects of the environment.
We have also been endowed with what Harari would call flexible cooperation (something that others such as Robert Axelrod, Mancur Olson, Kaushik Basu and others have deeply researched and reflected on). That in essence is technology. The ability to use nature to manage nature. This ability comes through uniquely interpreting data around nature and looking at the same tree as a tool for survival, a bridge against crocodiles, which the poor zebra is unable to do or which some other species may think of (chimpanzees can make tools) but cannot have a large scale cooperation around deploying that tool. Such ability to connect the dots, or what my systems thinking Prof.s Derek and Laura Cabrera would say, to do DSRP (making distinctions, looking at part-whole structures of things, making relationships between objects and ideas, and taking perspectives - essentially the four things that the human brain does), is something that human beings are quite adept at. We can be, in the words of the Cabreras, ‘metacognitive’. That is, we can think about the way we think and that so what gives us the ability to interpret the world in a way that helps us make these technologies to enhance our survival. So for me, the idea behind the technology has the following components:
1. Ability to interpret data and look at material forces (trees, radio waves, lithium, the sun, fossil fuel, stones, iron, etc.) as something useful in enhancing our survival while other animals may think of them as quite useless or of limited use. So, our motto is “everything is useful”.
2. Ability to cooperate in large numbers, record successes, and failures, and work to build useful solutions to survival problems over multiple generations. Here the role of memory, history, and cooperation enchanting social-cultural mechanisms and policies come into place.
Here is where the role of humanity types come in. If one were to have some use for a reductionist agenda, here could be a place: the fundamental instinct of human beings is to live as perpetuate human life, what Arthur Schopenhauer might call a “will to life” - an irrational "blind incessant impulse without knowledge" that drives instinctive behaviors, causing an endless insatiable striving in human existence. Or what Friedrich Nietzsche might call a will to “power” (if you are a Hararian you would look at technology as facilitating a “will to power” and if you are Bill Gates or Elon Musk types you are likely to see that role of technology as a means to perpetuate “will to power”).
So (1) if the fundamental impulse of human beings is to live, and (2) if the means to ensure this survival is to manipulate or adjust with nature through a complex process of gathering and using data about nature, which we call technology, then (3) the means to ensure that the technology comes to fruition is through large scale human cooperation and memory. And therefore, the role of deliberating in (1) is of the philosophers (existentialism and all); for working on (2) is of the scientists and technologists; and (3) for ensuring cooperation and memory is the role of policymakers, entrepreneurs, historians, bureaucrats etc. And whether we speak about the laws of Hammurabi trying to regulate agricultural methods or the new Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, all are the efforts in the same direction - that of facilitating cooperation for the use of technology. And that for me is a much more interesting agenda than reducing the tech debate to data privacy and cybersecurity.
At the heart of the matter is the problem of cooperation. But a final concern here is even at the cost of repetition. Human beings do not only survive through manipulating nature (I.e., technology) . They also survive by ensuring that the truths about nature are well accepted, and the bounties of nature as a result of its management are at least distributed in a manner that some human beings don’t just kill others making the whole of the system collapse and that the nature is manipulated to the degree and in the manner that makes survival possible for a longer period of time and in a qualitatively more comfortable manner. Here methods of governance for both, the private sector and the public sector becomes important.
(Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash)
At last, I decided to jump in on the technology debate with this focus. When I taught the Cyberlaw and policies course, it was a steep learning curve for me. At the heart of most of the matters were issues like:
- [ ] Managing contracts
- [ ] Safeguarding intellectual property rights
- [ ] Ensuring privacy and safety
- [ ] Safeguarding against monopolisation and other market distorting practices
- [ ] Safeguarding against human rights violations
- [ ] Managing territorial disputes and issues around jurisdictions
- [ ] Dealing with violence, bullying, fraud, crime, authoritarianism, and terrorism
- [ ] Managing global commons
- [ ] Managing livelihoods
- [ ] Managing principal-agent issues
- [ ] Managing power dynamics (gender, international relations, special interest groups etc.)
- [ ] Managing negative externalities, second and third order effects of actions
- [ ] Managing bias and noise in decision making
- [ ] Managing strategic communications
- [ ] Politics of policy making
- [ ] Avoiding bad equilibria
All good old (or bad old) policy issues at the core of public policy which is the ever-interesting ‘problem of cooperation’. It’s just that we are dealing with it in a new context, that of the internet. What this also means is that for most tech policy practitioners, it is not only sufficient to understand the latest technology and its intricacies which forms the context, but also the core principles of managing or dealing with the problem of cooperation. The knowledge of principles without context and the knowledge of context without a deep understanding of principles can both be dangerous. Both directions of knowledge (of context and principles) are endless. So, what we need to avoid, is sacrificing one for the other. At least in India, most tech policy practitioners seem anxious about learning as much about the contextual aspects as possible, excitedly consuming all they can in the latest discoveries in technology. That is indeed important. But that would not do good unless there is a keen insight on what aspect of the ‘problem of cooperation’ is that technology getting hindered by or is activating, and how to navigate it. So, a greater focus on the ‘policy’ aspects of ‘tech policy’, beyond just what there is in the latest parliamentary bills and in the media discourse is important along with, of course, a sufficient understanding of the tech aspects of tech policy.
A final side note for students and commentators: It is never cool or intelligent to start essays or op-eds with sentences such as “technology has changed every aspect of our lives”. It’s plainly trite, hackneyed, insipid, and unintelligent. And one must never have the audacity to use such sentences in panel discussions and speeches, something that I witnessed quite excessively in the think 20 deliberations. We can do better than that!
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