Essay by John G. Palfrey: “…The world would be different if large, open datasets could be accessed at low cost by civil society actors, provided that they incorporated constraints to limit the dangerous uses of the same technologies. Recall the example of climate change, which posited that an open-source dataset, comprising various actors, methods, and geographies, could be used to identify and enact solutions to climate issues around the world in a fraction of the time it takes today….
Philanthropy can—and should—seek to help shape technologies for the good of humanity, rather than for profit. If we do not intervene in the public interest, we may find ourselves being haunted by this missed opportunity for a brighter future. Our previous approaches to investing in and governing new technologies have left too much power in the hands of too few. The harms associated with a laissez-faire approach in an era of artificial intelligence, as compared with the previous digital technologies, may be far greater. Promises by the tech industry, from the mid-1990s to today, to self-regulate and include community members in their growth and design have not come to fruition, but they can serve as a sort of reverse roadmap for how to imagine and design the next phase of technological change. We know what will happen if a laissez-faire approach predominates.
We need to learn from this past quarter-century and design a better, more public-interested approach for the decades to come. This moment of inflection allows us to use futurism to guide today’s investments, to remind ourselves that we can embed greater equity into the technology world, and to recommit to philanthropic practices that help to build a safe, sustainable, and just world…(More)”.
