The 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Edelman: “The world is failing to meet the unprecedented challenges of our time because it is ensnared in a vicious cycle of distrust. Four interlocking forces drive this cycle, thwarting progress on climate change, global pandemic management, racism and mounting tensions between China and the U.S. Left unchecked, the following four forces, evident in the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer, will undermine institutions and further destabilize society:  

  • Government-media distrust spiral. Two institutions people rely on for truth are doing a dangerous tango of short-term mutual advantage, with exaggeration and division to gain clicks and votes.
  • Excessive reliance on business. Government failure has created an over-reliance on business to fill the void, a job that private enterprise was not designed to deliver.
  • Mass-class divide. The global pandemic has widened the fissure that surfaced in the wake of the Great Recession. High-income earners have become more trusting of institutions, while lower-income earners remain wary.
  • Failure of leadership. Classic societal leaders in government, the media and business have been discredited. Trust, once hierarchical, has become local and dispersed as people rely on my employer, my colleagues, my family. Coinciding with this upheaval is a collapse of trust within democracies and a trust surge within autocracies.

The media business model has become dependent on generating partisan outrage, while the political model has become dependent on exploiting it. Whatever short-term benefits either institution derives, it is a long-term catastrophe for society. Distrust is now society’s default emotion, with nearly 60 percent inclined to distrust…(More)”.

Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know

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Book edited by Ralph Hertwig and Christoph Engel: “The history of intellectual thought abounds with claims that knowledge is valued and sought, yet individuals and groups often choose not to know. We call the conscious choice not to seek or use knowledge (or information) deliberate ignorance. When is this a virtue, when is it a vice, and what can be learned from formally modeling the underlying motives? On which normative grounds can it be judged? Which institutional interventions can promote or prevent it? In this book, psychologists, economists, historians, computer scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and legal scholars explore the scope of deliberate ignorance.

Drawing from multiple examples, including the right not to know in genetic testing, collective amnesia in transformational societies, blind orchestral auditions, and “don’t ask don’t tell” policies), the contributors offer novel insights and outline avenues for future research into this elusive yet fascinating aspect of human nature…(More)”.

The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security

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Book by Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff: “From pandemic disease, to the disasters associated with global warming, to cyberattacks, today we face an increasing array of catastrophic threats. It is striking that, despite the diversity of these threats, experts and officials approach them in common terms: as future events that threaten to disrupt the vital, vulnerable systems upon which modern life depends.

The Government of Emergency tells the story of how this now taken-for-granted way of understanding and managing emergencies arose. Amid the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, an array of experts and officials working in obscure government offices developed a new understanding of the nation as a complex of vital, vulnerable systems. They invented technical and administrative devices to mitigate the nation’s vulnerability, and organized a distinctive form of emergency government that would make it possible to prepare for and manage potentially catastrophic events.

Through these conceptual and technical inventions, Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff argue, vulnerability was defined as a particular kind of problem, one that continues to structure the approach of experts, officials, and policymakers to future emergencies…(More)”.

Navigating Trust in Society,

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Coeuraj: “This report provides empirical evidence of existing levels of trust, among the US population, with regard to institutions, and philanthropy—all shaped during a time of deep polarization and a global pandemic.

The source of the data is two-fold. Firstly, a year-over-year analysis of institutional trust, as measured by Global Web Index USA from more than 20,000 respondents and, secondly, an ad-hoc nationally representative survey, conducted by one of Coeuraj’s data partners AudienceNet, in the two weeks immediately preceding the 2021 United Nations General Assembly. This report presents the core findings that emerged from both research initiatives….(More)”.

The Biden Administration Embraces “Democracy Affirming Technologies”

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Article by Marc Rotenberg: “…But amidst the ongoing struggle between declining democracies and emerging authoritarian governments, the Democracy Summit was notable for at least one new initiative – the support for democracy affirming technology. According to the White House, the initiative “aims to galvanize worldwide a new class of technologies” that can support democratic values.  The White House plan is to bring together innovators, investors, researchers, and entrepreneurs to “embed democratic values.”  The President’s top science advisor Eric Lander provided more detail. Democratic values, he said, include “privacy, freedom of expression, access to information, transparency, fairness, inclusion, and equity.”

In order to spur more rapid technological progress the White House Office of Science and Technology announced three Grand Challenges for Democracy-Affirming Technologies. They are:

  • A collaboration between U.S. and UK agencies to promote “privacy enhancing technologies” that “harness the power of data in a secure manner that protects privacy and intellectual property, enabling cross-border and cross-sector collaboration to solve shared challenges.”
  • Censorship circumvention tools, based on peer-to-peer techniques that enable content-sharing and communication without an Internet or cellular connection. The Open Technology Fund, an independent NGO, will invite international participants to compete on promising P2P technologies to counter Internet shutdowns.
  • A Global Entrepreneurship Challenge will seek to identify entrepreneurs who build and advance democracy-affirming technologies through a set of regional startup and scaleup competitions in countries spanning the democratic world. According to the White House, specific areas of innovation may include: data for policymaking, responsible AI and machine learning, fighting misinformation, and advancing government transparency and accessibility of government data and services.

USAID Administrator Samantha Powers said her agency would spend 20 million annually to expand digital democracy work. “We’ll use these funds to help partner nations align their rules governing the use of technology with democratic principles and respect for human rights,” said the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Notably, Powers also said the U.S. will take a closer look at export practices to “prevent technologies from falling into hands that would misuse them.” The U.S., along with Denmark, Norway, and Australia, will launch a new Export Controls and Human Rights Initiative. Powers also seeks to align surveillance practices of democratic nations with the Universal Declaration for Human Rights….(More)”.

Economists Pin More Blame on Tech for Rising Inequality

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Steve Lohr at the New York Times: “Daron Acemoglu, an influential economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been making the case against what he describes as “excessive automation.”

The economywide payoff of investing in machines and software has been stubbornly elusive. But he says the rising inequality resulting from those investments, and from the public policy that encourages them, is crystal clear.

Half or more of the increasing gap in wages among American workers over the last 40 years is attributable to the automation of tasks formerly done by human workers, especially men without college degrees, according to some of his recent research…

Mr. Acemoglu, a wide-ranging scholar whose research makes him one of most cited economists in academic journals, is hardly the only prominent economist arguing that computerized machines and software, with a hand from policymakers, have contributed significantly to the yawning gaps in incomes in the United States. Their numbers are growing, and their voices add to the chorus of criticism surrounding the Silicon Valley giants and the unchecked advance of technology.

Paul Romer, who won a Nobel in economic science for his work on technological innovation and economic growth, has expressed alarm at the runaway market power and influence of the big tech companies. “Economists taught: ‘It’s the market. There’s nothing we can do,’” he said in an interview last year. “That’s really just so wrong.”

Anton Korinek, an economist at the University of Virginia, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel economist at Columbia University, have written a paper, “Steering Technological Progress,” which recommends steps from nudges for entrepreneurs to tax changes to pursue “labor-friendly innovations.”

Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Stanford, is a technology optimist in general. But in an essay to be published this spring in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he warns of “the Turing trap.” …(More)”

Nudges: Four reasons to doubt popular technique to shape people’s behavior

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Article by Magda Osman: “Throughout the pandemic, many governments have had to rely on people doing the right thing to reduce the spread of the coronavirus – ranging from social distancing to handwashing. Many enlisted the help of psychologists for advice on how to “nudge” the public to do what was deemed appropriate.

Nudges have been around since the 1940s and originally were referred to as behavioural engineering. They are a set of techniques developed by psychologists to promote “better” behaviour through “soft” interventions rather than “hard” ones (mandates, bans, fines). In other words, people aren’t punished if they fail to follow them. The nudges are based on psychological and behavioural economic research into human behaviour and cognition.

The nudges can involve subtle as well as obvious methods. Authorities may set a “better” choice, such as donating your organs, as a default – so people have to opt out of a register rather than opt in. Or they could make a healthy option more attractive through food labelling.

But, despite the soft approach, many people aren’t keen on being nudged. During the pandemic, for example, scientists examined people’s attitudes to nudging in social and news media in the UK, and discovered that half of the sentiments expressed in social media posts were negative…(More)”.

Interoperable, agile, and balanced

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Brookings Paper on Rethinking technology policy and governance for the 21st century: “Emerging technologies are shifting market power and introducing a range of risks that can only be managed through regulation. Unfortunately, current approaches to governing technology are insufficient, fragmented, and lack the focus towards actionable goals. This paper proposes three tools that can be leveraged to support fit-for-purpose technology regulation for the 21st century: First, a transparent and holistic policymaking levers that clearly communicate goals and identify trade-offs at the national and international levels; second, revamped efforts to collaborate across jurisdictions, particularly through standard-setting and evidence gathering of critical incidents across jurisdictions; and third, a shift towards agile governance, whether acquired through the system, design, or both…(More)”.

Technology and the Global Struggle for Democracy

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Essay by Manuel Muniz: “The commemoration of the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump showed that the extreme political polarization that fueled the riot also frames Americans’ interpretations of it. It would, however, be gravely mistaken to view what happened as a uniquely American phenomenon with uniquely American causes. The disruption of the peaceful transfer of power that day was part of something much bigger.

As part of the commemoration, President Joe Biden said that a battle is being fought over “the soul of America.” What is becoming increasingly clear is that this is also true of the international order: its very soul is at stake. China is rising and asserting itself. Populism is widespread in the West and major emerging economies. And chauvinistic nationalism has re-emerged in parts of Europe. All signs point to increasing illiberalism and anti-democratic sentiment around the world.

Against this backdrop, the US hosted in December a (virtual) “Summit for Democracy” that was attended by hundreds of national and civil-society leaders. The message of the gathering was clear: democracies must assert themselves firmly and proactively. To that end, the summit devoted numerous sessions to studying the digital revolution and its potentially harmful implications for our political systems.

Emerging technologies pose at least three major risks for democracies. The first concerns how they structure public debate. Social networks balkanize public discourse by segmenting users into ever smaller like-minded communities. Algorithmically-driven information echo chambers make it difficult to build social consensus. Worse, social networks are not liable for the content they distribute, which means they can allow misinformation to spread on their platforms with impunity…(More)”.

The Tech That Comes Next

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Book by Amy Sample Ward and Afua Brice: “Who is part of technology development, who funds that development, and how we put technology to use all influence the outcomes that are possible. To change those outcomes, we must – all of us – shift our relationship to technology, how we use it, build it, fund it, and more. In The Tech That Comes Next, Amy Sample Ward and Afua Bruce – two leaders in equitable design and use of new technologies – invite you to join them in asking big questions and making change from wherever you are today. 

This book connects ideas and conversations across sectors from artificial intelligence to data collection, community centered design to collaborative funding, and social media to digital divides. Technology and equity are inextricably connected, and The Tech That Comes Next helps you accelerate change for the better….(More)“