Book by Rolf K. Baltzersen: “In the era of digital communication, collective problem solving is increasingly important. Large groups can now resolve issues together in completely different ways, which has transformed the arts, sciences, business, education, technology, and medicine. Collective intelligence is something we share with animals and is different from machine learning and artificial intelligence. To design and utilize human collective intelligence, we must understand how its problem-solving mechanisms work. From democracy in ancient Athens, through the invention of the printing press, to COVID-19, this book analyzes how humans developed the ability to find solutions together. This wide-ranging, thought-provoking book is a game-changer for those working strategically with collective problem solving within organizations and using a variety of innovative methods. It sheds light on how humans work effectively alongside machines to confront challenges that are more urgent than what humanity has faced before…(More)”.
Citizens
Book by Jon Alexander: “What are we doing to ourselves when we tell ourselves we’re Consumers 3000 times a day?
What would it look like to put the same creativity and energy into involving people as Citizens?
What would you do in this time, if you truly believed in yourself and those around you?Jon Alexander spent the first decade of his career in the advertising industry, selling some of the world’s biggest brands. Then he realised he was caught up in a story he didn’t believe in – the Consumer Story. Here, with New York Times bestselling writer Ariane Conrad, he shows us what we need to do to step into a bigger idea of ourselves: as collaborative, caring, creative Citizens who can shape our communities, organisations, and nations for the better…(More)”.
For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics
Book by Alex John London: “The foundations of research ethics are riven with fault lines emanating from a fear that if research is too closely connected to weighty social purposes an imperative to advance the common good through research will justify abrogating the rights and welfare of study participants. The result is an impoverished conception of the nature of research, an incomplete focus on actors who bear important moral responsibilities, and a system of ethics and oversight highly attuned to the dangers of research but largely silent about threats of ineffective, inefficient, and inequitable medical practices and health systems. In For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics, Alex John London defends a conception of the common good that grounds a moral imperative with two requirements. The first is to promote research that generates the information necessary to enable key social institutions to effectively, efficiently, and equitably safeguard the basic interests of individuals. The second is to ensure that research is organized as a voluntary scheme of social cooperation that respects its various contributors’ moral claims to be treated as free and equal. Connecting research to the goals of a just social order grounds a framework for assessing and managing research risk that reconciles these requirements and justifies key oversight practices in non-paternalistic terms. Reconceiving research ethics as resolving coordination problems and providing credible assurance that these requirements are being met expands the issues and actors that fall within the purview of the field and provides the foundation for a more unified and coherent approach to domestic and international research…(More)”.
The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines
Book by By David Autor, David A. Mindell and Elisabeth B. Reynolds: “The United States has too many low-quality, low-wage jobs. Every country has its share, but those in the United States are especially poorly paid and often without benefits. Meanwhile, overall productivity increases steadily and new technology has transformed large parts of the economy, enhancing the skills and paychecks of higher-paid knowledge workers. What’s wrong with this picture? Why have so many workers benefited so little from decades of growth? The Work of the Future shows that technology is neither the problem nor the solution. We can build better jobs if we create institutions that leverage technological innovation and also support workers though long cycles of technological transformation.
Building on findings from the multiyear MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, the book argues that we must foster institutional innovations that complement technological change. Skills programs that emphasize work-based and hybrid learning (in person and online), for example, empower workers to become and remain productive in a continuously evolving workplace. Industries fueled by new technology that augments workers can supply good jobs, and federal investment in R&D can help make these industries worker-friendly. We must act to ensure that the labor market of the future offers benefits, opportunity, and a measure of economic security to all….(More)”.
Why Privacy Matters
Book by Neil Richards: “Many people tell us that privacy is dead, or that it is dying, but such talk is a dangerous fallacy. This book explains what privacy is, what privacy isn’t, and why privacy matters. Privacy is the extent to which human information is known or used, and it is fundamentally about the social power that human information provides over other people. The best way to ensure that power is checked and channeled in ways that benefit humans and their society is through rules—rules about human information. And because human information rules of some sort are inevitable, we should craft our privacy rules to promote human values. The book suggests three such values that our human information rules should promote: identity, freedom, and protection. Identity allows us to be thinking, self-defining humans; freedom lets us be citizens; while protection safeguards our roles as situated consumers and workers, allowing us, as members of society, to trust and rely on other people so that we can live our lives and hopefully build a better future together…(More)”.
Breakthrough: The Promise of Frontier Technologies for Sustainable Development
Book edited by Homi Kharas, John McArthur, and Izumi Ohno: “Looking into the future is always difficult and often problematic—but sometimes it’s useful to imagine what innovations might resolve today’s problems and make tomorrow better. In this book, 15 distinguished international experts examine how technology will affect the human condition and natural world within the next ten years. Their stories reflect major ambitions for what the future could bring and offer a glimpse into the possibilities for achieving the UN’s ambitious Sustainable Development Goals.
The authors were asked to envision future success in their respective fields, given the current state of technology and potential progress over the next decade. The central question driving their research: What are likely technological advances that could contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals at major scale, affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people or substantial geographies around the globe.
One overall takeaway is that gradualist approaches will not achieve those goals by 2030. Breakthroughs will be necessary in science, in the development of new products and services, and in institutional systems. Each of the experts responded with stories that reflect big ambitions for what the future may bring. Their stories are not projections or forecasts as to what will happen; they are reasoned and reasonable conjectures about what could happen. The editors’ intent is to provide a glimpse into the possibilities for the future of sustainable development.
At a time when many people worry about stalled progress on the economic, social, and environmental challenges of sustainable development, Breakthrough is a reminder that the promise of a better future is within our grasp, across a range of domains. It will interest anyone who wonders about the world’s economic, social, and environmental future…(More)”
The Digital Continent: Placing Africa in Planetary Networks of Work
Open Access Book by Mohammad Amir Anwar and Mark Graham: “As recently as the early 2010s, there were more internet users in countries like France or Germany than in all of Africa put together. But much changed in that decade, and 2018 marked the first year in human history in which a majority of the world’s population is now connected to the internet. This mass connectivity means that we have an internet that no longer connects only the world’s wealthy. Workers from Lagos to Johannesburg to Nairobi, and everywhere in between, can now apply for and carry out jobs coming from clients who themselves can be located anywhere in the world. Digital outsourcing firms can now also set up operations in the most unlikely of places in order to tap into hitherto disconnected labour forces. With CEOs in the Global North proclaiming that location is a concern of the past, and governments and civil society in Africa promising to create millions of jobs on the continent, The Digital Continent investigates what this new world of digital work means to the lives of African workers. Anwar and Graham draw on a five-year-long field study in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and Uganda, and over 200 interviews conducted with participants including gig workers, call and contact centre workers, small self-employed freelancers, business owners, government officials, labour union officials, and industry experts. Focusing on both platform-based remote work and call and contact centre work, the book examines the job quality implications of digital work for the lives and livelihoods of African workers…(More)”.
How digital transformation is driving economic change
Blog (and book) by Zia Qureshi: “We are living in a time of exciting technological innovations. Digital technologies are driving transformative change. Economic paradigms are shifting. The new technologies are reshaping product and factor markets and profoundly altering business and work. The latest advances in artificial intelligence and related innovations are expanding the frontiers of the digital revolution. Digital transformation is accelerating in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The future is arriving faster than expected.
A recently published book, “Shifting Paradigms: Growth, Finance, Jobs, and Inequality in the Digital Economy,” examines the implications of the unfolding digital metamorphosis for economies and public policy agendas….
Firms at the technological frontier have broken away from the rest, acquiring dominance in increasingly concentrated markets and capturing the lion’s share of the returns from the new technologies. While productivity growth in these firms has been strong, it has stagnated or slowed in other firms, depressing aggregate productivity growth. Increasing automation of low- to middle-skill tasks has shifted labor demand toward higher-level skills, hurting wages and jobs at the lower end of the skill spectrum. With the new technologies favoring capital, winner-take-all business outcomes, and higher-level skills, the distribution of both capital and labor income has tended to become more unequal, and income has been shifting from labor to capital.
One important reason for these outcomes is that policies and institutions have been slow to adjust to the unfolding transformations. To realize the promise of today’s smart machines, policies need to be smarter too. They must be more responsive to change to fully capture potential gains in productivity and economic growth and address rising inequality as technological disruptions create winners and losers.
As technology reshapes markets and alters growth and distributional dynamics, policies must ensure that markets remain inclusive and support wide access to the new opportunities for firms and workers. The digital economy must be broadened to disseminate new technologies and opportunities to smaller firms and wider segments of the labor force…(More)”.
Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know
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
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)”.