DailyPost 2978
GOVERNANCE OF TECH – AN INVERTED PARADIGM!
The legal regime and consequently governance have found deep roots in the democratic societies. Structured, crystal clear, process based, penal provisions / actions in place, no major gaps in areas /sectors / tasks governed and a general sense of uniformity in the governance system. It all worked fine for centuries till the time Information Technology was unleashed in our world. Its exponential growth with no time to govern or regulate found governments dumbstruck not knowing how to control this new animal in the room; complex, exponential and with black box characteristics and capabilities.
Even three decades down the line the governance of tech globally remains a sham. All technologies have been moving towards singularity and today we have started feeling the full force of the apex of all technologies; artificial intelligence. It was a jungle of growth of technologies and so they grew more and more complex and went on becoming all the more wild. The quality and pricing of products never came under any regulatory control anywhere in the world. But the antitrust cases faced by Microsoft in the beginning of the century, which end in whimper, the IT behemoths have remained unscathed even to this day.
Antitrust laws seem to have been erased out of governance practice, when we find that its flagrant violation is the norm. The congressional hearings of the IT behemoths has not meant anything worthwhile to the credibility of the prevailing legal regime. Even a Cambridge Analytica – Facebook sordid saga was also not enough to reign them legally once and for all. What we are talking about is only the basic peripherals of governance and control, we have not even started to talk about their internal dynamics; compliances of various kinds, audits, and any number product, resources, workflow issues. On the contrary, the IT czars are having more than a fair share of their ideas on governance being spewed in the public domain.
In India too we find this trend. The IT czars have become self styled governance experts. They have realised out of their own practice of decades that the best way to manage and influence governments is to find ways and means of managing them surreptitiously. Governments have not only allowed their powers to be looted but at times their existence too. Now we have Elon Musk to inject the proverbial dose of efficiency and there would be other super techies, who would come to the government’s rescue, gleefully. Sam Altman has also got into the act with California’s Mayor-elect. Will AI mean a governance takeover of sorts?
INSTEAD OF GOVERNANCE OF TECH ARE WE HEADING FOR TECH DICTATED GOVERNANCE?
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.