Anticipating Risk, Regulating Tech: A Playbook for Ethical Technology Governance
Summary
IFTF’s Ethical OS Toolkit has been used by many organizations and agencies across the civic sector, including the California state legislature, the United States Conference of Mayors, and other local governments, to bring more foresight and long-term thinking to policy decisions about new technologies. In response to high demand from government entities, and with support from the Tingari-Silverton Foundation, the IFTF Governance Futures Lab has developed this Playbook for Ethical Tech Governance. Adapted from the original Ethical OS, the Playbook will equip civil servants with the skills and tools to proactively resolve ethical dilemmas emerging from the constantly evolving landscape of new technology and new social and political dynamics. It’s intended to help those working in government, or leaders in the public sector, to make better long-term decisions by increasing their foresight capacity, allowing them to develop future-facing regulatory structures that help them anticipate the worst consequences of technology before they happen. In this session, Ilana Lipsett will present Institute for the Future's Playbook for Ethical Tech Governance, a decision-making guide for governments and leaders who are charged with regulating change and mitigating risk, all while encouraging innovation. The guide was designed to help safeguard against both intended and unintended consequences of techno-social shifts. This session will include an overview of the Playbook, along with a live demo of how to apply these principles and put them into action using a Decision Tree worksheet that accompanies the guide.
Key Insights
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Social media platforms in 2016 operated without anticipating democratic harms, exemplifying the failure of self-regulation in tech.
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Shoshana Zuboff’s theory of 'tragedy of the uncommons' explains how private commercial interests govern spaces assumed to be public.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s 2010 shift of Facebook’s privacy default from private to public reflects tech’s power to redefine social norms absent laws.
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Technology creates as many new problems as solutions, requiring future-facing governance to avoid post-traumatic innovation responses.
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Humans struggle to imagine futures distinct from the past, limiting foresight unless we deliberately practice futures thinking to expand mental models.
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Future-proofing technology governance involves envisioning both positive and negative consequences of emerging technologies and regulatory decisions.
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The IFTF playbook uses near-term and long-term future scenarios and decision trees to help policymakers anticipate ethical dilemmas in tech governance.
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Including impacted communities in governance conversations through participatory processes ensures that diverse lived experiences shape technology regulation.
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Ethical tech governance is applicable beyond policymakers to civic designers, businesses, and communities to prepare for emerging tech impacts.
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Decolonizing futures thinking and diversifying technology creators helps democratize power and prevents narrow cultural perspectives from dominating tech futures.
Notable Quotes
"In our information civilization, the information space that people assume to be public is actually ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit."
"We decided these would be the social norms now, and we just went for it."
"Technology generates as many new problems as new solutions."
"The internet as the self-regulating market is a failed experiment."
"Future thinking helps us create future memories, essentially to hack our neurobiology and trick our brains into creating pathways to imagine possible futures."
"Ethical technology governance means anticipating the long-term social impacts of technology today and acting to protect essential public goods."
"When something of massive consequence happens that no one predicted, it usually means we have failed to point our imagination in the right direction."
"Whoever has been and might continue to be the most negatively impacted absolutely needs to be centered and have their voices at the table."
"Regulation is part of the solution, but by diversifying who makes technology and embedding safeguards, we can better prevent corruption of well-intentioned products."
"Futures thinking is not about predicting the future, but about being smarter about anticipating risks and consequences of our actions today."
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