Random Access - Tuesday, June 29, 1999On technological change and social disruption
Morals and ethics in the information ageby Chris Gulker
Is modern, technologically-driven society driving us to a better, or a worse life?This is a favorite theme that I found myself pondering yet again as I waited for a breakfast appointment in, of all places, Las Vegas. There's certainly no town like Las Vegas for cogitating on moral and ethical issues, and, indeed, the subject of ethics and computers was to be the topic of my breakfast meeting.
A recent quote came to mind - the words of author and academic Francis Fukuyama.: "The greatest problems we face are in our moral and social life. Everything else is going pretty well."
Fukuyama has a long article in the current Atlantic Monthly titled "The Great Disruption", a treatise about the social disruption that he feels is accompanying the United States' transition from an industrial economy to an information economy. Even as our material well-being shows constant improvement, deeply troubling moral and ethical issues rise daily in places like Kosovo and Littleton, Colorado.
Futurist Alvin Toffler has labeled this epoch the "Third Wave", the previous two waves being the transition from hunter-gatherer society to agriculture, and from agriculture to industry.
Both movements caused huge social disruption. Some might argue that the tale of Adam and Eve is an allegory for the transition from the "natural" hunter-gatherer state to the social and economic architectures required for agrarian society. Dickens prospered by chronicling the wrenching disruption caused by the transition from agricultural to industrial economies.
Fukuyama offers that the social disruption that began in the 1960s, and which quickly saw most negative social indicators like crime rise sharply through the 1990s, were the result of the fundamental economic change that was taking place. Many observers blame other influences, like the welfare state or the decline of traditional religion, but Fukuyama thinks that a more profound shift was in process. The decline of religion and family orientation were symptoms, not root causes.
While many of us equate the information age with the rise of the Internet, the 1960s saw the US begin the move from the muscle jobs of an industrial society to today's economy where 60% of jobs can be described as "office work". Most Americans are information workers now, where, a generation ago, most did physical labor. In the process, almost everything about our social behavior changed.
Women entered the work force in huge numbers, and the nature of families changed sharply. Divorce rates shot to 50%, and 1 out of 3 U.S. children are now born out of wedlock. Family, which Fukuyama argues had been diminishing as a social organism for 200 years, took a particularly sharp hit.
Freedom and individualism have come to be more highly prized. Governments and corporations have devolved power from centralized control to relying on people to self-organize. Self-organization in turn relies on free-flowing information to establish rules and norms that lead to individual success and fulfillment.
The 21st century will rely heavily on informal norms as well as more formal rules and laws argues Fukuyama. Internet denizens already know about this process: "netiquette" is one such example of rules that sprang seemingly from thin air, without any central enforcement body. This is the essence of self-organizing communities.
Simply put, people saw that things would work better if everyone kept their behavior within certain limits. This didn't mean that there weren't instances of egregious abuse, but it did mean that by and large people were guided by enlightened self-interest. We've come to see that we can do well in the world by extending cautious trust to people who don't happen to be of the same family, or religion, or nationality.
I first observed this when my stepson began regularly contacting teenagers all over the world who liked the same music he did. Their community was self-organizing, self-governing and built completely on shared norms and tastes.
Other broad-based communal norms have sprung to wide acceptance. Spammers, for instance, are the few, and held in universally low regard. Individual expression is not only allowed, but encouraged, as is vigorous debate. Only rarely are courts or law enforcement required to mediate issues in cyberspace.
Fukuyama notes that the social negative tidal wave rose coincidentally in many countries with differing cultures, simultaneously. The sharp decline in thos same indices in this decade has been simultaneous as well. The only common facet of these cultures was that all were being accelerated at the same time by the pace of global change.
The good news says Fukuyama, is that which can be broken can be made whole, albeit in new ways. Researchers at the University of Chicago have published studies suggesting that shared, communal norms are far more powerful than law at influencing behavior.
And since the Net has proved itself to be a powerful medium for self-organizing communities, I have little doubt that much of what is built in the near future will be built at least in part on the Net. New Declarations of Independence and Magna Cartas are daily being created, modified and encoded as FAQs.
This is the raw stuff of the future, in my very humble opinion, and no time like the present to get going on it.
So I'm off to my breakfast meeting to hear an idea about setting up a computer ethics curriculum that will help us all find our way in the 21st Century. Maybe just a little scary to be doing this in Las Vegas...
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