Welcome to the eleventh issue of my monthly newsletter

I'll be sharing analysis and short stories about digital transformation, practical recommendations, or recommended reading on this platform.

This time, I want to draw attention to a problematic trend I'm seeing when discussing Digital Governance and Tech Policy, namely that we are immitating the way computers think: binary. Yet as we know from other fields, constructive dialogue and workable solutions to social issues require us to find a middle-ground beyond the extremes. Why this matters, how I think we got here, and how we could reverse this trend in this month's newsletter.

Please enjoy!

The world of computers is the world of ones and zeros, of on and off, of simplicity and clarity. It is truly astonishing that by simple using two states we were able to build machines and run code on them, that solves complicated problems or lets us dive into virtual worlds increasingly indistinguishable from the real one.

Quantum computing with its famous superposition promises a new kind of revolution by flipping the binary order on its head, but that is a topic for another issue of this newsletter. This time I want to talk about an observation, namely that our discourse on digital technologies is increasingly mirroring the binary logic, seperating us into distinct groups of proponents of certain technologies and critics on the other side, leaving increasingly little room for compromise and nuanced debate.

While this might have started a while ago with the growing disappointment about the democratic potential of social media in the aftermath of the arab spring, I think we most clearly see this binary discourse and growing polarisation in the AI community.

If you try to follow researchers, entrepreneurs, and pundits on social media to get a feeling on where we are headed with artificial intelligence or you read popular media about technology, it quickly and rather clearly seems that you can be either for AI - lauding the use of nucelar power for data centers, criticizing regulatory efforts as anti-innovative, associating yourself with groups like the self-proclaimed "accelerationists" etc. - or you can be skeptical of AI - seeing it as yet another power grab by private actors, an extension of Western colonialism and capitalism, an extistential danger to humanity etc.

Over time, the discourse also seems to have become more aggressive with actors reaffirming themselves among the peers of their chosen group and pointing fingers more aggressively towards the other groups, dismissing their views outright. Whoever gets excited about a new AI use-case or technological break-through must be in the pocket of a tech-company and is probably out to disenfranchise a vulnerable group, whoever suggests that negative externatlities of an AI system should maybe be addressed by regulations is a luddite and enemy of progress. This perceived polarisation is also visible in taking a political stance as the example by the Financial Times for Silicon Valley shows. Whereas tech tycoons used to tend towards Democrats and moderate views, distinct camps have emerged at both ends of the political spectrum.

I find this polarisation problematic as first of all there is the danger of a self-reinforcing dynamic where we get more and more polarized in terms of our political views on technology. But also, just as in other fields, polarisation is a hindrance to constructive dialogue which I find particularly troubling when it comes to Tech Policy and Digital Governance. As previously mentioned here, there is already a considerable amount of "policy debt" with regard to digital technologies, so the pressure is high to have a nuanced and differentiated political debate on how to govern digital technologies and in particular AI.

But how did we get here? My hypothesis is that the increasing aggressiveness of the public discourse as seen in social media and popular publications can at least in part be attributed to a media failure of adequately representing the arguments and positions of AI researchers. The public appreciation of AI research has been very much focused on a certain type of AI researcher and entrepreneur coming from a technological background and operating for-profit companies (even if they haven't generated net profits for years in some cases) as evidenced by various rankings, e.g. the TIME list of People in AI.

Following a journalistic logic of competiting narratives and stories we of course also have other publications drawing attention to a different kind of AI researchers like the WIRED piece on various women working on AI safety. But because nuance and diffentiated takes apparently make for bad stories in the attention economy, tech journalists are more interested in presenting various camps and pitting them against each other, than to engage with the substance of what the research actually says. As researchers have argued, the dichotomy of the AI community does not necessarily reflect the reality, which seems to be more collaborative and much less binary.

This understanding needs to be strengthened and I suggest that we need more and better tech-journalists to help a broader public appreciate the nuances in Digital Governance debates. It works in other fields too and there is absolutely no reason that it can't work here. It is clear that we need a better discourse rather sooner than later. Even if computers for the foreseeable future will remain operating on the binary system, humans shouldn't.

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