AI for social good is a thriving research topic and a frequently declared goal of AI strategies and regulation. This article investigates the requirements necessary in order for AI to actually serve a public interest, and hence be socially good. The authors propose shifting the focus of the discourse towards democratic governance processes when developing and deploying AI systems. The article draws from the rich history of public interest theory in political philosophy and law, and develops a framework for ‘public interest AI’. The framework consists of (1) public justification for the AI system, (2) an emphasis on equality, (3) deliberation/ co-design process, (4) technical safeguards, and (5) openness to validation. This framework is then applied to two case studies, namely SyRI, the Dutch welfare fraud detection project, and UNICEF’s Project Connect, that maps schools worldwide. Through the analysis of these cases, the authors conclude that public interest is a helpful and practical guide for the development and governance of AI for the people.
This article points out a struggle of today's societies with the traditional concepts of civil disobedience and stresses the need for reevaluation of the concept of civil disobedience for policy making and public discourse. Starting with a minimal definition of civil disobedience, the article introduces Hannah Arendt's approach for a legitimisation of civil disobedience and discusses her ideas for digital actions, which are increasingly framed as digital forms of civil disobedience. Addressing WikiLeaks as an example of digital civil disobedience, the author problematises the internal secrecy of WikiLeaks and the focus on Julian Assange as a single decision-maker. Both aspects challenge Arendt's understanding of legitimate civil disobedience.Even though traditional criteria of civil disobedience need to be revisited in the digital age, organisations or disobedience actors might themselves in their actions be well-advised to comply with the principles they fight for.
Abstract:Digital technologies have fostered the rise of new forms of civil disobedience that change and challenge established notions of this form of political action. This paper examines digital civil disobedience using the concept of friction to explore contested entanglements of this kind of protest and its new technological adaptations, as well as tensions on the conceptual level of civil disobedience. The paper is split into in three sections which offer analyses of (a) the historical dimension of this form of protest, (b) seven factors that represent some of the features of contemporary digital forms of civil disobedience, and (c) the recurring motif of power of information within digital civil disobedience. The paper is centered on the notion that transformations of civil disobedience demand a reconsideration of traditional understandings of civil disobedience to meet the conditions of our current society.
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