Technology that undermines freedom of thought ultimately undermines innovation, and that is not good for anyone.
This will be the year we take back control of our minds and regain our freedom to think for ourselves. From persuasive design to behavioral micro-targeting through emotion recognition technology, predictive policing and neuropolitics, in the past decade the goal of much new and emerging technology has been about curating what Shoshana Zuboff calls “human futures,” exploiting our data to judge and control what we think and feel and ultimately how we behave.
In 2016, when Cambridge Analytica was mining the minds of electorates around the world using behavioral microtargeting techniques commonly used in online advertising, the idea of stopping surveillance-based advertising—the data-driven fuel that powers the internet—was unthinkable. This past year, however, we have seen the EU’s Digital Services Act put the brakes on targeted advertising for minors. Even President Biden, in his 2022 State of the Union Address, flagged this as an issue for action.
In 2023, we will see regulators and lawmakers around the world make it clear that the surveillance capitalism business model based on targeted advertising is no longer acceptable—in law or in practice. There are already signs of big tech companies thinking carefully about the implications of their work for freedom of thought and taking radical steps. In 2021, Facebook scrapped its research on wearable brain-computer interfaces. In 2022, Microsoft announced that it would phase out public access to controversial emotional recognition technology.
This is just the beginning. Recognizing that there are some things we should never do with technology will mean that, in 2023, the world will wake up to the urgent need to protect our inner freedom in the technological era. We will see a change in the direction of travel of technology innovation to create tools that, instead of breaking down the walls around inner worlds, are designed to protect our inner freedom.
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