How little we know about the dangers.
We can discover, “Like,” click on, and share information faster than ever before, guided by algorithms most of us don’t quite understand.
Some social scientists, journalists, and activists have been raising
concerns about how this is affecting our democracy, mental health, and
relationships, we haven’t seen biologists and ecologists weighing in as
much.
That’s changed with a new paper published in the prestigious science journal PNAS earlier this month, titled “Stewardship of global collective behavior.”
Seventeen researchers who specialize in widely different fields, from
climate science to philosophy, make the case that academics should treat
the study of technology’s large-scale impact on society as a “crisis
discipline.”
The authors warn that if left misunderstood and unchecked, we could see
unintended consequences of new technology contributing to phenomena such
as “election tampering, disease, violent extremism, famine, racism, and
war.”
Human collective dynamics are critical to the wellbeing of people and
ecosystems in the present and will set the stage for how we face global
challenges with impacts that will last centuries .There is no reason to suppose natural selection will have endowed us
with dynamics that are intrinsically conducive to human wellbeing or
sustainability. The same is true of communication technology, which has
largely been developed to solve the needs of individuals or single
organizations. Such technology, combined with human population growth,
has created a global social network that is larger, denser, and able to
transmit higher-fidelity information at greater speed. With the rise of
the digital age, this social network is increasingly coupled to
algorithms that create unprecedented feedback effects.
Insight from across academic disciplines demonstrates that past and
present changes to our social networks will have functional consequences
across scales of organization. Given that the impacts of communication
technology will transcend disciplinary lines, the scientific response
must do so as well. Unsafe adoption of technology has the potential to
both threaten wellbeing in the present and have lasting consequences for
sustainability. Mitigating risk to ourselves and posterity requires a
consolidated, crisis-focused study of human collective behavior.
Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the
actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals
generate and share information. In humans, information flows were
initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by
emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social
networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at
low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated
changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional
consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge
to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global
crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a
“crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science
have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and
regulators for the stewardship of social systems.