Should the government do more to protect my data?

In a world increasingly shaped by technology, governments must increase efforts to secure and enforce protection of your data. As digital divides emerge, it is vital to ensure fairness in resource and power distribution. Laws enable the reflection of societal values in technology, foster responsible innovation, and enhance broad prosperity.

Technology and data play an increasingly important role in our lives. The speed with which cutting-edge applications based on artificial intelligence and similar breakthroughs become part of our everyday lives is hard to keep up with. This also has an impact on the make-up of our society – there are those among us who enjoy the benefits and opportunities of new devices and services, but there are also those who prefer to stick to the old ways of doing things.

In the public sector, this division has implications for how we interact with the government - for example, by using digital identity services such as DigiD, or by filing our income tax online. In the private sector, the last three decades have seen the meteoric rise of a handful of companies that dominate the digital society, cloud infrastructures, or the machines needed to make computer chips. All of this has implications for the distribution of power and our autonomy, for who has influence and who does not, for how wealth is generated and distributed, and for the prospects we have as individuals and as a society.

Laws and regulation are one way of responding to these developments. But they can also be seen to shape a better future going forward. In democratic countries - those that respect human rights and the rule of law - they allow to have a legitimate, multi-stakeholder debate that leads to binding rules. These rules define clear obligations to behave responsibly with respect to the technologies, as well as rights for those who are potentially harmed. In this sense, the question is not whether regulations and laws promote or stifle innovation. We should use them to negotiate the principles we want to see embedded in technology, the process by which innovations become part of our everyday lives in a responsible and enabling way, and how the opportunities that technology and data bring can create prosperity for all.

If interpreted in this way, the government should do more to protect (y)our data.

The short answer is “maybe”. Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the core of a transformative revolution affecting all aspects of society. AI-based tools are already integrated in our daily lives (look at your phone!). AI will have disruptive effects but it will also contribute to creating new jobs. The impact of this transformation is ultimately a matter of governance and politics, where us (the users and the society) are put first rather than the interests of a few private corporations.

The most honest answer is “maybe”. Alarmist claims and exaggerations on the potential and the impact of AI have appeared regularly in the press since the ‘70s - yet, most of the  jobs are still here, and many new types of jobs have been created.

The most recent wave of AI tools, such as ChatGPT or DALL-E, is based on Large (Language) Models, also called Foundation Models. These tools have reached impressive results and are already part of our daily lives: for instance, Google has integrated a language model (BERT) in its search engine  to improve its results as of 2019. The anthropomorphization of these machines, described as “intelligent”, “sovrahuman”, able to “understand”, is more marketing than reality. Their strength is also their weakness: as soon as they are applied to data or tasks that are a bit off with respect to the original purpose they were trained for, their performance drastically drops.

We are in the midst of a transition driven by AI technologies, and transitions have disruptive effects. When automation was introduced in the car industry, jobs were lost but new ones were created. The integration of AI in our lives must be planned as a support to do better by understanding what skills we want to preserve and which ones we might concede to AI rather than replace us. A recent paper appeared in Science on the use of ChatGPT in the context of professional writing tasks has shown that those who used ChatGPT (in this experimental context) increased their productivity, reducing the time spent on “boring” tasks and shifting it to more creative ones. However, the study did not show a leveling effect: mediocre writers did not improve, and neither did the good writers.

Rather than “stealing”, AI will definitely change our jobs in ways that are unpredictable now. Like any other innovation, AI may make some jobs obsolete, but we must work for a positive outcome: even coding will change, meaning that nowadays software engineers may be jobless in the future. We need to remember that every transition has a cost, and it is our duty as a society to decide how this transition happens and protect the most vulnerable. In the words of prof. Luciano Floridi, we must make AI “work against wrong doing, support human responsibility, and make us more humans”.

Higher alcohol levels in the blood do not seem to improve pronunciation skills in a non-native language, nor make them any worse. In the mother tongue, however, pronunciation does worsen under the influence of alcohol. These are the results of a study conducted by us during Lowlands Science 2018 .

During Lowlands Science 2018, we asked over 100 participants to take a breathalyzer test and asked them to say sentences in both their first language (Dutch) and English. We assessed the intelligibility of the pronunciations in both languages by having (sober) Dutch native speakers rate the Dutch pronunciations, and English native speakers rate the English pronunciations online. While pronunciation of the Dutch sentences was rated lower for participants with a higher blood alcohol concentration, the alcohol level had no effect on the rating of the English sentences. We also made a video about how we conducted this research.

The negative effect on speaking in the mother tongue is due to the impact of alcohol on the fine motor skills needed to move the tongue to speak. However, the absence of this negative effect in the non-native language cannot be clearly explained based on this study. It could be that the reduced fine motor skills cause the influence of the mother tongue (the accent) on the non-native language to become less apparent. However, it is also possible that alcohol does not equally affect the brain regions responsible for speaking a native language versus a non-native language. More details about the study can be read in the academic article published based on this research.

A good book evokes a world that, while different from the day-to-day reality of the reader, the reader feels drawn to. In a good book, life and love, desires and fears are made palpable through the style and voice of the narrator.

To the question what makes a good book, there are at least three types of answers. First, what someone thinks is a good book depends on the views on literature held by the reader or group of readers. This opinion on what is or should be good literature is called poetics. For example, someone who thinks a novel should reflect contemporary societal reality as realistically as possible holds a different view of literature than someone who likes fairy tales or fantasy. Or, a reader or book club especially interested in the lives of famous people will prefer to choose a biography or autobiography rather than a made-up story. And, those who like classical, regular, and rhyming poetry will not readily reach for a collection of poems with experimental verses.

A second answer is of a more institutional nature: good books are books to which authoritative readers and institutions, such as publishers, reviewers, teachers, and members of literary juries, attach meaning and value. Their decisions to publish, discuss, teach, and award a prize to a book determine the value assigned to a book in a society. This, according to the field theory of French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, is mainly about symbolic value, although it can of course be converted into a financial value, for example when favourable reviews boost sales of a book or when a literary prize involves a lot of money.

A third answer is that the value of a book is determined by an individual reader’s personal taste, preferences, and repertoire (all the books they have previously read). Personally, I like books that do not confirm what I already know and believe, but that confront me with a world of imagination that is strange and often disturbing; books that challenge my own ideas about literature and the world. I like books that allow for many different interpretations rather than forcing one specific interpretation on the reader, and that in this way re-energizes the readers’ thinking.