Joseph Bak-Coleman et al write:

Search engines, online banking, social-media platforms and large-language models, such as ChatGPT, are among the many computational systems that offer (or could offer) tremendous benefits. They provide people with unprecedented access to information. They help to connect hundreds of millions of individuals. And they could make all sorts of tasks easier, from writing computer code to preparing scientific manuscripts.

Such innovations also come with risks.

The speed at which content can be generated and shared creates new possibilities for amplifying hate speech, misinformation and disinformation. Decision-making that is augmented by algorithms can exacerbate existing societal biases and create new forms of inequity, for instance in policing and health care. And generative artificial-intelligence (AI) systems that create visual and written content at scale could be used in ways for which the world is not prepared, culturally or legally.

Although an increasing number of universities, institutes, think tanks and government organizations are attempting to make sense of and improve the digital world, technology companies are, in our view, deploying a range of tactics to influence debate about the tools they are developing. As independent researchers studying the societal impacts of digital information technologies, we continually weigh the risks of corporations taking legal action against us for the most basic scholarly activities: collecting and sharing data, analysing findings, publishing papers and distributing results. Also, the type of data made available tends to focus research efforts on the behaviour of users, rather than on the design of the platforms themselves.

The challenges of climate change and ecosystem degradation have similarities to those now stemming from the global information ecosystem in terms of complexity, scale and importance. In the same way as bodies such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conduct assessments of global environmental change that inform evidence-based policy, an analogous panel is now needed to understand and address the impact of emerging information technologies on the world’s social, economic, political and natural systems. [Continue reading…]