The massive global platforms are defining a new political economy.
Their corporate sovereignty will chafe with states' own sovereignty. Those same nations will curry favour with the platforms to win the putative economic benefits provided by them. The large platforms know that governments will be seeking to reign in their power, through regulation or legislation. These firms will accelerate their efforts to secure platform advantage and raise the baseline from which their settlement will be judged in the years to come.
National Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategies will emerge from more countries. The result? More grounds for co-operation and more reason to argue about intellectual property, privacy, data and license to operate.
Silicon Valley’s political culture — and how that has been codified into software, corporate culture and strategy — will continue to smell. The Valley will hire outsiders to fix these problems or, more likely, just for the optics. This will take years.
And before we’ve tackled that smell, crypto whizzes will establish governance mechanisms on emerging blockchain networks. They will do so with a narrow, ideological framing which will threaten to hurt us in the coming decades by which time these networks will mediate many of the resources we need. This matters because information technology systems affect how we build our understanding of the world; they affect how we perceive our set of choices; they affect how we act in that world.
In short: they affect our understanding both of the “is” and the “ought”.
