For U.S. intelligence agencies, the twenty-first century began with a shock, when 19 al Qaeda operatives hijacked four planes and perpetrated the deadliest attack ever on U.S. soil. In the wake of the attack, the intelligence community mobilized with one overriding goal: preventing another 9/11. The CIA, the National Security Agency, and the 15 other components of the U.S. intelligence community restructured, reformed, and retooled. Congress appropriated billions of dollars to support the transformation.

That effort paid off. In the nearly two decades that U.S. intelligence agencies have been focused on fighting terrorists, they have foiled numerous plots to attack the U.S. homeland, tracked down Osama bin Laden, helped eliminate the Islamic State’s caliphate, and found terrorists hiding everywhere from Afghan caves to Brussels apartment complexes. This has arguably been one of the most successful periods in the history of American intelligence.

But today, confronted with new threats that go well beyond terrorism, U.S. intelligence agencies face another moment of reckoning. From biotechnology and nanotechnology to quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI), rapid technological change is giving U.S. adversaries new capabilities and eroding traditional U.S. intelligence advantages. The U.S. intelligence community must adapt to these shifts or risk failure as the nation’s first line of defense.

The Digital Transformation (DX) is a broad term describing the changes and innovations brought about by the introduction of information and communication technologies into all aspects of society. One such innovation is to empower bottom-up, self-governing socio-technical systems for a range of applications. Such systems can be based on Ostrom’s design principles for self-governing institutions for sustainable common-pool resource management. However, two of these principles, both focusing on self-determination, are vulnerable to distortion: either from within, as a narrow clique take control and run the system in their own, rather than the collective, interest; or from without, as an external authority constrains opportunities for self-organisation. In this chapter, we propose that one approach to maintaining ‘good’, ‘democratic’ self-governance is to appeal to the transparent and inclusive knowledge management processes that were critical to the successful and sustained period of classical Athenian democracy, and reproduce those in computational form. We review a number of emerging technologies which could provide the building blocks for democratic self-governance in socio-technical systems. However, the reproduction of analogue social processes in digital form is not seamless and not without impact on, or consequences for, society, and we also consider a number of open issues which could disrupt this proposal. We conclude with the observation that ‘democracy’ is not an end-state, and emphasise that self-governing socio-technical systems need responsible design and deployment of technologies that allow for continuous re-design and self-organisation.

Corruption of the information ecosystem is not just a multiplier of two long-acknowledged existential threats to the future of humanity—climate change and nuclear weapons. Cyber-enabled information warfare has also become an existential threat in its own right, its increased use posing the realistic possibility of a global information dystopia, in which the pillars of modern democratic self-government—logic, truth, and reality—are shattered, and anti-Enlightenment values undermine civilization around the world. 

View full article

This document is a memo from the "Global Populisms and their International Diffusion Conference" held at Stanford University on March 1-2, 2019.

This is a work in progress. DO NOT cite without checking with the authors first.