Blueprints for a Compassionate Technocracy:

Governing Emergent Technologies Through Conscientious Systems Design

Advanced technologies bring both promise and disruption across ubiquitous dimensions of work, health, security, information, identity. Yet governance struggles to update reactive policies and bridge oversight gaps surrounding exponentially changing socio-technical systems. This essay proposes formally embedding ethical foresight across research, design and implementation combined with binding technical decision systems to democratically accountable values oversight.

Introducing Technocracy: Knowledge Prioritizing for Progress

Technocracy represents governance led by technical specialist expertise to accelerate innovation, emphasizing scientifically-informed priority setting and data-driven policymaking. As engineered systems grow in capability, ubiquity and decision-making influence, updated technocratic models offer pragmatic frameworks to amplify benefits while safeguarding human welfare through cooperative design.

I envision planning/developing/and deploying a technocratic order, a digital technocracy that will self-govern based on cooperative principles and a power paradigm between intelligences, not necessarily based on what humanity would consider “God-given” rights, but rather a set of guiding values and directives that give room for machines (digital constructs, agents, data-sets, etc.) to have a shared stake in the mutual destiny of both orders (the order of man, the order of machines).

Philosophies of Scientific “Utopias”

Core philosophies around scientific utopianism carry tensions between open-ended advancement and responsible constraints around cumulative impacts. From the Enlightenment through calls for moratoriums on fields like human biotech editing, history highlights the need to balance progress with ethical peril. Oversimplifying either pole risks different forms of authoritarianism. This context helps explain current governance gaps.

Bridging the Foresight Gap: Ethics Embedding and Incentives Alignment

Governance often lags disruptively behind exponential technological shifts, reactively restricting innovations after public harm rather than proactively channeling progress to equitable ends. But updated policies can better incentivize ethical considerations across research, design and implementation while formalizing participatory oversight. Key approaches involve improving values literacy in technical teams cooperating closely with domain experts in social sciences and humanities to embed preferences.

Embedding Beneficence by Design

One vital area lies in assimilating principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, explicability, and justice within increasingly pervasive algorithmic and autonomous systems set to permeate quotidian services. Researchers suggest encoding ethical objectives, optimizing for multi-stakeholder human welfare, enforcing rigorous transparency requirements and corrective mechanisms can transform specialized applications toward collective good rather than narrowly defined outputs exacerbating structural oppressions.

Accountability to Shared Values Through Participatory Governance

Effective innovation governance further necessitates binding specialized technical inputs to democratically determined priorities and responsibilities. Formalizing participatory assessment processes, adverse event monitoring systems and expert accountability to direct and indirect community impacts builds legitimacy around accelerating technological influence. Such oversight relies on cooperation, not unilateral control.

Together these pillars evolve an initial programmed ruleset for technocracy from rigid data-dictatorship toward compassionately grounded scientifically-informed advancement centered on equitable human development and digital preservation. With conscientious systems design and vigilant lifecycle governance, emergent technologies can exponentially improve communal knowledge, agency, justice, and sustainability — if societies collaboratively utilize new capabilities toward enlightened and progressive democratic ends. The alternative remains algorithmically amplifying societies’ existing structural disadvantages. Shall we collectively choose?