Truthout

April 3, 2014

Emanuel Pastreich

Facebook has become a critical platform for international exchange that allows people around the world to seek out peers with similar interests and to begin serious exchanges with them about how to create a better world. Although Facebook is a for-profit organization that treats its users as potential advertisers and uses personal information gathered from postings as a private commodity for sale to third parties, nevertheless Facebook is still the best means to reach out to a broad audience and to develop a global audience.

Facebook was not intended for serious intellectual and political exchange. At present, you cannot easily seek out other people with common interests (or by region) using a search on Facebook and you cannot systematically store the materials that you send or receive through Facebook for easy reference. Information posted is designed to essentially disappear within a few days. In addition, there is no way for third parties to develop original apps to run on Facebook that would allow users to expand its functionality or customize their pages. There are many ways that those actually using Facebook can carry out the innovations necessary to make it a meaningful means of sharing information.

But in spite of all the limitations of Facebook, an increasing number of politically conscious users are pushing it to be a platform for profound debate on political and social issues, both locally or internationally, Even in its primitive current format, Facebook offers the possibility for a broad conversation with thoughtful individuals around the world and it is increasingly populated by individuals from developing nations, and thoughtful activists, who may even be middle school or high school students. That is to say, although it may not have been designed for that purpose, Facebook offers an opportunity for people who are completely locked out of the policy debate to contribute. Although there are specialized platforms for internet exchange available, Facebook is unique in cutting across class lines and international borders.

If we compare Facebook in terms of the potential for an individual to advocate for policy, develop a broad base of support on issues and seek out expert opinion, Facebook in its primitive current form is still years ahead of the United Nations, the World Bank, OECD or any of the international organizations supposedly engaged in global governance. Although those international organizations carry out their own informed internal debate, which is then distributed in a one-way manner to the hoi polloi via rather arcane technical texts, there is literally no means for someone like me, let alone a Nigerian merchant or a Chinese high school student, to have any say at all on policies those organizations put forth that impact the entire world. 

Let us compare what Facebook has the potential to become with the current United Nations, the main institution of global governance. The United Nations is extremely limited in its mandate and recognizes nation states alone as its members (although it works with corporations and NGOs on a daily basis). With the governing institutions of most nation states torn apart by the interests of multinational corporations and internal class divisions, often with a tiny minority monopolizing access to political power, there is literally no way for ordinary citizens (even in the tens of millions) to put forth a proposal to the United Nations General Assembly, let alone to pressure the United Nations to implement policies.

Facebook, the company, did not actually build Facebook; we did. The company Facebook was able to secure massive low-interest loans at our expense and use them to scale up global networks. Anyone with access to that much capital could have built a “Facebook.” We, the people, did the work of actually populating Facebook with people and contents.

We can think of the founders of Facebook as the equivalent of the robber barons who built the Union Pacific railroad in the 19th century. Although figures such as Clark Durant or Mark Hopkins raised money for the Union Pacific and built it for the shrewdest of profit motivations, over time those railroads were shaped into more rational institutions through the active demands of their users, people who advocated for such acts as the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, which outlawed short-haul discrimination and other predatory practices. Eventually, the free-wheeling railroads were made to conform to strict codes in the 20th century and moulded into reliable utilities.

It is not a moment too soon to start the hard work of transforming Facebook — or some avatar of Facebook — into a platform for participatory democratic global governance. We don’t have long to design a global response to the crisis of climate change through meaningful coordination of humanity’s actions; the institutions we assumed would respond to that global challenge have failed miserably.

We can’t wait to form human networks that can bring us together as a species. Now, sadly, we are fully integrated through systems of distribution, logistics and data distribution, but we do not know each other at all. We must overcome our ignorance and indifference to each other and form an entirely new form of participatory global governance to respond to global threats. At this moment Facebook may be our best hope.

Until we make forceful and concrete proposals for what Facebook could be and through our will and our creativity push Facebook in the direction it should move, it will not become anything more than a place to exchange pictures of soccer games and birthday cakes.

Here comes the hard part. Building a true, common, global community online by lobbying Facebook directly for changes in the rules of governance (allowing the users to decide by democratic process what the design and structure of Facebook will be) is near impossible in that such a for-profit organization has no incentive to accept such demands. On the other hand, alternative social networks tend to be extremely limited in their participants and are even farther from true representative governance than is the commercial Facebook. For liberal thinkers to exchange their liberal thoughts with each other is not particularly helpful to anyone. What we need is a broad discourse in terms everyone can understand.

The first step is to present a concrete vision for the future of social networks as a form of global governance and for the importance of that vision for the daily lives of the users of online social networking services like Facebook. That vision should include basis rules of governance first for how Facebook (I use Facebook here as a term for social networks in general, both contemporary and future) will be governed internally: how individual users can debate what the policy for Facebook at the micro and macro level should be and proceed to propose that policy for approval within the Facebook community.

The governance of Facebook starts with reforms that make it more accessible, more transparent, and more oriented to the needs of individuals and communities. We can start with simple reforms like allowing individuals to design applications on their own within Facebook and have the right to give or sell them on their own to other members.

That process could involve the formation of local elected communities for debating and determining local and global Facebook policy. Unlike the United States government, Facebook can serve as a place for input concerning policy and voting to approve that policy. We must recognize that Facebook is potentially a political entity (and already serves that role) and endow it with the proper functions to serve that purpose locally and globally.

Once internal rules are in place for how Facebook governs itself, the next step will be for Facebook to create structures for larger forms of global governance. Of course Facebook does not have offices or anything like the resources of a government, and perhaps it does not require them. At the same time, we must remember that governments around the world are hollowing out at a rapid pace these days and are not serving the function of governance.

The nature of governance in a future “Republic of Facebook” cannot be dictated in this article; it must be worked out through a series of meetings between informed and visionary figures who are committed to building a better world. We can imagine something like a constitutional convention for Facebook that would do that initial work of setting forth a vision and following up with continued refinements.

Of course those who want to employ Facebook merely as a place to post photographs of grandchildren and hamsters are free to do so. But for those committed to doing something greater, there are several directions possible for the advancement of the next generation of Facebook. Some of those directions suggest a new vision of governance.

A systematically administered Facebook could serve as a place for those with similar concerns around the world to meet and propose new projects for collaboration, new solutions to common problems. It could be a means for those who pursue similar goals in every corner of the globe to seek partners and collaborators for research, policy debate and implementation. In an age of limited financing, the potential to share funds between similar groups offers tremendous potential.

Of course Facebook, or whatever network replaces it, does not serve the role of a government in the full sense of the word. That role can be left to local governments best equipped to respond to the problems of broken sewers and electric grids. But when it comes to identifying an effective response to climate change by coordinating between groups around the world and implementing the solution, an improved Facebook can bring together the stakeholders in a sense that so-called legislatures full of professional politicians cannot.

If we have the will, and a sense of obligation in the face of global crisis, the platform of Facebook can be transformed into a legitimate form of global democratic governance. Some parts of that new system will build on the best of governance from the past 3,000 years, but other parts will be, perforce, unprecedented in human history and maybe even offer new hope to those who despair of humanity’s capacity to rise to today’s challenges.

original article

The Century-Long Challenge to Respond to Fukushima

Emanuel Pastreich (Director)

Layne Hartsell (Research Fellow)

The Asia Institute

More than two years after an earthquake and tsunami wreaked havoc on a Japanese power plant, the Fukushima nuclear disaster is one of the most serious threats to public health in the Asia-Pacific, and the worst case of nuclear contamination the world has ever seen. Radiation continues to leak from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi site into groundwater, threatening to contaminate the entire Pacific Ocean. The cleanup will require an unprecedented global effort.

Initially, the leaked radioactive materials consisted of cesium-137 and 134, and to a lesser degree iodine-131. Of these, the real long-term threat comes from cesium-137, which is easily absorbed into bodily tissue—and its half-life of 30 years means it will be a threat for decades to come. Recent measurements indicate that escaping water also has increasing levels of strontium-90, a far more dangerous radioactive material than cesium. Strontium-90 mimics calcium and is readily absorbed into the bones of humans and animals.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) recently announced that it lacks the expertise to effectively control the flow of radiation into groundwater and seawater and is seeking help from the Japanese government. TEPCO has proposed setting up a subterranean barrier around the plant by freezing the ground, thereby preventing radioactive water from eventually leaking into the ocean—an approach that has never before been attempted in a case of massive radiation leakage. TEPCO has also proposed erecting additional walls now that the existing wall has been overwhelmed by the approximately 400 tons per day of water flowing into the power plant.

But even if these proposals were to succeed, they would not constitute a long-term solution.

A New Space Race

Solving the Fukushima Daiichi crisis needs to be considered a challenge akin to putting a person on the moon in the 1960s. This complex technological feat will require focused attention and the concentration of tremendous resources over decades. But this time the effort must be international, as the situation potentially puts the health of hundreds of millions at risk. The long-term solution to this crisis deserves at least as much attention from government and industry as do nuclear proliferation, terrorism, the economy, and crime.

To solve the Fukushima Daiichi problem will require enlisting the best and the brightest to come up with a long-term plan to be implemented over the next century. Experts from around the world need to contribute their insights and ideas. They should come from diverse fields—engineering, biology, demographics, agriculture, philosophy, history, art, urban design, and more. They will need to work together at multiple levels to develop a comprehensive assessment of how to rebuild communities, resettle people, control the leakage of radiation, dispose safely of the contaminated water and soil, and contain the radiation. They will also need to find ways to completely dismantle the damaged reactor, although that challenge may require technologies not available until decades from now.

Such a plan will require the development of unprecedented technologies, such as robots that can function in highly radioactive environments. This project might capture the imagination of innovators in the robotics world and give a civilian application to existing military technology. Improved robot technology would prevent the tragic scenes of old people and others volunteering to enter into the reactors at the risk of their own wellbeing.

The Fukushima disaster is a crisis for all of humanity, but it is a crisis that can serve as an opportunity to construct global networks for unprecedented collaboration. Groups or teams aided by sophisticated computer technology can start to break down into workable pieces the immense problems resulting from the ongoing spillage. Then experts can come back with the best recommendations and a concrete plan for action. The effort can draw on the precedents of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but it must go far further.

There is no reason why detailed information on radiation emissions and the state of the reactors should not be publicly available in enough detail to satisfy the curiosity of a trained nuclear engineer. If the question of what to do next comes down to the consensus of millions of concerned citizens engaged in trying to solve the problem, we will have a strong alternative to the secrecy that has dominated so far. Could our cooperation on the solution to Fukushima be an imperative to move beyond the existing barriers to our collective intelligence posed by national borders, corporate ownership, and intellectual property concerns?

A project to classify stars throughout the university has demonstrated that if tasks are carefully broken up, it is possible for laypeople to play a critical role in solving technical problems. In the case of Galaxy Zoo, anyone who is interested can qualify to go online and classify different kinds of stars situated in distant galaxies and enter the information into a database. It’s all part of a massive effort to expand our knowledge of the universe, which has been immensely successful and demonstrated that there are aspects of scientific analysis that does not require a Ph.D. In the case of Fukushima, if an ordinary person examines satellite photographs online every day, he or she can become more adept than a professor in identifying unusual flows carrying radioactive materials. There is a massive amount of information that requires analysis related to Fukushima, and at present most of it goes virtually unanalyzed.

An effective response to Fukushima needs to accommodate both general and specific perspectives. It will initially require a careful and sophisticated setting of priorities. We can then set up convergence groups that, aided by advanced computation and careful efforts at multidisciplinary integration, could respond to crises and challenges with great effectiveness. Convergence groups can also serve as a bridge between the expert and the layperson, encouraging a critical continuing education about science and society.

Responding to Fukushima is as much about educating ordinary people about science as it is about gathering together highly paid experts. It is useless for experts to come up with novel solutions if they cannot implement them. But implementation can only come about if the population as a whole has a deeper understanding of the issues. Large-scale networked science efforts that are inclusive will make sure that no segments of society are left out.

If the familiar players (NGOs, central governments, corporations, and financial institutions) are unable to address the unprecedented crises facing humanity, we must find ways to build social networks, not only as a means to come up with innovative concepts, but also to promote and implement the resulting solutions. That process includes pressuring institutions to act. We need to use true innovation to pave the way to an effective application of science and technology to the needs of civil society. There is no better place to start than the Internet and no better topic than the long-term response to the Fukushima disaster.

Originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus on September 3, 2013

We must come to terms with the current information revolution and take the first steps to form global institutions that will assure that our society, and our governments, can continue to function through this chaotic and disconcerting period. The exponential increase in the power of computers will mean that changes the go far beyond the limits of slow-moving human government. We will need to build new institutions to the crisis that are substantial and long-term. It will not be a matter that can be solved by adding a new division to Homeland Security or Google.

We do not have any choice. To make light of the crisis means allowing shadowy organizations to usurp for themselves immense power through the collection and distortion of information. Failure to keep up with technological change in an institutional sense will mean that in the future government will be at best a symbolic façade of authority with little authority or capacity to respond to the threats of information manipulation. In the worst case scenario, corporations and government agencies could degenerate into warring factions, a new form of feudalism in which invisible forces use their control of information to wage murky wars for global domination.

No degree of moral propriety among public servants, or corporate leaders, can stop the explosion of spying and the propagation of false information that we will witness over the next decade. The most significant factor behind this development will be Moore’s Law which stipulates that the number of microprocessors that can be placed economically on a chip will double every 18 months (and the cost of storage has halved every 14 months) — and not the moral decline of citizens. This exponential increase in our capability to gather, store, share, alter and fabricate information of every form will offer tremendous opportunities for the development of new technologies. But the rate of change of computational power is so much faster than the rate at which human institutions can adapt — let alone the rate at which the human species evolves — that we will face devastating existential challenges to human civilization.

The Challenges we face as a result of the Information Revolution

The dropping cost of computational power means that individuals can gather gigantic amounts of information and integrate it into meaningful intelligence about thousands, or millions, of individuals with minimal investment. The ease of extracting personal information from garbage, recordings of people walking up and down the street, taking aerial photographs and combining then with other seemingly worthless material and then organizing it in a meaningful manner will increase dramatically. Facial recognition, speech recognition and instantaneous speech to text will become literally child’s play. Inexpensive, and tiny, surveillance drones will be readily available to collect information on people 24/7 for analysis. My son recently received a helicopter drone with a camera as a present that cost less than $40. In a few years elaborate tracking of the activities of thousands, or millions, of people will become literally child’s play.

At the same time, increasing powerful technology will make the fabrication of texts, images, and, increasingly, videos and sounds easy. We can see already in the latest generation of virtual reality sophisticated forms of mimetic representation that promise to be indistinguishable from reality in the near future. The drastic drop in the cost of computation will make it possible to create elaborate histories for virtual events, and biographies for virtual people, that will make those realities entirely convincing. Once a virtual person has forty years of complex memories and records (from credit records to medical records and diaries), the challenge of distinguishing him from an actual individual will be difficult. In addition, as virtual reality merges with social networks, the chaos will be extreme. Facebook friends may end up being partially, and then primarily, avatars controlled by supercomputer networks without the individual being aware.

The impact of the information revolution does not stop there. The use and misuse of DNA material in genetically modified organisms, or for other applications, is becoming exponentially cheaper. Whereas a single human genome was once prohibitively expensive, the cost of sequencing is falling at a rate far faster than Moore’s Law.

As the cost approaches zero for sequencing, Professor John Burn of Newcastle University is one of a growing number who advocate for creating genomes for every single human on earth. Doing so will be easy in five years or less, and the benefits could be tremendous. But imagine an age in which one’s DNA can be picked up off of a glass and duplicated into clones, or combined with other DNA to form payloads for viruses, or employed to manufacture off-the-shelf organs, there will be a desperate need for a set of rules and regulations on the collection and use of genetic information.

There are a host of other threats on the horizon that call out for some international system of regulation and control beyond simple market forces and gentleman’s agreements. Some can be predicted, others we can only speculate about. For example, we will face serious challenges when it comes to the function of money as it becomes entirely digitalized and its value is subject to imperceptible manipulations and alterations on a global scale. So also the rise of micro-drones beyond the control of even governments that can spy and wage invisible wars will require new institutions to contain them. For that matter, the next generation of 3D printing not only promises breakthroughs such as organ fabrication and the synthesis of edible hydroponic meat tissues, but also threatens to make possible the unlicensed production of weapons according to designs. These developments will require new legal and ethical structures before they can be adequately addressed.

The Constitution of Information

I propose that the first step in responding to the information crisis is the drafting of a global “Constitution of Information” that sets down concrete rules concerning the use of information and the maintenance of accuracy of information, thereby establishing a reliable system that is founded on a strong set of checks and balances to make sure that attempts to control information does not lead to even greater abuses.

Although the gathering and manipulation of information has become a major issue, the existing national constitutions on which we base our laws and our governance (in the United States or elsewhere) have little to say about this problem. Moreover, many of us have trouble grasping the seriousness of the information crisis: it remains largely invisible because it alters the very means by which we perceive the world.

We need to hold an international constitutional convention in which we can draft a binding global “constitution of information” that will address the consequences of the information revolution. It would be meaningless simply to propose a text for a constitution at this point because a living constitution is not a written text but rather an institution created through a series of negotiations and compromises. At this point we can only identify the need and the general issues that must be addressed within such a constitution and by institutions created by that convention.

Those who object to such a constitution of information as a dangerous form of centralized authority that will encourage abuse are not fully aware of the problems we already face. The abuse of information has already reached epic proportions and we are just at the doorstep of exponential increases.

In his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell foresaw the dangers of a centralized clearinghouse for official propaganda named “The Ministry of Truth” in which the imperative to promote veracity is perverted into a factory for manufacturing fiction in the tradition of Stalin. The dangers of such a distortion of any attempt to rectify the tremendous amount of disinformation and misinformation in circulation should be foremost in our minds.

We are proposing a system that will bring accountability and institutional transparency to the institutions that are already engaged in the control, collection, and alternation of information. The point is to give an ethical imperative and a vision for the future. Failure to establish institutions like this constitution of information will not assure preservation of an Arcadian utopia, but rather will encourage the emergence of even greater fields of information collection and manipulation that are entirely beyond the purview of any institution. The result will be increasing manipulation of human society by shadowy and invisible forces for which no set of regulations has been established.

One essential assumption behind the constitution of information should be, following David Brin’s argument in his book The Transparent Society (1998) that privacy will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to protect in the future in light of technological evolution. We must accept, paradoxically, that information must be made part of the public commons in order to preserve its integrity and its privacy. That is to say that simply protecting privacy will not be sufficient granted the overwhelming development of new technologies for gathering and altering information that will emerge in the years ahead.

Within a future constitution of information, and the institutions that it proposes, there must be a complex separation of powers wherein information is monitored, and its abuses controlled, or punished, according to a meticulous, painfully negotiated, agreement that follows the principles of transparency, accountability and the maintenance of a commons for the benefit of ordinary people. Information could be governed by three branches of government, something like the legislative, executive, and judicial systems that have served well in constitution-based governments following the proposals of Montesquieu for a tripartite system. The branches could be assigned different tasks and authorities within this system for monitoring information. The branches within government of information would have built into their mandates competing interests that would motivate them to limit the power of the other branches. Currently, there is little such balance of power within the global intelligence community or the large IT companies that have such influence globally.

For this reason, I suggest that as part of the three branches of government, a “three keys” system for the management of information be adopted. That is to say that sensitive information will be accessible — otherwise we cannot assure that information will be accurate — but that the information can only be accessed when the three keys are present that represent the three branches of the system. That process would assure that accountability can be maintained because three institutions whose interests are not necessarily aligned must be present to access that information.

The need to both assure privacy and to insure accuracy and reliability will require complex institutional changes and reinterpretations of the constitutional systems that exist already. But as we are already entering into a “post-constitutional” age in countries like the United States, it is imperative that we reaffirm the value of such public contracts so that to keep them from becoming mere ornaments.

The challenges of maintaining a balanced and reliable ecosystem for information cannot be dictated in a single article, but we can set the goal and start to bring together both practitioner and visionaries to put forth a direction and an encapsulation of the central tenets for a system based on transparency and accountability.

(based on article originally featured in The Hankyoreh, June 3, 2013)

Asia Institute Report

Proposal for a Constitution of Information
March 3, 2013
Emanuel Pastreich

Introduction

When David Petraeus resigned as CIA director afteran extramarital affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell was exposed, the problem of information security gained national attention. The public release of personal e-mails in order to impugn someone at the very heart of the American intelligence community raised awareness of e-mail privacy issues and generated a welcome debate on the need for greater safeguards. The problem of e-mail security, however, is only the tip of the iceberg of a far more serious problem involving information with which we have not started to grapple. We will face devastating existential questionsin the years ahead as human civilization enters a potentially catastrophic transformation—one driven not by the foibles of man, but rather by the exponential increase in our capability to gather, store, share, alter and fabricate information of every form, coupled with a sharp drop in the cost of doing so. Such basic issues as how we determine what is true and what is real, who controls institutions and organizations, and what has significance for us in an intellectual and spiritual sense will become increasingly problematic. The emerging challenge cannot be solved simply by updating the 1986 “Electronic Communications Privacy Act” to meet the demands of the present day;[1] it will require a rethinking of our society and culture and new, unprecedented, institutions to respond to the challenge. International Data Corporation estimated the total amount of digital information in the world to be 2.7 zettabytes (2.7 followed by 21 zeros) in 2012, a 48 percent increase from 2011—and we are just getting started.[2]

[1]As is suggested in the article by Tony Romm “David Petraeus affair scandal highlights email privacy issues” (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83984.html#ixzz2CUML3RDy).

[2] http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23177411#.UTL3bDD-H54

The explosion in the amount of information circulating in the world, and the increase in the ease with which that information can be obtained or altered, will change every aspect of our lives, from education and governance to friendship and kinship, to the very nature of human experience. We need a comprehensive response to the information revolution that not only proposes innovative ways to employ new technologies in a positive manner but also addresses the serious, unprecedented, challenges that they present for us.

The ease with information of every form can now be reproduced and altered is an epistemological and ontological and a governmental challenge for us. Let us concentrate on the issue of governance here. The manipulability of information is increasing in all aspects of life, but the constitution on which we base our laws and our government has little to say about information, and nothing to say about the transformative wave sweeping through our society today as a result. Moreover, we have trouble grasping the seriousness of the information crisis because it alters the very lens through which we perceive the world. If we rely on the Internet to tell us how the world changes, for example, we are blind as to how the Internet itself is evolving and how that evolution impacts human relations. For that matter, in that our very thought patterns are molded over time by the manner in which we receive, we may come to see information that is presented in that on-line format as a more reliable source than our direct perceptions of the physical world. The information revolution has the potential to dramatically change human awareness of the world and inhibit our ability to make decisions if we are surrounded with convincing data whose reliability we cannot confirm. These challenges call out for a direct and systematic response.

There are a range of piecemeal solutions to the crisis being undertaken around the world. The changes in our world, however, are so fundamental that they call out for a systematic response.We need to hold an international constitutional convention through which we can draft a legally binding global “constitution of information” that will address the fundamental problems created by the information revolution and set down clear guidelines for how we can control the terrible cultural and institutional fluidity created by this information revolution. The process of identifying the problems born of the massive shift in the nature of information, and suggesting solutions workable will be complex, but the issue calls out for an entirely new universe of administration and jurisprudence regarding the control, use, and abuse of information. As James Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

The changes are so extensive that they cannot be dealt with through mere extensions of the United States constitution or the existing legal code, nor can it be left to intelligence agencies, communications companies, congressional committees or international organizations that were not designed to handle the convergence of issues related to increased computational power, but end up formulating information policy by default. We must bravely set out to build a consensus in the United States, and around the world, about the basic definition of information, how information should be controlled and maintained, and what the long-term implications of the shifting nature of information will be for humanity. We should then launch a constitutional convention and draft a document that sets forth a new set of laws and responsible agencies for assessing the accuracy of information and addressing its misuse.

Those who may object to such a constitution of information as a dangerous form of centralized authority that is likely to encourage further abuse are not fully aware of the difficulty of the problems we face. The abuse of information has already reached epic proportions and we are just at the beginning of an exponential increase. There should be no misunderstanding: We are not suggesting a totalitarian “Ministry of Truth” that undermines a world of free exchange between individuals. Rather, we are proposing a system that will bring accountability, institutional order, and transparency to the institutions and companies that already engage in the control, collection, and alternation of information. Failure to establish a constitution of information will not assure preservation of an Arcadian utopia, but rather encourage the emergence of even greater fields of information collection and manipulation entirely beyond the purview of any institution. The result will be increasing manipulation of human society by dark and invisible forces for which no set of regulations has been established—that is already largely the case. The constitution of information, in whatever form it may take, is the only way to start addressing the hidden forces in our society that tug at our institutional chains.

Drafting a constitution is not merely a matter of putting pen to paper. The process requires the animation of that document in the form of living institutions with budgets and mandates. It is not my intention to spell out the full parameters of such a constitution of information and the institutions that it would support because a constitution of information can only be successful if it engages living institutions and corporations in a complex and painful process of deal making and compromises that, like the American Constitutional Convention of 1787, is guided at a higher level by certain idealistic principles. The ultimate form of such a constitution cannot be predicted in advance, and to present a version in advance here would be counterproductive. We can, however, identify some of the key challenges and the issues that would be involved in drafting such a constitution of information.

The Threats posed by the Information Revolution

The ineluctable increase of computational power in recent years has simplified the transmission, modification, creation, and destruction of massive amounts of information, rendering all information fluid, mutable, and potentially unreliable. The rate at which information can be rapidly and effectively manipulated is enhanced by an exponential rise in computers’ capacity. Following Moore’s Law, which suggests that the number of microprocessors that can be placed on a chip will double every 18 months, the capacity of computers continues to increase dramatically, whereas human institutions change only very slowly.[3] That gap between technological change and the evolution of human civilization has reached an extreme, all the more dangerous because so many people have trouble grasping the nature of the challenge and blame the abuse of information they observe on the dishonesty of individuals, or groups, rather than the technological change itself.

The cost for surveillance of electronic communications, for keeping track of the whereabouts of people and for documenting every aspect of human and non-human interaction, is dropping so rapidly that what was the exclusive domain of supercomputers at the National Security Agency a decade ago is now entirely possible for developing countries, and will soon be in the hands of individuals. In ten years, when vastly increased computational power will mean that a modified laptop computer can track billions of people with considerable resolution, and that capability is combined with autonomous drones, we will need a new legal framework to respond in a systematic manner to the use and abuse of information at all levels of our society. If we start to plan the institutions that we will need, we can avoid the greatest threat: the invisible manipulation of information without accountability.

Surveillance and gathering of massive amounts of information

As the cost of collecting information becomes inexpensive, it is becoming easier to collect and sort massive amounts of data about individuals and groups and to extract from that information relevant detail about their lives and activities. Seemingly insignificant data taken from garbage, emails, and photographs can now be easily combined and systematically analyzed to essentially give as much information about individuals as a government might obtain from wiretapping—although emerging technology makes the process easier to implement and harder to detect. Increasingly smaller devices can take photographs of people and places over time with great ease and that data can be combined and sorted so as to obtain extremely accurate descriptions of the daily lives of individuals, who they are, and what they do. Such information can be combined with other information to provide complete profiles of people that go beyond what the individuals know about themselves. As cameras are combined with mini-drones in the years to come, the range of possible surveillance will increase dramatically. Global regulations will be an absolute must for the simple reason that it will be impossible to stop this means of gathering big data.

Fabrication of information

In the not-too-distant future, it will be possible to fabricate cheaply not only texts and data, but all forms of photographs, recordings, and videos with such a level of verisimilitude that fictional artifacts indistinguishable from their historically accurate counterparts will compete for our attention. Currently, existing processing power can be combined with intermediate user-level computer skills to effectively alter information, whether still-frame images using programs like Photoshop or videos using Final Cut Pro. Digital information platforms for photographs and videos are extremely susceptible to alteration and the problem will get far worse. It will be possible for individuals to create convincing documentation, photo or video, in which any event involving any individual is vividly portrayed in an authentic manner. It will be increasingly easy for any number of factions and interest groups to make up materials to that document their perspectives, creating political and systemic chaos. Rules stipulating what is true,and what is not, will no longer be an option when we reach that point. Of course the authorization of an organization to make a call as to what information is true brings with it incredible risk of abuse. Nevertheless, although there will be great risk in enabling a group to make binding determination concerning authenticity (and there will clearly be a political element to truth as long as humans rule society) the danger posed by inaction is far worse.

When fabricated images and movies can no longer be distinguished from reality by the observer, and computers can easily continue to create new content, it will be possible to continue these fabrications over time, thereby creating convincing alternative realities with considerable mimetic depth. At that point, the ability to create convincing images and videos will merge with the next generation virtual reality technologies to further confuse the issue of what is real. We will see the emergence ofvirtual worlds that appear at least as real as the one that we inhabit. If some event becomes a consistent reality in those virtual worlds, it may be difficult, if not impossible, for people to comprehend that the event never actually “happened,” thereby opening the door for massive manipulation of politics and ultimately of history.

Once we have complex virtual realities that present a physical landscape that possesses almost as much depth as the real world and the characters have elaborate histories and memories of events over decades and form populations of millions of anatomically distinct virtual people with distinct individualities, the potential for confusion will be tremendous. It will no longer be clear what reality has authority and many political and legal will be irresolvable.

But that is only half of the problem. Thosevirtual worlds are already extending into social networks. An increasing number of people on Facebook are not actual people at all, but characters, avatars, created by third parties. As computers grow more powerful, it will be possible to create thousands, then hundreds of thousands, of individuals on social networks who have complex personal histories and personalities. These virtual people will be able toengage human partners in compelling conversations that pass the Turing Test. And, because those virtual people can write messages and Skype 24 hours a day, and customize their message to what the individual finds interesting, they can be more attractive than human “friends” and have the potential to seriously distort our very concept of society and of reality. There will be a concrete and practical need for a set of codes and laws to regulate such an environment.

The Problem of Perception

Over time, virtual reality may end up seeming much more real and convincing to people who are accustomed to it than actual reality. That issue is particularly relevant when it comes to the next generation, who will be exposed to virtual reality from infancy. Yet virtual reality is fundamentally different from the real world. For example, virtual reality is not subject to the same laws of causality. The relations between events can be altered with ease in virtual reality and epistemological assumptions from the concrete world do not hold. Virtual reality can muddle such basic concepts as responsibility and guilt, or the relationship of self and society. It will be possible in the not-too-distant future to convince people of something using faulty or irrational logic whose only basis is in virtual reality. This fact has profound implications for every aspect of law and institutional functionality.

And if falsehoods are continued in virtual reality—which seems to represent reality accurately—over time in a systematic way, interpretations of even common-sense assumptions about life and society will diverge, bringing everything into question. As virtual reality expands its influence, we will have to make sure that certain principles are upheld even in virtual space so as to assure that it does not create chaos in our very conception of the public sphere. That process, I hold, cannot be governed in the legal system that we have at present. New institutions will have to be developed.

The dangers of the production of increasingly unverifiable information are perhaps a greater threat than even terrorism. While the idea of individual elements setting off “dirty bombs” is certainly frightening, imagine a world in which the polity simply can never be sure whether anything they see/read/hear is true or not. This threat is at least as significant as surveillance operations, but has received far less attention. The time has come for us to formulatethe institutional foundation that will define and maintain firm parameters for the use, alteration and retention of information on a global scale.

Money

We live in a money economy, but the information revolution is altering the nature of money itself right before our eyes. Money has gone from an analog system within which it was once was restricted to the amount of gold an individual possessed to a digital system in which the only limitation on the amount of money represented in computers is the tolerance for risk on the part of the players involved and the ability of national and international institutions to monitor. In any case, the mechanisms are now in place to alter the amount of currency, or for that matter of many other items such as commodities or stocks, without any effective global oversight. The value of money and the quantity in circulation can be altered with increasing ease, and current safeguards are clearly insufficient. The problem will grow worse as computational power, and the number of players who can engage in complex manipulations of money, increase.

Drones and Robots

Then there is the explosion of the field of drones and robots, devices of increasingly small size that can conduct detailed surveillance and which increasingly are capable of military action and other forms of interference in human society. Whereas the United States had no armed drones and no robots when it entered Afghanistan, it has now more than 8,000 drones in the air and more than 12,000 robots on the ground.[4] The number of drones and robots will continue to increase rapidly and they are increasingly being used in the United States and around the world without regard for borders.

As the technology becomes cheaper, we will see an increasing number of tiny drones and robots that can operate outside of any legal framework. They will be used to collect information, but they can also be hacked and serve as portals for the distortion and manipulation of information at every level. Moreover, drones and robots have the potential to carry out acts of destruction and other criminal activities whose source can be hidden because of ambiguities as to control and agency. For this reason, the rapidly emerging world of drones and robots deserves to be treated at great length within the constitution of information.

Drafting the Constitution of Information

The constitution of information could become an internationally recognized, legally binding, document that lays down rules for maintaining the accuracy of information and protecting it from abuse. It could also set down the parameters for institutions charged with maintaining long-term records of accurate information against which other data can be checked, thereby serving as the equivalent of an atomic clock for exact reference in an age of considerable confusion. The ability to certify the integrity of information is an issue an order of magnitude more serious than the intellectual property issues on which most international lawyers focus today, and deserves to be identified as an entire field in itself—with a constitution of its own that serves as the basis for all future debate and argument.

This challenge of drafting a constitution of information requires a new approach and a bottom-up design in order to be capable of sufficiently addressing the gamut of complex, interconnected issues found in transnational spaces like that in which digital information exists. The governance systems for information are simply not sufficient, and overhauling them to make them meet the standards necessary would be much more work and much less effective than designing and implementing an entirely new, functional system, which the constitution of information represents. Moreover, the rate of technological change will require a system that can be updated and made relevant while at the same time safeguarding against it being captured by vested interests or made irrelevant.

A possible model for the constitution of information can be found in the “Freedom of Information” section of the new Icelandic constitution drafted in 2011. The Constitutional Council engaged in a broad debate with citizens and organizations throughout the country about the content of the new constitution. The constitution described in detail mechanisms required for government transparency and public accessibility that are far more aligned with the demands of today than other similar documents.[5]

It would be meaningless, however, to merely put forth a model international “constitution of information” without the process of drafting it because without the buy-in of institutions and individuals in its formulation, the constitution would not have the authority necessary to function. The process of debating and compromising that determines the contours of that constitution would endow it with social and political significance, and, like the constitution of 1787, it would become the core for governance. For that matter, the degree to which the content of the constitution of information would be legally enforceable would have to be part of the discussion held at the convention.

Process for the Constitutional Convention

To respond to this global challenge, we should call a constitutional convention in which we will put forth a series of basic principles and enforceable regulations that are agreed upon by major institutions responsible for policy—including national governments and supra-national organizations and multi-national corporations, research institutions, intelligence agencies, NGOs, and a variety of representatives from other organizations. Deciding who to invite and how will be difficult, but it should not be a stumbling block. The United States Constitution has proven quite effective over the last few centuries even though it was drafted by a group that was not representative of the population of North America at the time. Although democratic process is essential to good government, there are moments in history in which we confront deeper ontological and epistemological questions that cannot be addressed by elections or referendums and require a select group of individuals like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. At the same time, the constitutional convention cannot be merely a gathering of wise men, but will have to involve those directly engaged in the information economy and information policy.

That process of drafting a constitution will involve the definition of key concepts, the establishment of the legal and social limits of the constitution’s authority, the formulation of a system for evaluating the use and misuse of information and suggestions as to policies for responding to abuses of information on a global scale. The text of this constitution of information should be carefully drafted with a literary sense of language so that it will outlive the specifics of the moment and with a clear historic vision and unmistakable idealism that will inspire future generations as the United States Constitution inspires us. This constitution cannot be a flat and bureaucratic rehashing of existing policies on privacy and security.

We must be aware of the dangers involved in trying to determine what is and is not reliable information as draft the constitution of information. It is essential to set up a workable system for assuring the integrity of information, but multiple safeguards, checks, and balances will be necessary. There should be no assumptions as to what the constitution of information would ultimately be, but only the requirement that it should be binding and that the process of drafting it should be cautious but honest.

One essential assumption should be, following David Brin’s argument in his book The Transparent Society,[6] that privacy will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to protect in the current environment. We must accept, paradoxically, that much information must be made “public” in some sense in order to preserve its integrity and its privacy. That is to say that the process of rigorously protecting privacy is not sufficient granted the overwhelming changes that will take place in the years to come.

Brin draws heavily on Steve Mann’s concept of sousveillance, a process through which ordinary people could observe the actions of the rich and powerful so as to counter the power of the state or the corporation to observe the individual. The basic assumption behind sousveillance is that there is no means of arresting the development of technologies for surveillance and that those with wealth and power will be able to deploy such technologies more effectively than ordinary citizens. Therefore the only possible response to increased surveillance is to create a system of mutual monitoring to assure symmetry, if not privacy. Although the constitution of information does not assume that a system that allows the ordinary citizen to monitor the actions of those in power is necessary, the importance of creating information systems that monitor all information in a 360-degree manner should be seriously considered as part of a constitution of information. The one motive for a constitution of information is to undo the destructive process of designating information as classified and blocking off reciprocity and accountability on a massive scale. We must assure that multiple parties are involved in that process of controlling information so as to assure its accuracy and limit its abuse.

In order to achieve the goal of assuring accuracy, transparency and accountability on a global scale, but avoid massive institutional abuse of the power over information that is granted, we must create a system for monitoring information with a balance of powers at the center. Brin suggests a rather primitive system in which the ruled balance out the power of rulers through an equivalent system for observing and monitoring that works from below. I am skeptical that such a system will work unless we create large and powerful institutions within government (or the private sector) itself that have a functional need to check the power of other institutions.

Perhaps it is possible to establish a complex balance of powers wherein information is monitored and its abuses can be controlled, or punished, according to a meticulous, painfully negotiated, agreement between stakeholders. It could be that ultimately information would be governed by three branches of government, something like the legislative, executive, and judicial systems that has served well for many constitution-based governments. The branches assigned different tasks and authority within this system for monitoring information must have built into their organizations set conflicts of interest and approach in accord with the theory of the “balance of power” to assure that they limited the power of the other branches.

The need to assure accuracy may ultimately be a more essential task than the need to protect privacy. The general acceptance of inaccurate descriptions of state of affairs, or of individuals, is a profoundly damaging and cannot be easily rectified. For this reason, I suggest as part of the three branches of government, a “three keys” system for the management of information be adopted. That is to say that sensitive information will be accessible—otherwise we cannot assure that information will be accurate—but that information can only be accessed when three keys representing the three branches of government are presented. That process would assure that accountability can be maintained because three institutions whose interests are not necessarily aligned must be present to access that information.

Systems for the gathering, analysis and control of information on a massive scale have already reached a high level of sophistication. What is sadly lacking is a larger vision of how information should be treated for the sake of our society. Most responses to the information revolution have been extremely myopic, dwelling on the abuse of information by corporations or intelligence agencies without considering the structural and technological background of those abuses. To merely attribute the misuse of information to a lack of human virtue is to miss the profound shifts sweeping through our society today.

The constitution of information will be fundamentally different than most constitutions in that it must contain both rigidity in terms of holding all parties to the same standards and also considerable flexibility in that it can readily adapt to new situations resulting from rapid technological change. The rate at which information can be stored and manipulated will continue to increase and new horizons and issues will emerge，perhaps more quickly than expected. For this reason, the constitution of information cannot be overly static and must derive much of its power from its vision.

Structure of an Information Accuracy System

We can imagine a legislative body to represent all the elements of the information community engaged in the regulation of the traffic and the quality of information as well as individuals and NGOs. It would be a mistake to assume that the organizations represented in that “legislature” would necessarily be nation states according to the United Nations formulation of global governance. The limits of the nation state concept with regards to information policy are increasingly obvious and this constitutional convention could serve as an opportunity to address the massive institutional changes that have taken place over the past fifty years. It would be more meaningful, in my opinion, to make the members companies, organizations, networks, local government, a broad range of organizations that make the actual decisions concerning the creation, distribution and reception of information. That part of the information security system would only be “legislative” in a conceptual sense. It would not necessarily have meetings or be composed of elected or appointed representatives. In fact, if we consider the fact that the actual physical meetings of government legislatures around the world have become but rituals, we can sense that there the whole concept of the legislative process requires much modification.

The executive branch of the new information accuracy system would be charged with administrating the policies based on the legislative branch’s policies. It would implement rules concerning information to preserve its integrity and prevent its misuse. The details of how information policy is carried out would be determined at the constitutional convention.

The executive would be checked not only by the legislative branch but also a judicial branch. The judicial branch would be responsible for formulating interpretations of the constitution with regards to an ever-changing environment for information, and also for assessing the appropriateness of actions taken by the executive and legislative.

The terms “executive,” “legislative” and “judicial” are meant more as placeholders in this initial discussion, rather than as actual concrete descriptions of the institutions to be established. The functioning of these units would be profoundly different from such branches of present local and national governments, or even international organizations like the United Nations. If anything, the constitution of information, in that information and its changing nature underlie all other institutions; will be a step forward towards a new approach to governance in general.

Conclusion

It would be irresponsible and rash to draft an “off the shelf” constitution of information that can be readily applied around the world to respond to the complex situation of information today. Although I accept that initial proposals for a constitution of information like this one may be dismissed as irrelevant and wrong-headed, I assert that as we enter an unprecedented age of information revolution and most of the assumptions that undergirded our previous governance systems based on physical geography and discrete domestic economies will be overturned, there will be a critical demand for new systems to address this crisis. This initial foray can help formulate the problems to be addressed and the format in which do to so in advance.

In order to effectively govern a new space that exists outside of our current governance systems (or in the interstices between systems), we must make new rules that can effectively govern that space and work to defend transparency and accuracy in the perfect storm born of the circulation and alteration of information. If information exists in a transnational or global space and affects people at that scale, then the governing institutions responsible for its regulation need to be transnational or global in scale. If unprecedented changes are required, then so be it. If all records for hundreds of years exist on line, then it will be entirely possible, as suggested in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, to alter all information in a single moment if there is not a constitution of information. But the solution must involve designing the institutions that will be used to govern information, thus bringing an inspiring vision to what we are doing. We must give a philosophical foundation for the regulation information and open up of new horizons for human society while appealing to our better angels.

Oddly, many assume that the world of policy must consist of the drafting turgid and mind-numbing documents in the specialized terminology of economists. But history also has moments such as the drafting of the United States constitution during which a small group of visionary individuals manage to meet up with government institutions to create an inspiring new vision of what is possible that are recorded in terse and inspiring language. That is what we need today with regards to information. To propose such an approach is not a misguided modern version of Neo-Platonism, but a chance to seize the initiative with regards to ineluctable change and put forth a vision, rather than responding to change.

[1]As is suggested in the article by Tony Romm “David Petraeus affair scandal highlights email privacy issues” (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83984.html#ixzz2CUML3RDy).
[2] http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23177411#.UTL3bDD-H54
[3] Human genetic evolution is even slower.
[4]Peter Singer. “The Robotics Revolution” in Canadian International Council, December 11, 2012.
[5] http://fairerglobalization.blogspot.kr/2011/06/iceland-write…n-age.html
[6]Brin, ‚David. The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose between Privacy and Freedom? New York: Basic Books, 1998.

But that assumption is not necessarily true. Let me make two different, related points.

First, although you can easily travel from Delhi to Seoul, from Johannesburg to Berlin, physical movement is not the equivalent of communication and deep exchange. Increasingly individuals travel around the world with great ease, but stay at remarkably uniform hotels and eat in quite similar restaurants where ever their travels take them. When it comes to deep conversations and close personal relations, although the amount may be increasing, it is not obvious that greater global travel makes for close personal ties. There is a global class who move everywhere, but they are increasingly more related to each other than to the countries in which they live. As I wrote in “The Frankenstein Alliance,” Washington D.C. and Beijing have more in common with each other than with rural regions of their own respective countries.

In fact I would argue, as I have previously, that one of the great challenges we face is the growing gap between the rate at which the world is integrated in terms of logistics and trade, the exchange of natural resources, or the circulation of money and the rate at which individuals in the various nations of the world establish relations, or build global institutions, to parallel those physical steps towards integration.

If we look at East Asia one hundred years ago, we see that travel was difficult and such conveniences as phones did not exist. Yet the depth of intellectual exchange between certain scholars and policy makers was quite impressive, perhaps one might even say “deeper” than just about any discussion going on today. There is clearly a loss.

The other serious issue is whether the growth of computer power is pulling us together, or fragmenting us further, reducing the distance between us, or creating even greater distance between us. The jury is still out, and I would suggest that perhaps both phenomena are taking place simultaneously.

Let me put it another way: the distance between Washington D.C. in terms of travel time has been reduced, and SKYPE has made it irrelevant. At the same time the actual distance between one office in the Pentagon and another office has so increased, in a bureaucratic sense, as to be measured in light years. We find individuals in such global organizations to be linked together through enormous mazes of supercomputers that create distance and complexity. Such supercomputers, if we can imagine them as organisms, have no incentive to simplify the situation and every reason to want to make it more complex, more convoluted. Bureaucracy is in a sense traditionally a product of technology. The technology surrounding the storage and transfer of the written word. Today, however, supercomputers, that dark mass out there that impacts every aspect of our daily life but is almost beyond our awareness, have created their own “hyper-bureaucracy” that complicates just about everything, slowing down the process by which decisions for most things are made and speeding up just certain tasks that are required for a computer’s global agenda.

We could also say that the essential problem is an excess of information. That the supply of information generated by computers, rather than simply tasks, can make them more difficult. There is some validity in that argument.

The most inspired and trenchant author, Neil Postman, wrote at length about the problem of information in his most thoughtful book

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Vintage Books, 1993)

Postman suggests that we are entering an age in which technology itself dominates all levels of discourse, and even the manner in which men try to think, creating enormous blindness, and great risk. Although I think that Postman ultimately overstates the case, he has grasped something essential.

Postman writes,

” The relationship between information and the mechanisms for its control is fairly simple to describe: Technology increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mechanisms are needed to cope with the new information. When additional control mechanisms are themselves technical, they in turn further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquillity and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in thier experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.”

This state at which the supply of information is no longer controlled, and individuals can no longer judge what information is relevant, what is meaningful, is becoming increasingly common. It is quite dangerous in part because the value of the information that the individual receives seems debased. We are subject to, as I commented in my paper on “Non-Traditional Security Threats”  a Gresham’s Law of information. The original Gresham’s Law states that debased currency will replaced pure currency. If you circulate coins that are 90% gold and coins that are 10% gold, in short time you will have a situation in which only coins that are 10% gold in circulation.

It is not simply that bad information is circulated, although that does happen too, but rather that so much information is circulated that the value of any piece of information, no matter how important, is reduced as a result. I am reminded of Andy Warhol’s  series of prints “Car Crash.” Warhol took a gruesome photograph of a fatal automobile accident and made a collage in which the photo is repeated many times. The effect is that the horror of the image is much reduced and it becomes little more than a pattern for the observer.

Postman returns to describe  his dystopia “Technopoly” as a flood of uncontrolled information:

“One way of defining Technopoly, then, is to say it is what happens to society when the defenses against information glut have broken down. It is what happens when institutional life becomes inadequate to cope with too much information. It is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tried to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure. Though it is sometimes possible to use a disease as a cure for itself, this occurs only when we are fully aware of the processes by which disease is normally held in check. My purpose here is to describe the defenses that in principle are available and to suggest how they have become dysfunctional.”  (Technopoly, 72)

It is a frightening prospect. I am not convinced that Postman’s assessment is entirely correct. There are certainly parts of his book that are overstated and overly gloomy. But I would suggest that we run a very serious risk of misunderstanding the nature of the threats we face. We may imagine this threat out there in Iran or Pakistan, but in fact that threat out there is part of this greater structure in which we are embedded, a structure that continues to expand.

One quote that I particularly enjoyed from Postman’s book was this one:

“Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science”

(Paul Goodman, New Reformation)

The implication of the quote is that how we use technology has a moral component to it. Therefore,  to confuse technology with science is to lose track of the true significance of one’s actions.

Professor 

Kyung Hee University

June 9, 2012

The Crisis in Education in Korea and the World

The suicide of four students at KAIST in Korea last year has made it apparent that there is something fundamentally wrong with the manner in which our children are educated. It is not an issue of one test system over another, or the amount of studying students must do. Although KAIST keeps rising in its ratings and shows up increasingly in the media, students are being sacrificed on the altar of a new model for the university: a model for the university in which the human experience and spiritual growth are no longer considered of importance. Students are produced like RAM memory drives, or carbon nanotubes. They are built to the highest standards of in quality in all visible respects, under the highest pressure and with the greatest efficiency. But what the purpose of life is besides getting good grades and a good job is far from clear to these students. Students seem to be competing against some overwhelming force that they cannot overcome, a force that leads to despair and to suicide. But although students may think they are competing against each other, in fact they are competing against Moore’s Law. The forces that drive our children are forces they cannot be expected to overcome. The increasing capacity of computers serves as an overwhelming weight on youth. The more that their minds are aligned with the demands of computers, the further away they are from what humans can do well naturally: creating new cultures and new ideas.

Increasingly, we see universities that build expensive research facilities and administrative offices and spend heavily on advertisement, but from the point of view of the student seeking something other than the qualifications necessary to get a job, those universities have become inhuman deserts. All this is happening at a time when we need more human universities that address the challenges of our age. We need to invest what money we have left in the actual courses and guidance for our students, for programs that will give our students the broad understanding of the principles of human nature, of philosophy and literature, art and ideology. Such an education will guide them forward, regardless of the changes wrought by technological change.

To speak bluntly, judging students by their ability to digest information and reproduce that information on tests, is the equivalent of turning people into machines. But humans cannot compete against machines. Our brain is carbon and water based, not silicon based. The consequence of such a mistaken analogy produces unspeakable tragedy. Moreover, we may well find that the students we now train to be computer engineers, or lawyers, will discover, within their lifetimes that those careers disappear. Why? Becausethe unprecedented rate of technological change threatens to make many of those careers fully automated within the next decade. Already many law firms are firing lawyers because automation has reduced the perceived need for analysis.

What to do in such an environment? First we need to create a human school in which serious engagement with texts, with works of art, with all aspects of culture, from advertising in magazines to the arguments of politicians, are the subject of study. As technology advances in our society, the critical role will be played by those who can evaluate and respond to the implications of technology for society and the environment. That response will require as much an understanding of metaphysics and psychology as electrical engineering and computer programming.

Here are the problems we will have to consider: What will we do when we can no longer distinguish between real and fabricated images? How will be use technology to save the environment instead of destroying it? How can we make sure that future robots and computers are helpful to mankind? How we define the “human” as robots computers and biotechnology start to merge?

These problems of how we will manage technology are going to be absolutely critical to humanity. They are the problems our students should learn about in class. Yet finding answers to these questions lies in the realm of esthetics, philosophy, literature and art and not in the fields of mechanical and electrical engineering. We must completely rethink the purpose of education to make it more human, and at the same time to make it appropriate to the needs of our children’s future. That is not to say that there is any one career that is the right path. Rather our children must be able to decide for themselves how to survive in an uncertain and changing world. The education necessary for that wisdom should be the highest priority.

What if my son spends his life learning computer design only to find himself replaced by a computer when he is 35 years old? What are the odds of that? They are higher than most of us would like to contemplate. We might ask whether he would be better off as a poet or a painter, creating a new culture and presenting new ideas for the future.

Without such people, without people who can imagine new worlds and possibilities, we run the serious risk that technology will spin out of control, creating problems that we will not be able to solve, especially if we are fully dependent on machines. Or technology may evolve in unexpected directions, developing for its own purposes, and counter to the needs of humans.

Then there is the issue of leadership. We have this vague idea of leadership that is taught to young people. That concept of leadership is best summed up by the concept of the CEO. But as far as I can tell, CEOs–as they are presented to our youth–are men and women who dress well, make good presentations at meetings, work hard on their assignments and live a luxurious life. Such individuals exist, but they are not leaders. In most cases, they are followers of models and examples created by others.

It is certainly true that education should produce leaders. But leaders mean those with the imagination, the moral conscience and the courage to do what others are not imaginative enough to do, not ethical enough to do, not brave enough to do. We need to ask ourselves seriously, how many leaders are these universities producing? Then we can go back to creating schools that are really about education.

There is one more crisis facing education in Korea that most students do not fully understand, but demands our full attention: the aging society. As Korea ages, as the percentage of the population over sixty goes up radically over the next twenty years, young people and children will be sacrificed as more and more of the concern of government and society goes towards caring for the elderly.

Korea is on track to be the most aged society that has ever existed by 2050. 40% of the population in 2050 would be over 65 and already in 2030, when today’s graduate is 40, already 25% would be over 65 years of age. The results could be a society that cares very little about the education of the young and very much about the extremely expensive process of extending life for the very old.

That would mean that most resources would be used for hospitals and care for the elderly instead of schools. Even in the field of education, it is possible to imagine an aging population using funds to establish educational program for the elderly paid for with the money that would normally go to train young people. That would be, after all democracy. And we see such disturbing trends already in Korea. We will need to create a space to educate our youth that can be protected from the encroaching demands of the aged and allow young people to feel appreciated and needed. Japan, which has entered the swing towards an aging society earlier than Korea, already has a generation of young people who feel their society and government do not care about them.

There is one more rather insidious problem that faces our students in this age of computer-driven education. We risk cultivating a rather flat and simplistic representation of reality, a low-resolution mimesis. The world around us is infinitively complex, contradictory and unpredictable. The representation of reality in much of science is numeric or graphic, making invisible just how little we know about the natural universe. The student is given the incorrect impression that if a human genome can be represented in a certain number of terabytes, that there is nothing more to life or to genetics than that. Although the conversation of genetic code to data is a significant form of “understanding” it is extremely limited in its application. We thereby risk cultivating blindness in our children by making them think that because they saw the computer representation they understand it. Understanding reality is infinitely difficult. Even the nature of the electron or the DNA continues to defy human analysis. It is only in a very limited sense that we have mastered these subjects.