Professor Sarah Pink, Director Emerging Technologies Lab, Monash University

To better invest in and develop infrastructure we need to keep people in mind. Recent examples of smart city failures and growing demand for energy have demonstrated that new thinking is needed on how infrastructure is designed and built. Climate and public health crises will be part of our lives beyond 2020. Boosting digital infrastructure means introducing new technologies that can connect, provide services to and track people as they live their everyday lives. An effort such as this requires attention to the changing needs and priorities of Melbourne’s diverse communities as we move into an uncertain future. The City of Melbourne is taking an important step in this direction through its emphasis on ethics and privacy.

Working ethically and respecting privacy in digital infrastructure requires an ethics first and people focused approach.

This means understanding people beyond their roles as citizens, consumers or users. These labels – which are used too often in policy, industry and design – are one-dimensional. They fail to acknowledge the complexity of people’s lives.

How we experience and live with new digital technologies depends on how they fit into the routines, social worlds, cultural identities, and economic circumstances of our daily lives. We are often driven by the needs and priorities of the moment – getting some sleep, getting to work, getting the kids to school on time, fitting in some shopping or the gym – not by rational decision making.

A strategic approach to digital infrastructure investment is fully engaged with people in their diversity, complexity and everyday needs.

A focus on people acknowledges the need for flexibility and empowerment. Instead of hoping that new technologies will change human behaviour – top down – an ethical approach is ground-up. New technologies should be adaptable for diverse groups of people and circumstances. Flexible technologies, and a commitment to empowering people to learn and change with them, should underpin responses in times of crisis.

An ethics first and people focused approach involves taking technological possibility to be just that – a possibility. Anthropological research shows that people do not use technologies as engineers and designers imagined they should. There will always be unintended consequences. The challenge is to ensure that these are positive. Our lives are not governed by technologies created for us, but by how the possibilities they offer fit with our everyday needs and priorities. Research from the Emerging Technologies Lab where I work includes studies of self-driving cars, smart home technologies and personal wearable devices. These studies all demonstrate how people innovate with technologies to make them suit their own needs. For example, when people use wearable tracking devices which measure our steps, heart rate, sleep and more, very often the technologies do not change their behaviour or improve their health. Many people give up using them after a few months. Those who continue have made the devices and data part of their routines and feel they can learn something from them. Their privacy concerns are often minimal because they do not consider that the data reveals a full or true picture of them, and their approaches are diverse. Many take the accuracy of their data seriously, but others just don’t care about accuracy as long as their activity is registered. The insight for digital infrastructure is that to be successful, it must be flexible and it must enable people to engage, learn and create their own sense of meaning.

New technologies are not solutions to societal problems. Rather they are beneficial because they open up possibilities. Instead of hoping that new technologies will provide solutions for diverse communities, we should ask how they can support and empower people in their diversity, to connect in ways that feel safe and have meaning for them.

This could entail asking the following types of ethics first and are people focused questions, which bring together - rather than separate - the familiar with the new, and the human with the digital:

• What would a trusted digital city feel like? How does digital infrastructure become as familiar and comforting as the Melbourne city paths we walk through and the buildings that are our everyday landmarks?
• How does being connected in the digital city make us feel safe, protected and empowered? What does data privacy mean for Melbourne’s diverse communities and how might people confidently determine safe boundaries of data sharing?
• How do we want to live with non-humans? How can human-less delivery keep us safe? What is the human face of human-less delivery?

An ethics first and people focused strategy it is not difficult to achieve. It simply means going further than public consultations and surveys or seeking to change human behaviour. It means working from the ground up to engage people in ways that feel safe and meaningful for them. People should be empowered to learn and grow into the modes of digital connection that they trust, that are suitable for their particular lives and communities, and that prepare them for potential climate and health crises in the future. It might look like this:

• Define guiding ethical principles
• Conduct research to understand people’s everyday priorities and imagine future scenarios with them in which their privacy values are central.
• Identify desirable futures
• Consider the relationship between the benefits for wider societies on the one hand and for the diverse individual people who live in those societies on the other. Prototype and test simulated versions of an ethical digital city with people
• Use the new knowledge developed from the above to determine which infrastructure should be invested in
• Empower people in learning processes with the new technology
• Enable human innovation and creativity to bring unanticipated benefits
• Observe and evaluate the ethical and equitable societal benefits of this process

Melbourne has the resources to achieve this, but those resources often remain invisible. Our Universities have extensive knowledge about the digital lives and diversity of Melbourne’s people and climate. Researchers are currently building an unprecedented depth of understanding about the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. We have the research and analytical skills and expertise to do better than rapid surveys and on-the-spot consultations. Drawing on these resources will help create the realistic and plausible understandings needed to create an ethical and equitable route towards digital connectivity.

This opinion paper is part of the City of the Future event 2, exploring focus are 4: Data and Ethics.

Problem statement: How might we accelerate our digital infrastructure while maintaining ethics and privacy?