Trying to make definitive predictions about the impact on societies of technological changes is fraught with difficulty - and this applies a fortiori to trying to judge whether such changes will be on balance beneficial.
A more useful approach is to seek to identify the different ways in which technologies will improve or detract from prospects for democratic and open societies, and to then consider how to accentuate the positive and mitigate the negative effects. The goal should be to identify some useful policy prescriptions available to governments, NGOs and other actors. |