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woman speaking to an Amazon Echo.
Mild tyranny … a woman speaking to an Amazon Echo. Photograph: Aflo Co. Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo
Mild tyranny … a woman speaking to an Amazon Echo. Photograph: Aflo Co. Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

Future Politics by Jamie Susskind review – when life-changing decisions are made by machines

This article is more than 5 years old

Bossy fridges are just the start. This is an ambitious study of how all aspects of human life are being transformed by tech

Is it possible to have mild tyranny? It sounds like an oxymoron, and certainly not the kind of thing citizens in a democracy might choose. But when you consider the relationship many of us have with technology there is something gently tyrannical involved. In theory we are free to abandon our computer screens, at liberty not to check our phones. In practice we are ensnared in digital networks for most of our waking hours (and longer, for those with smart watches that monitor sleep patterns).

In submission to devices, we surrender vast quantities of personal data. Somewhere in the information harvested by powerful tech companies – Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google – there is a reliable account of where you are, where you are going and who you will see. With a bit of algorithmic extrapolation, it is possible also to predict how you feel.

This knowledge goes beyond any monitoring apparatus established by an authoritarian state. Jamie Susskind writes about a new era of mass “scrutability”, a degree of penetration into our private realms more profound than old-fashioned surveillance. And we sign up for it. We tick the box confirming we have read the terms and conditions, although, of course, we haven’t, because the immediate utility outweighs any abstract cost. Susskind defines this as the “data deal” – a new form of social contract, insufficiently understood by most who enter into it, that entrenches an imbalance of power between the givers of information (you and me) and those who benefit from it (companies and states). He quotes the legal scholar Tim Wu: “Consumers on the whole seem content to bear a little totalitarianism for convenience.”

If Future Politics focused only on the power of tech giants it would be a useful book covering familiar ground. But Susskind’s ambition is far greater. His subject is the full spectrum of disruption to the way humans have organised themselves since antiquity. It is an attempt to disassemble the fundamental concepts that underpin political life – justice, liberty, democracy, equality, property – and put them back together again in the context of a tech-driven revolution. At the very least, it is an impressive feat of intellectual organisation.

That a revolution is happening is beyond doubt. The first chapter describes the degree to which digital systems of increasing capability – quasi-intelligent and autonomous – are integrated into our lives. Amazon’s Alexa, the robotic assistant that has already inveigled her way into millions of households, is barely the start. Our fridges will soon be ordering our groceries. Our cars will drive us around – or conceivably refuse to go where they have been programmed to think we should not be going.

Susskind calls this seamless fusion of technology and the external environment our “digital lifeworld”, from the German Lebenswelt. Having demonstrated the scale of the social transformation under way, he steps right back to define a theoretical framework for understanding the political implications. He interrogates what it means for one person or entity to have power over another and concludes that it is “a stable and wide-ranging capacity to get others to do things of significance that they would not otherwise do, or not to do things they might otherwise have done”. This might sound obvious enough, but it is a necessary preface to the systematic exploration of different ways in which political power is fragmented through the digital network, applied forcefully or persuasively, conspicuously or invisibly, with or without consent. How do you know if your voting behaviour has been influenced by a campaign fed with data skimmed from Facebook? Or, looking into the future, how much leeway should your robot surgeon have in making life-and-death decisions while you are unconscious, under the scalpel?

Susskind’s meticulous method owes something, perhaps, to his background as a barrister, determined to assemble a watertight case. The rigour pays off because it exposes the conceptual magnitude of the change facing politicians and citizens. No aspect of public or private life will be undisturbed by systems that are evolving faster than most people realise, and written in codes that very few can decipher. The era is foreseeable when life-changing decisions, such as legal judgments, medical diagnoses, hiring and firing, are routinely made by intelligent machines operating to instructions written by other machines with no human programming input. Where in that chain does political accountability lie?

The theory is mercifully leavened with self-deprecating humour. The author has a repertoire of cultural references, quotes and a knack for illustration of what would otherwise be arid philosophical quandaries: the ethics of a bossy fridge that rebukes its owner for its unhealthy contents; the digital nightclub door that turns away people deemed too unappealing by its face-recognition software. Without the colourful interludes Future Politics would be a harder book to read, but still an important one. It doesn’t contain many prescriptions. Susskind recuses himself from the task of devising regulations for the “digital lifeworld”. Who can blame him? It is mind-boggling enough just to contemplate the vastness of the challenge. To have written it all down so lucidly, engagingly and succinctly is a formidable achievement.

Future Politics is published by Oxford. To order a copy for £17.60 (RRP £20) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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