The Marconi Fellows helped to create many of the innovations that enable unprecedented sharing of information, networks to build and mobilize a community, and economic and educational opportunities are tightly entwined with our daily processes and even ways of thinking.
But with the benefits of the globally interconnected Internet come the same problems that have followed us since early human civilizations: competition, ego, group dynamics, attention-seeking behavior, and other issues that occur in a social setting. Many of these are magnified on the Internet since anti-social behavior is easier online than in person.
While I am neither a psychologist nor a sociologist, my role as a technologist inspires me to think deeply about the way the products and systems we build will be used, and especially, the way they might be misused. The technology we create cannot guard against all forms of abuse, but we need to acknowledge that our inventions will be used for things we did not intend. We also have a critical role to play in providing the solution.
As humans, we naturally sort ourselves into like-minded groups (a phenomenon apparently hard-wired into our brains). While this certainly existed before the Internet, its interaction with the global network has led to results none of us predicted when it launched. With unprecedented connectivity comes the ability for beneficial and malevolent actors to seek out, recruit, and collaborate with like-minded people. And though we at the Marconi Society believe access to the Internet is an essential benefit, we also believe that people need the digital literacy skills and information literacy training to safely, effectively make use of the myriad opportunities the Internet provides.
With the arrival of COVID-19, the Internet took on a newly enormous role for many of us. Paired with a U.S. election marked by increasing distrust of the electoral system and reports of the heightened vulnerability of older adults to misinformation, the stakes for solving this techno-human problem have never felt so high.
As reports of misinformation and voter suppression campaigns continue, the Internet plays a dual role of connecting voters with accurate reporting while also enabling the proliferation of inaccurate information. While some hope for the possibility of online voting, our existing end-to-end security and oversight mechanisms fall far short of ensuring secure, accurate, anonymous, and verifiable voting. And yet, the network provides voters with essential information such as their polling place and candidate platforms as well as the ability to stream debates and coverage of political events.
These benefits are offset by harmful behaviors on the Internet and create incentive for software that delivers safety, security, privacy and law enforcement frameworks to deal with perpetrators who may be inflicting harm from anywhere, including across an international boundary. Thus the international community is strongly motivated to devise strategies and bilateral or multilateral agreements to combat such abuse.
Marconi Fellows Whit Diffie, Taher Elgamal, Marty Hellman and Paul Kocher all created innovations in cryptography applied in the Internet’s IP Security (IPSEC) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) that improved our ability to securely interact. Social media platforms are continually updating the ways they scan for, and subsequently flag or remove, disinformation and harmful content. While we are far from achieving a fully safe and trustworthy online ecosystem, these technological innovations are necessary steps toward success.
It is not enough to build a system that people can access (and, a reminder, nearly 3.6 billion people globally do not have access to the Internet); we must work as a community to ensure the technology we build serves our goal of implementing a digitally inclusive, connected world that serves the best of humanity, and not the worst.
