People Not Code: The Case for a Digital Civil Society Observatory

Socio-technical change happens at a very different pace to legislative and regulatory activity. This is partly due to bureaucratic and institutional norms and partly due to the difficulty of gathering timely and useful evidence about the social and other impacts of technologies. To date in the UK, legislative and regulatory attention has tended to focus on socially prevalent, or fully emerged, harms; as such, mitigations in critical areas including child online safety, data protection, and financial fraud have not been introduced until the scale of harm has reached a crisis point. Deploying more anticipatory methods would reduce the number of wide-spread harms; doing so requires a reliable evidence base of emergent societal impacts.

This essay makes the case for Digital Civil Society Observatory, an evidence-gathering body that would sit alongside the AI Safety Institute and the Turing Institute. This would draw on the empirical knowledge and expertise of the broad field of civil society to anticipate, understand, and mitigate the ongoing societal impacts of technologies and ensure that innovation delivers public benefit and a stronger society, strengthening democratic outcomes and bringing the range and complexity of public interest and experience to greater prominence in the technology policy and governance landscape.