Started to read a book called 'The New Digital Age'. It examines how technology will continue to fundamentally impact people's lives and work across the globe.
So what will or should governments do in the future? What is their purpose, their mission? My take:
1.
Governments define and enforce the law, which is a set of boundary conditions on what individuals (people or companies) can do and what they can't. Everyone needs to adhere to the law.
2.
In capitalism, anything that is
created is driven by individual actions at the very end. By anything I mean products, knowledge, innovation, wealth, moral values, or cultural achievements. It is true that some things are the result of a collective movement (a product consists of thousands of parts; a music festival would be dead without any spectators; a religion would be irrelevant without followers), but they are always spearheaded by individuals (a CEO or product manager; a band member or the festival organizer; a preacher).
I find that there's nothing wrong with that, as long as there is somebody that examines the collective effects of these creations and takes action to mitigate the effects if they are undesired. Such action can be a law that forbids individuals certain actions or restricts the ways in which they are carried out, or a policy that creates mere incentives for individuals to act in one way but not another. That's the role of the government.
3.
Capitalism relies on markets. "Markets" are anything where supply meets demand: think of your grocery store, financial markets, idea markets like TV channels or the internet. Governments need to administer these places, as they cannot be administered by the individual participants.
Governments don't
create, they
administer.
4.
There are certain areas where reliance on the creations of individuals is inappropriate. I'm thinking of defense, environmental protection, and of course (most important of all) social welfare in the sense of equalizing incomes, taking care of the poor, the unemployed and the sick.
Then there are areas where in theory there could be a self-sustaining non-governmental solution, but it is very hard to imagine it in today's world. I'm thinking of education and public transport. Those fields also interrelate with the collective effects in 2.
So how does the technology of the New Digital Age come into play? It seems quite obvious to me that the internet and associated technologies like smartphones, cloud services, and connected devices greatly lubricate the "creation" part, especially products and ideas. Probably not so much the moral values. How does that affect what governments do? Clearly the internet is a global place, so it seems that regulations of it should also be of global nature. But what regulations does it need?
