A new ANU centre shaping tech policy focuses on optimal benefits

Former diplomat Johanna Weaver will lead a push for rules which bring out the best, and avoid the worst, in new technologies.

Johanna Weaver, leader of the Australian National University's new Tech Policy Design Centre.

The uneven race between technological development and those who are trying to establish the rules and strategies to manage it effectively has prompted the Australian National University to set up a new unit – the Tech Policy Design Centre.

The new body will “reimagine how policy can be used in a positive way to shape technology”, ANU chancellor and former foreign minister Julie Bishop said on Monday.

“This will help position our nation to harness the full potential of digital technologies while responsibly mitigating against future harms,” she said.

Centre director Johanna Weaver, a lawyer and former diplomat with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, says wholesale change is needed. She admits it is a big ambition.

Although Australia is doing well in many aspects of managing technological innovation, and it is crucial to avoid stifling innovation, “our current governance frameworks are struggling to keep up with the pace of innovation and change”, she says.

“We are seeing technology having positive and negative impacts on our society, our economy and our security. Many of these are unintended, such as social media, designed to connect friends, now breeding disinformation that has the potential to undermine democracies.

“But our future does not need to be a digital dystopia … We have a say in how this story unfolds; but we need to think much more intentionally about the impact of technology on the things that matter to us.”

Well-designed policy “drives economic growth, protects our national security and promotes the rights of individuals” she says.

Covid-19 check-in apps are a case in point. “If the app is easy to use, people are more likely to use it. If people have confidence that the data will only be used for the stated purpose – public health, not criminal investigations – more people will use it. Then we’re more likely to get accurate data when it comes to contact tracing. And that will impact the length of the lockdowns.”

She defines the challenge simply: “How do we move beyond taking the technology that is served up to us, to using policy as a tool to shape the technology that we want and need?”

Weaver says the first thing is a change in mindset, to “stop thinking about technology as one discrete piece of technology and to start thinking about how that piece of technology fits in the bigger picture … the impact that technology is having or could have on our systems of government, our society, our economy, our secur­ity.”

Most recently Weaver was Australia’s chief cyber negotiator at the UN, where there is spirited debate over how to maintain peace and avoid new technologies triggering conflict.

“Every country in the world is grappling with the impact that rapidly evolving technologies are having,” she says.

The centre will embark on projects involving industry, as the drivers of innovation; government, which speaks for the people and steers governance; and academics, because “often the deep knowledge and long-term research” resides with them and groups such as people with disabilities and those from culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

There will be a “futures” project to define scenarios for how the technology ecosystem might evolve, and what governance would be needed in each case; and a stocktake of the attempts that have been made to regulate the big technology companies, how effective they have been and how they could be improved.

There also will be a survey of attitudes to technology among the public.

“What do people want from technology and how do they see the role of governance in shaping technology?” Weaver asks.