Abstract or Introduction
It has been said by Lawrence Lessing that “code is law”. This is true already in a society which is dependent on information technology. Even though machines are not full members of this society yet, we already entrust a number of very personal and important functions to them.
In many cases, this trust goes beyond the trust parents would give a small child, who also is a member of society but does not have the right to vote yet. If you step on an airplane you trust your life to the machine and if you take your child with you, you give more trust to a machine you have never seen, and most likely might not even understand, than you would give to most other humans (i.e., strangers), let alone almost all animals.
In this sense, our society is mainly a human-machine hybrid society, with both terms being used fairly widely. In a world which depends on machines behaving in specific ways, the power to code means the power to control a large part of the human-machine hybrid society. Coders often have a degree of direct power governments or lawmakers can only dream of.
- Quote paper
- Stefan Kirchner (Author), 2015, Code is Power. Coding, User Dependency and Human Rights, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/313132
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