Youth Pledge and Smart Data

Ahead of the 91st commemoration of the Youth Pledge, I am remembering a "disturbing" banquet that took place before the 90th last year.

KOMPAS/RADITYA HELABUMI

Budiman Sudjatmiko

Why disturbing? Because I had dinner with a married couple, one of whom was an Indonesian artificial intelligence expert and the other a linguist from abroad who was researching Dayak languages. Because language is a child of culture and history, sentences are the children of logic and words are the children of the speakers\' emotions. I smelled an aroma throughout the dinner, an aroma that was more than just the sensation of intelligent sons and daughters, the biological children of the coupling of homo sapiens (wise human) and homo datum (data human).

Later, more questions appeared. How could the behavior of 1,340 tribes who reside between latitude 6 degrees north, latitude 11 degrees south, longitude 95 degrees east and longitude 141 degrees east in an archipelago with 416 regencies and 98 cities be mapped and read by artificial intelligence? What understanding would be born in the minds of 63.36 million young people about the nation and about themselves in an age whose culture, logic, and emotions are mapped by smart machines based on word data in our 652 regional languages?

The Youth Pledge text confirms that our tribes collided and our nation was formed because we recognize that we have one land and one language. If we examine this further, the logic of the context reads like this: The claim of the boundaries of the motherland is the starting point, while nationality is the final conclusion. How is the homeland and nation determined as the initial limit and concluded at the end? The answer is in the language, which connects the motherland and the nation. The problem is that to define our language we need an artificial intelligence that is not yet available.

How is the homeland and nation determined as the initial limit and concluded at the end? The answer is in the language, which connects the motherland and the nation.

Information technology (in the Fourth Industrial Revolution era in the form of artificial intelligence and machine learning) has again determined our perspective. What will it end up with? This is the big question of my writing. The development of the nation-state concept since the Treaty of Westphalia four centuries ago has given birth to 193 countries. There are three waves of growth based on the development of information technology. Google N-Gram, which records the popularity of words (as the children of emotion) in the millions of books that have been published since the 16th century, confirms the link between the three waves and changes in the information medium (newspaper, radio, television and internet) that are popular in its each respective time.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Google N-Gram again recorded a surge in popularity of the word "internet" beyond any other information medium. The internet forms a global network, enabling each person and thing to be connected. Information virtualization makes interactions simply cross physical and geographical boundaries. In turn it opens space for the emergence of collective emotional bonds outside of a collective identity as a nation. For example: For some Indonesians or Brits who are in favor of the Islamic State (IS) movement, propaganda in Arabic is even more stirring to the emotions. The emotions are stirred up to put the IS struggle into the historical context of the rise and fall of the khilafah (caliphates), rather than of the history of the 10 November battle in Surabaya or the Battle of Agincourt battle in the Hundred Years War. They move through the internet.

Challenges

Political order in the state sphere is imposed from above and below all at once. In the digital age, the political battlefield has shifted from territorial control to data and information control, which in the previous era was monopolized by the state. Over the last two decades we have witnessed the emergence of new business entities whose power surpasses the states, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, whose valuations are more than US$4.1 billion, exceeding German gross domestic product (GDP), the third largest economy in the world.

Today more than 2 billion people are active monthly Facebook users and the number grows 17 percent per year. In contrast to their seniors such as Exxon, Monsanto and General Electric, the tech giants do not only have capital, but they also access and master technology to process all personal data and service user behavior, of course with the profit motive. Data is a new oil field. The corporations of artificial intelligence technology become the new big brothers who "supervise" every citizen well, even though they are not elected – so they cannot be controlled – by the people. This makes social coordination – which is the main role of the state – more complex and complicated than ever before.

Information virtualization makes interactions simply cross physical and geographical boundaries. In turn it opens space for the emergence of collective emotional bonds outside of a collective identity as a nation.

Meanwhile, the extreme globalization of capital, goods, services and information has a counter-effect that undermines the legitimacy of the state from below. On the one hand, various problems caused by the careless management we received from the 20th century, such as the widening of disparity and economic crises, have weakened trust in public institutions. The social media clearly divides the community, giving rise to a wave of right-wing populism in a number of countries.

According to psychometric research by the Department of Psychiatry of Cambridge University in 2016, more than 40 percent of citizens who feel in the majority in 36 countries and who would participate in elections from 2017 to 2020 (for example Muslims in Indonesia, Catholics in Brazil, or white Protestants in the US), had characteristics of fear and hate toward everything that was new and different (ethnic and religious), were irritable, found difficult to work together, and could muster little effort to achieve, regardless of their educational backgrounds and the extent of their positions. Some time ago we witnessed the severity of an election that nearly threw the Indonesian people into a landfill of history. Will all this end in the extinction of social capital? Of course not. Every age has its therapy. All depend on our intelligence not to take expired drugs.

Smart social contract

The bond of citizens to the state is expressed in the trust that the state is able to guarantee the lives and needs of its citizens. Because of the transformative impact of digital technology on all matters, this is the best time to rethink the social contract of the state and its citizens. Its aim is always the same: "a free, united, just and prosperous society". However, the principles of its achievement must be adaptive to changing times. If it is not adaptive, we become extinct. It is as simple as when Charles Darwin taught us about natural selection. However, now the principle is not just survival of the fittest, but survival of the fastest.

In the digital age, the political battlefield has shifted from territorial control to data and information control, which in the previous era was monopolized by the state.

I have been disturbed by two main issues in the digital social contract of the Indonesian nation. First, about personal data, ranging from data collection, management, use and protection. In a digital society, every citizen has the right to have full control over his digital identity, how the data is used and the extent to which it is shared and monetized. Second, the state and communities in Indonesia still face data problems that are scattered and interpreted based on their selfish sectoral interests. Urban and rural communities suffer alienation from their personal and community data. Vertically it is not sovereign; horizontally they do not trust each other. The data being collected is truly "silly" data because of the absence of protocol for communicating intelligently with one another.

The digital social movement needs to be massively building new social contracts based on smart data so that data among communities can talk to one another. That way, the program for the multiplication and distribution of science and welfare, as an absolute facility for facing Industry 4.0, can really run.

The Smart Data Protocol (Blockchain) enables us to choose the level of privacy we want for each digital interaction and transaction, determine what personal and community data is and to whom the data is shared according to the agreement among the parties, along with the cost of monetizing the data. Especially in rural areas, data must be secured. Data on natural wealth, economic behavior, languages and so on does not need to fly all the way to Silicon Valley, but can stay and become smart in their respective silicon villages. Inspired by the "disturbing" dinner, armed with the Smart Data Protocol managed by village, city and country communities, there must be a kind of new Youth Pledge, which does not depend on the artificial intelligence of giant technology companies as the big brothers (who are supervising), but based on Smart Data as an equal brotherhood.

We have to start from the text of Youth Pledge 4.0, which could be written like this: "We 63.36 million sons and daughters of the Indonesian Wisdom Human (Homo Sapiens) and Human of Data (Homo Datum), who live in 416 regencies and 98 cities, claim to have one country, the homeland of Indonesia, which is located between latitude 6 degrees north, latitude 11 degrees south, longitude 95 degrees east and longitude 141 degrees east; we the 63.36 million sons and daughters of the Indonesian Wise Human and Human of Data confess to have one nation, an Indonesian people consisting of 1,340 ethnicities whose culture originates from 74,958 villages, forests, nagari, gampong, and the like; we 63.36 million sons and daughters of the Indonesian Wise Human and Human of Data uphold the language of unity, the Indonesian language, which we will continue to enrich with the cultural history, logic and emotions of the vocabulary of 652 regional languages in the archipelago."

Read more : Cutting the Bureaucratic Echelon System

In the mouths of 63.36 million Homo Datum who make the pledge, Indonesia will not only be a republic, but will also be an intelligent IndONEsian Supercomputer based on the Smart Data Protocol.

Happy Youth Pledge Day, young Homo Datum!

Budiman Sudjatmiko, General Chairman of Inovator 4.0 Indonesia