Fourth Industrial Revolution and Algorithms: New Challenges for Policy Design

Since the beginning of this century, ‘disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, big data, autonomous vehicles, and genetic editing, have transformed the economic and social fabric of peoples’ lives. Some colloquially refer to these changes as the 4th industrial revolution. This has led to a wide range of emerging policy issues centered on three policy areas: ethics, security, and research and development. Unlike the earlier digital policy literature that was focused on the application of informational technology, this chapter explores the role of algorithms that underlie these technologies. In this chapter, we raise key-related considerations for algorithmic policy design. First, codesign and nudging are two emerging tools applied in algorithmic policy design. Second, collaboration and learning are central processes. Finally, we highlight two important policy design outputs: trust and public value.