Phenomenon digitization

Digitisation increasingly means that tasks and behaviours that were previously considered typically human are being taken over by computers. In the past, digitisation has rather changed the industry, but also the perception of the human being of his environment, time and space. In the future, digitisation will increasingly enter areas that were previously considered to be typically human perceptions of behaviour. This will become apparent in different areas. For example, in human-machine interaction, the Internet of things or the smart home. The changes caused by this will lead to a completely new division of labour between humans and the environment, humans and machines, humans and infrastructure. These changes will have both individual and social consequences. Political challenges lie in particular in the fact that politics does not simply trace digitisation. Technology-oriented norms sometimes tend to simply follow the laws of technology or what is considered to be its own laws. Politically, however, it is about something else, namely the design of technology, the creation of the preconditions and framework conditions of technology. And that means that even such a right cannot contain rules alone. At the same time, it must be sufficiently well-informed to see where the dangers actually lie and at what point regulatory action can be taken. It is therefore a matter of bringing together security and technology, digitisation and law in the context of political decision-making. This task is currently still in the starting blocks. Freedom and security are often seen as opposites. In reality, however, the field of tension is much more complex. Security can also protect the possibility of exercising freedom. Only those are free who can to some extent see what the consequences of their actions can be and then weigh up these consequences themselves. Complete unpredictability therefore means that one cannot act freely either. Security stabilises the framework conditions of freedom. But vice versa, there is no security without freedom. Even the largest police states in the world have at some point reached their limits when people demanded freedom. In plain language, this means that security always requires freedom. Finding the right balance here is a task that cannot be achieved once and for all. It can only succeed in practical situations of weighing up the various options.

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