Ten Rules for the Digital World (www.thefuturefoundation.eu)

A ten-point manifesto titled "Ten Rules for the Digital World" lays out ethical, social and environmental principles for how digital technology — especially AI — should be designed, deployed and governed. It warns against treating technology as an end in itself or machines as human, stresses the need for downtime and in-person social skills, and calls for protecting democratic capacities, human dignity and personal development from attention-harvesting and datafication. The document highlights environmental costs, surveillance risks, concentrated power and the cultural harms of overstating technological capabilities, urging a shift from thoughtless digitalization to technology that serves people, society and nature. For the AI/ML community the rules translate into concrete design and governance implications: avoid anthropomorphic language and deceptive agent behavior, adopt value-sensitive design and rigorous impact assessment, and develop standardized monitoring of the full environmental footprint of systems. Practically this means transparent model limits, restrained use of continuous nudging/notification patterns, protections against score-based social sorting, safeguards for digital sovereignty and privacy, and mechanisms to democratize platform power (participatory governance, interoperability, antitrust-like remedies). The manifesto demands engineering practices that prioritize human flourishing, environmental accountability and distributed participation over unchecked optimization and centralized control.