The Inequity Of Technology

The Inequity of Technology

These turbulent times bring ideas of living freely as equals in the world into vivid colour at the edge of our awareness. It’s a time when our generation is hard at work building the nation. Our national aspiration to duplicate a wealthy American society where people roam free in pursuit of the grand American Dream is no secret. And yet, that shimmering ideal disappears the closer we look.

In a provactive piece titled “America is Turning into a Developing Nation” we see a picture of a split nation. 20% live and work in the comfortable and secure Finance, Technology and Electronics sector and rarely visit the other 80% who live in fear of the blow which will send them into poverty & humiliation. For them,

the world of possibility is shrinking, often dramatically. People are burdened with debt and anxious about their insecure jobs if they have a job at all. Many get sicker and die younger … life is uncertain … they are not thinking about the future; they are focused on surviving the present.

In India, we already live in a society divided between the rupee economy and the dollar economy and experience both

spectacular GDP growth, and … the existence of almost two-thirds of Indians under the $2 poverty line

Our society is only just setting out on a technological reinvention. What does the rapidly disintegrating American Dream foretell about the kind of future lying in wait for us?

Technologists pride themselves in being apolitical and above the messiness of morality, creating neither good nor evil, empowering the free and unrestricted use of technology for the betterment of the human condition. The disturbing trend though, is of technology and capital uniting to create a skewed global society

“It’s like what you see in India … Silicon Valley is a look at the future we’re creating, and it’s really disturbing.” Many of those made rich by the recent technology boom, don’t seem to care about “the mess they’re creating.”

The 20th century began with industrial capitalism where wealth was to be found in new methods of industrial production. It ended with financial capitalism where access to capital helped captured markets. Today we live in an age of surveillance capitalism of ‘Big Other’

constituted by unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification

Revenue is generated, value captured and markets dominated by collecting streams of information about each one of us into one vast data ocean. An ocean harvested by commerce and politics alike in their pursuit to predict and manipulate mass behaviour. In a not-so-long-ago essay, observer Tim O’Reilly wrote, “data is the new Intel Inside”. His validation came when

Marissa Mayer, Google’s ex-VP of Search Products and User Experience, “confessed that having access to large amounts of data is in many instances more important than creating great algorithms.”

Hidden behind shining glass and chrome of innovative disruption, newly engineered monopolies swarm across the world eating away at the roots of large swaths of the population. Whether at the hands of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Flipkart, Apple, Uber or Ola (and the list doesn’t stop there) – uncountable content creators, journalists, retailers and cab drivers amongst others are losing livelihoods to the tide of technology. This does not even begin to include those feeling the impact of robotics in manufacturing and the enourmously disruptive effects of artificial intelligence predicted over the next ten years. The newly deskilled quickly become voiceless fodder for exploitation, forever teetering on the brink of the 80%.

How do conscientious, well-intentioned technologists craft a role for themselves where their skills and talents direct the world towards more equitable outcomes? What forms of technology do societies and communities adopt to ensure equitable access to opportunity and communal resources? How do we straighten out the democratising intent of technology with the inequality it creates?