An amazingly simple message from my ongoing exploration of the future of digital is:
If you want an egalitarian future, technologies need to be egalitarian.
Diversity, inclusion, and equity are not just ‘nice’ ideas they are principles for an egalitarian society that values everyone, includes everyone, and supports everyone – as if everyone is one. It is built on compassion - or the belief that when any one of us suffers we all do.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are shaping our commercial, political, civic, and private worlds radically – just no one told the public or asked them what they think.
The means of development of new technologies (AI/information technology in fusion) is mostly in the hands of commercial companies.
There is profit to be made and pleasure to be gained - very quickly. There is not much society can do about this because this is where the knowledge and capabilities for design of technology is.
The values of civic society and the public are being left behind because technology is not in our area of expertise – we are the experts of our own lives not in how to design technology.
In a commercial world time is money and so is data. Data is the new resource everyone is talking about and cannot get enough of. You will be asked to use your data several times a day.
Any action to improve human lives is noble but is no use or harmful if the types of lives that are created are not wanted by those humans.
I am not saying AI/IT is bad – the opposite – it can be great – but for who?
The world is dominated by a commercial hegemony that tends to quash egalitarianism or treat the principles of diversity, inclusion, and equity in a very superficial way as a route to further profit rather than human good.
Individual people need other individual people. The system of connection and joy breaks down when we chose to connect only with people like us, near us, who wear the same clothes, think the same and talk the same way as us.
AI/IT can be used for the creation and distribution of material goods, money, status, and power. It can also be used to alleviate some of the ‘symptoms’ of our unequal lives, such as health inequalities or educational opportunities for example.
More fundamentally - AI/IT can be used towards some of the deeper solutions to supporting human connection and joy. For example, closing the ‘distance’ (interconnection and intersubjective understandings) between student-teacher-parent, addressing the widening gaps between patients-carer-provider in healthcare exacerbated by remote healthcare, and the challenge of the leader-manager-employee relationship.
Understanding our relationship to the environment is a useful place to begin supporting human connections and decide for ourselves what our future should look like. We just don't have much time to do it.