Hiding in plain sight
Whether we like it or not, we are hastily embarking on a mysterious boat to the future, also named Fourth Revolution. Maybe it is time to make sure we are not leaving anyone behind?
Progress, technology and the new condition of human beings
Internet, internet of things, augmented reality, virtual reality, robotics, deep learning, artificial intelligence… Most of us have a variably precise idea of the signification and innumerable implications of these terms. They are the allegedly peaceful guns of what can be regarded as the final, all-encompassing and panoptic revolution of humankind: The Fourth Revolution. We have reached a point in our History where the controlled, linear curve of progress known since the first Industrial Revolution has metamorphosed into an almost Kafkaesque, exponential jump into the future. A future still dangerously oscillating between a Venus-project style utopia and an Orwellian dystopia.
Is the revolution all-encompassing indeed?
If what we have defined as the Fourth Revolution is by nature holistic in that it comes from and influences multiple fields of study, it might not be as widespread as it seems to be. Its very own paradox is that it tends to ignore the basic human rights of some, while creating super human artificial intelligences. In other words, the Fourth Revolution is accompanied at all times by what has been named “digital divide”, an inequality in the access and the use of information and communication technologies in general and the Internet in particular.
A recent World Economic Forum report showed that in 2014, 4 billion people still didn’t have access to Internet. The consequences of the access-based digital divide are ever-increasing in that it creates a two-speed, intrinsically unfair system where one half of the world is born with the silver spoon of the Internet in his mouth, and the other condemned to live with the handicap of living on the wrong side of the gap. Pioneers of the tech industry such as Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, have taken interest in the issue and noticed that with 90% of the world’s population living within range of a cellular network, the issue could be faced. This is how the initiatives internet.org, by Facebook, or Internet for All, by the World Economic Forum, were born.
But the end of the road is not in sight yet for the resolutely optimistic who wish to close the gaps. We should not overly simplify the digital divide and look at the matter in terms of access versus no access to the technology as this would immediately dismiss the qualitative aspect of the said access. To the above-mentioned access-based digital divide has succeeded a more complex, multifaceted gap that promises a difficult and long resolution: it has been named the use gap and is based on the assumption that the unprecedented expansiveness in the functionalities of smart devices is by nature accompanied by a prerequisite fund of knowledge. In other words, a range of skills and a technological expertise are now expected from the internet user, even though the burden of the duty of educating these potential users has not been taken on by anybody as of yet.
On the verge of darkness?
Technological progress and the digital transition, which have emerged and been allowed by the very structure of capitalism –and been accelerated, among other factors, by neoliberalism, could be a poisoned gift. They bring about a shift in the structure of our societies: the traditional middle-class is slowly drifting towards its new and undesirable identity of modern proletariat in a downward social mobility phenomenon, as a 2017 report from the NGO Oxfam has shown. We observe an unmistakable polarisation in the levels of education and revenues, which is reinforced by the digital divide and directly caused by the very structure of our economies, societies and political systems. The scholar Hannu Nieminen concludes a paper on the digital divide by stating that “the way ICT has been applied in work life and education appears to have accelerated social, economic and cultural inequality”.
We have set free a godlike innovation generator that, rather than creating the “brave new world” it was designed for, has the ability to reveal the faults ingrained in our systems. It is thus our duty to follow the footsteps of Jacque Fresco and Peter Joseph and rethink a world that has come to an end.
