Tech for good & impact tech, what’s it all about?
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On a regular basis I stop what I’m doing and just marvel at how incredible humans are and how wild this thing called society is. It’s truly awe-inspiring and horrifying in equal measure.
I suppose we really shouldn’t be surprised about that last part either. People are just smart monkeys, who love to gossip and wear interesting hats (in a nutshell). We aren’t great at long term planning, empathy outside of our own tribe is sometimes quite hard, we get easily distracted by shiny things and to make it all worse we got so good at innovating to create helpful tools that we now have the ability to wield incredible, earth shattering power at the touch of a button.
We can destroy whole mountains in a day, empower thoughts and ideas to disseminate through entire countries in an afternoon and our actions are so vast in their consumption of resources that they alter the entire makeup of our biosphere.
The point I’m laboriously making is… technology is a tool and when used maliciously, or even just without thought, it can have massively bad consequences.
Tech for good then is when we consciously try to move away from business as usual. Its when we consider every detail of what we are making, who it serves, how it will impact others and indeed what implications it has on anything and everything.
I have two reasons for writing this article:
- I went to a really good meetup in London: By ‘Cyberdelics’ & ‘Tech for Good’
- I’m working alongside Nth to build innovative tech which solves important challenges
The meetup event was really energising and helps you realise there are loads of other people and ideas all working towards similar goals. With Nth we’ve been working on a few projects with exciting outcomes but I wanted to outline what impact tech really is and why we’re working towards it.
There are lots of other resources on the web you can take a look at and a really good place to start is at the Tech for Good Principles, but I’m also going to leave a few thoughts here that hopefully can help in some small way.
To start with the phrases ‘tech for good’ or ‘impact tech’ don’t imply charitable work. You can have a business, or be a government and be making or using impact tech. Another thing to consider is that there is no hard and fast rule, it is all subjective and there is no governing body letting people into, or kicking them out of, some club. B Corporations are something you may have heard of which is slightly different but still relevant, as they measure a company’s impact on a sliding scale, awarding them a score depending on a range of factors.
Tech for good could probably have a sliding scale scorecard system, but more generally it is a movement which seeks to change the underlying motives behind the technology we are already building.
If you are about to embark on some project, or found a startup or build a product then you should know something; it’s going to be a challenge, most good things in life are. We all know that the planet is in a climate crisis and there are countless other urgent matters that need smart people to address, so I would argue that if you are about to go to all that effort, then there are a few questions you should consider first.
Is your technology going to solve an actual problem in the world and help people? Or is it just going to add more strings to the bow of consumerism? Say what you like about the consumerist lifestyle, but it certainly isn’t good for people or planet.
Are the intentions behind your technology transparent? This is obviously a significant talking point after huge scandals involving Facebook and others. Truly responsible companies, charities or governments would make the relationship between user and technology 100% explicit so there are no false pretenses or expectations.
One of the hardest things to do when building a technology is to think about how this new tech could affect others indirectly, this requires some serious outside the box thinking and it’s possible there will be tradeoffs. If you do in fact go through this thought exercise you may also find you learn more about the thing you are trying to build which will in turn help you improve it perhaps before you even start to build it.
At Nth we have been so inspired by the various technologies being created or re-purposed for positive impact in the world and we want to do as much as we can to support this movement. For example; we are in the process of building an educational game for school children teaching them about the impacts of changing temperatures in the place where they live.
