The Technology Apocalypse
The seventh edition of The Fifth Elephant — which concluded last week — featured a talk on poor quality of data collected by the Aadhar project. Anand Venkatanarayanan drew parallels with the “Four horsemen and Apocalypse” fable to explain data security issues with the Aadhar project. As developers, it is hard to get lost in the technology and fail to think about the value and purpose of technology and that we have inherent biases and blindness towards technology. These biases hurt us when we scale any technology across the country.
You can catch up on the talk online, below:
As the country is debating important technology initiatives, and is making technology mandatory in day-to-day governance, we are still unable to understand the shortcomings of the technology itself. An interesting trait which Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) Chairman RS Sharma brought into the debate — incidentally, last week — is harm. How can technology harm us? If technology can harm us, how do we classify/define such harms? These are important questions which no one has an answer to. The latest draft of the personal data protection bill presented by Sri Krishna Committee tries to answer some of them.
Harm from technology is something everyone is studying across the world as we enter the age of ubiquitous computing, with sensors tracking every aspect of our life. Racial biases and discrimination through technology have been extensively documented and debated in the West. It is important as a community that we do not cause any harm to others, especially when Big Data and algorithms are being termed “Weapons of Math Destruction”.
As stakeholders of developing these tech solutions, we can’t ignore the rights of people and work for profits. Employees across different tech firms are even voicing out against technologies like surveillance and Artificial Intelligence which may violate human rights. So there is a need to have a conversation about some of these issues in tech more and start looking at tech differently.
You can read the following books and papers from these organisations who work on digital rights
Organisations:
MIT Civic Media Lab — https://civic.mit.edu/publications/
Gov lab — http://www.thegovlab.org/publications.html
Harvard Berkman Klein Center — http://cyber.harvard.edu/publications
Web Foundation — https://webfoundation.org/research-publications/
Data and Society — https://datasociety.net/research/
Algorithmic Justice League — https://www.ajlunited.org/
Books:
