Happy New Year!
2020 is finally over, and a new year means a new beginning, new year resolutions to do justice to yourself, and of course an overwhelming sense of optimism that this is going to be my year.
2020 was not a year you wanted at the start of a new decade. Particularly for me, I graduated this summer, which meant, I could not see my college friends one last time before everyone moved to new places. But nevertheless, it's 2021 now, with new goals and a fresh outlook for life.
I am a strong believer in humane technology and the fact that by using technology, we can not only solve our local problems but also, solve problems for everyone means it is a tool to empower ourselves. And because of this, I felt so powerless that we had the right technology to actually get ahead of this pandemic. Using contact-tracing tech, we would have way been ahead of the curve. We could have avoided 1.8 million deaths and or the fact that we had to deal with 80M+ cases.
Now, this should make you think. The fact that 4B+ people had to go under some kind of lockdown and yet we couldn’t get ahead of the curve?
Not only we managed to successfully cripple our health systems but also forced people to live in lockdowns for months resulting in mental health falling (and yet, this is our last worry).
Why did we fail?
Was it the failure of governments to adapt and tell people to install these mobile applications so we could do efficient contact tracing? Or did we let spread too much misinformation about it? Did we fail to ask people to maintain social distancing? Why was wearing a mask even debated?
It's not that we cannot solve the problems, but rather, we chose not to.
Just like the previous generations did not care about the environment and we have to clean up their mess, the future generations should not look down on us and say we failed in building humane technology.
I think it would be fair for me to demand my generation to stop working on making people click ads, but rather on problems that matter.
Having said this, there are some things that we need to get right this year:
Even though we failed 1.8M people, first-time in human history, we successfully manage to research and manufacture the vaccine, and for 2021, we must make sure about equitable distribution of the vaccine, and we have to stop vaccine nationalism.
We need to understand that if the virus mutates even in one country and for some reason, our vaccine isn't able to tackle that, due to our globalized economies, things can go south really quick.
And everyone deserves the vaccine. Just because poor countries cannot afford vaccines, does not mean we do them an injustice. Everyone is human, and as a society, it is our moral responsibility to eradicate this.
2021 is going to be a big year for climate change. With the lockdown, we did see pollutions levels going down. We woke up to cleaner air and that means we can make earth habitable for species other than us. We must invest in green technologies, move to renewable energy sources. This means we need energy storage technology, electric vehicles, environmentally-friendly industries, and a rise in public transport. And all of these are possible if the governments across the world make the right legislation. The Paris Climate deal was a stepping-stone and we have a long way ahead.
Democracy has been under threat in many countries, and there are countries where the government is not able to protect its citizens. It's not that we have to intervene in each of these countries and establish a leader being an outsider, but we do need to understand why is democracy under threat in many countries? There has been a rise in extremism, and social media has just helped polarized things. The rising anger and distrust against democratic institutions are concerning and tells us somewhere we have failed as a society.
The independence of the media is at stake. There is information overload and separating signal from noise is becoming strenuous. Media channels have identified their audience and are only catering to them. There is the loss of investigative journalism, and it is no longer the fourth pillar of democracy as often, it's not serving the job of the pillar. A part of it can be blamed on governments who are cracking down on media when covering the stories that matter. Press freedom is falling (link the article to media independence). Another part of this could be blamed on the new business models. With the advent of social media and mobile devices, articles need to be quick bait to get the attention (online articles are dependent on ad revenue decided by page views). And a further reduction in attention span means people are not reading long articles back as much as today. The rise of (video) media content and a growing number of millennia actually getting their news from youtube have forced the media houses to pivot. But the shift has not been able to sponsor independent and credible media.
Things in tech we need to get right:
Ethical AI: Artificial Intelligence is experiencing an exponential level and it is not only part of our daily consumer technology but is also making societal decisions already. But the thing about technology is, we cannot have a blackbox system, which gives rise to Explainable AI. Not only we need to understand that blackbox AI is not something desirable, but also make sure appropriate legislatures are made to make sure these blackbox AI are never deployed on large scale at a societal level. As engineers and researchers, we must pledge to develop explainable AI and promise to ourselves that we don't deploy these systems. It is time we start talking about ethical software and AI.
Privacy Tech: While we make technology a fundamental part of life, consumers have realized the value of privacy, and there is a legislature being written in parts of the countries. Consumers need to understand that they have to demand technology and service as an in-built feature, and it should not be a luxury.
In this decade, I hope to see privacy-enhancing technology (PET) booming. The technologies such as differential privacy, homographic encryption, zero-knowledge proof, or multi-secure party computation have already given their own POC, and now it’s time to add them to our daily products and services.
Privacy should not be a luxury.
Fake news: The advent of social media, has given rise to people living in a bubble. A person on social media just sees the articles and opinions from people they are friends/ follow them. This means if you follow a particular thing, you will be shown more articles/ videos/ posts related to that thing, magnifying your thought process and belief in the information. Think of it as a CIA brainwashing experiment, but actually happening in real-life at scale. As a technologist, when we design feeds, or are building a gateway to the internet, we need to be more careful.
Though we do have a bunch of challenges, I am optimistic about this decade. It's not that we aren't innovating enough. We successfully built multiple vaccines in record time, something that was done the first time in human history. This always gives me optimism that technology can be used for good and with the right implementation, we can definitely make a positive impact.
We have the future of quantum computing, robotics becoming more mainstream, self-driving cars not be taboo anymore and artificial intelligence actually supplementing humans to make better and informed decisions. And all of this won’t happen on its own, but rather we have to drive it while making sure, we get it right.
Wishing you a happy new year again, an exciting 2021.
Let’s Build humane technologies!