Why Thoughtful Technology Requires Everyone’s Attention- A Q&A with Darlene Damm (Part 2)
This is the second part of a conversation with Darlene Damm, an awesome person who works at the intersections of tech innovation and social impact. She was kind enough to answer my questions around the promise and precariousness of technology which I think we should all be bringing more awareness to. You can check out Part 1 here.
[ME] What needs to happen for us to experience a reality where technology helps us thrive versus the opposite?
Darlene Damm [DD]: We need the people and organizations who have historically been responsible for solving social problems and making the world a better place to step up into the technology world. For example, over the last decade you have seen a number of United Nations groups and social entrepreneurs embrace technology. They are showing how we can make the world a better place, and also serving as role models. We also need more marginalized communities, people with diverse life experiences and the people who are experiencing society’s biggest problems to get a role in building the technology itself and identifying what problems it will solve. And for those already in the sector to welcome and support the involvement of those groups.
ME: Are there any examples out there you can point to where some of this is already happening?
DD: The World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator is doing amazing work supporting their own staff and other startups using technology to create a world of zero hunger. UNICEF Ventures has a fund that supports innovators using advanced technologies to help children.
ME: In a new world with things like COVID-19 in it, that has forced us to revisit fundamentals about the ways our economic, political, educational and other systems work — what do you see as the role of technology now?
DD: At a fundamental level, over the last two decades we began the process of digitizing every industry, sector and field in the world. This first took off in the 90s and early 2000s with access to information, access to education and commerce and retail. In the last five to ten years, we saw digitization start to hit fields like healthcare, governance, food, construction, etc. During this process of digitizing every industry, you also have the chance to build into the industry new ways information flows, new ways decisions are made — basically how power and resources flow.
Think about how today millions of people can take a MIT course vs. say 40 students. Or how a songwriter can get billions of views of their video. Or how someone paying thousands of people to be internet trolls can cause massive confusion or chaos around an election. All of our economic, political, and education systems have been going through massive disruptions already, but it has been slower and not evenly spread out, then you add COVID-19, which creates a huge push for everyone to go digital all at once and we actually start to see its full force, and it creates windows of opportunity for people to play a bigger role.
Another interesting piece is that those who were previously working under a framework that they will succeed if they out-complete others, are suddenly in a situation where the rules have changed — you now need to collaborate with others in order to survive. While it might change over time, at least initially people were sharing massive amounts of data and information about COVID as it was a common crisis.
I’ve always believed that collaboration results in a much better use of resources and talent and creates better outcomes but so far we have been in a system where the value of collaboration has not been visible. Hopefully people will see how much more effective it is, how much faster we can go, how much better things can be. How do you successfully make that model mainstream? I think there are some really interesting experiments in the blockchain communities where they are creating digital companies and communities that better allocate resources and more fairly reward people for their contributions. None of this is a new idea — in a nutshell it’s simply taking the idea of giving out stock (ownership, the ability to contribute to decision-making), to everyone who contributes.
ME: How do you see technology playing a role in dismantling systems of oppression and supporting movements like Black Lives Matter now and into the future versus enabling further bias and discrimination?
DD: Historically, technology has always played an important role in furthering social movements and you will see that many of the great social leaders have used the technology of their times to make a difference. For example, Gandhi’s work coincided with the radio, Martin Luther King Jr. with the television. Today many social and civil rights leaders are using the Internet and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement also incorporated smartphone video footage into their movement. Those three examples are about people using technology to communicate, collaborate and build movements.
I believe some of the new technologies we are seeing today can also further social movements by addressing some of the economic disparities that underpin oppression. For example, how can we use digital education, telemedicine, renewable energy, or robotic community gardens to ensure that everyone has high quality affordable healthcare, food, education and clean air to breathe? Or how can innovators from oppressed communities now use low cost digital technologies to build solutions for the problems in their own communities or build global companies and organizations that change the way the world works entirely in a more fair way?
Of course people are using technology in ways that intentionally or unintentionally harm oppressed communities. For example, over the last few years there has been a lot of discussion around biased algorithms. As an example, a company builds software to help them screen job applicants, but uses data from existing employees — who might all be of one race or gender because of past biases, or favors the schools or former places they worked which might have also been biased — so that software then seeks out more of those candidates amplifying rather than solving the problem. So people are now working on creating unbiased data pools to train the algorithms. This is also one of the reasons why it is so important for diverse innovators to be engaged in building technology in the first place.
[ME]: What does the tech space look like to you 10 years from now?
DD: One way to think about the future is to read the work of Ray Kurzweil. In his book, The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil maps out all the new technologies he thinks will unfold over time. When you have a sense of what is possible technologically, you can then imagine how this will impact every industry including what new products, services and applications will be possible, what industries will die out or merge, what new industries will be formed. All of this needs to be taken in the context of social trends that are also happening. But once you have his timeline in your mind, you can then start better seeing the changes around that are happening today, and how they connect to other changes that are happening.
For example, if I were to tell you that I think clean renewable energy will be free in the future, you’ll probably think that I’m crazy. But then if you start looking at the different components of technology that generate energy for example solar panels or battery technology and then you look at how their costs are falling over time, and the convergence of additional technologies (for examples robots that can quickly build solar panels or batteries or the new satellite networks SpaceX is launching that might allow billions of new innovators in under resourced parts of the world to have access to and share the latest knowledge on these technologies via new real time translation services), you start to see we are moving toward a world where energy will be super cheap or free. People might argue if this is 5 years away, 10 years or 20 years, but you can see it coming. And then you start to think — how would free renewable energy impact the transportation industry or the housing industry or the manufacturing industry or the aerospace industry? There are millions of new things that will unfold in the future. But if you understand Kurzweil’s thinking and why the exponential nature of technology underlies that, you can get a pretty good sense of what things will look like. This, by the way, also allows you to figure out how to solve social problems, when to launch a new startup, what policies a government should be thinking about creating, etc.
ME: Finally, what roles do you think technologists and non-tech people play in harnessing the best of technology? Is there something we can and should be doing?
I hope we can live in a world where we get rid of the terms technologists and non-tech people. Why do we label ourselves in those ways? We are all using technology more and more as an essential part of our daily lives. Furthermore, many of the tools to, say, build a website, or even run a quantum computer, have increasingly user-friendly interfaces so that everyone can use them. And you can always learn new skills or form a company or organization with someone who has more skills than you do at that particular moment to create a solution using technology. It’s also becoming an increasing norm that students learn how to code just as it used to be a norm that everyone would study reading and math. For myself, even though I studied History in college, I decided for myself that wasn’t a label that I should let define me and I looked for experiences to learn about and work with technology in the same way that I might try to learn how to cook or play a new sport.
Something that surprised me is that many people simply learn about technology by asking their friends and peers questions. It’s no different than some people learning to cook from videos, some people paying for a cooking class, some people going through years of training to work at a world-famous restaurant. It’s the same process.
To harness the best of technology, we need everyone who cares about society, whether they think of themselves as technologists or not, to build with it. Again, this is important because the technology of today is extremely powerful and will have a much bigger impact on society in the future than the way we have seen technology behave in the past. It’s important to take part.
Thanks for reading and welcome and encourage any thoughts/comments you might have on how all of us might become more engaged in this conversation!
