I wonder if the prevailing technological cultural zeitgeist discourages some of the world’s brightest and most ambitious people choosing other routes for public service. Moreover, the solutions to some of our biggest challenges perhaps lie much more firmly in a need for better human cooperation than faster technological innovation.
I’m in an echo chamber that reverberates with stories about how platforms, algorithms and data are going to save the world. Confusingly, my echo chamber also reverberates with stories about how platforms, algorithms and data are going to end it. It is like going for a relaxing soda and lime with Tim Martin and Charlie Mullins to talk about Brexit. Truth be told, technology has the potential to do both (Nuclear Medicine or Nuclear Weapons: The Digital Determinants of Health).
If this were true and we existed in a world of total global cooperation would we not have a lot less to fear from modern technology? The fundamental challenge seems to me that emergent, amorphous and seemingly unfathomable transnational cyberspace empires are being commercialised in the financial interest of specific countries over others.
Sure powerful global tech platforms can be annoying. But they pay the bills.
As long as this remains true it makes sense for originator nations to let technology rumble into territory that maximises power and tax yield over the global collective public good. If your country holds the reins to powerful weapons that influence elections, there is only so far any rhetoric about regulation is likely to extend. If your country is collecting taxes on every object everyone buys everywhere then maybe monopolies are not so bad. Emergent regional and national taxation policies are interesting to follow.
We’ve got emergent, amorphous and seemingly unfathomable platforms, algorithms and data existing in a complex partially federated world. If emojis were part of the Forbes editorial guideline i’d use the exploding head one. It is so complicated it is tempting to ignore, or better still, to imagine that it will just work out fine and Martin Luther King’s quote was a statement of inevitability.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”
Martin Luther King
Rather than a paraphrase of the much earlier and much less certain quote of abolitionist minster, Theordore Parker.
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”
Theodore Parker
But us lil’people have been here before. We humans have form when it comes to being of our own history and creation but not determined by it. We can create, debate and recalibrate.
How does a ragtag volunteer army in need of a shower.
Somehow defeat a global superpower?
– Aaron Burr, Hamilton the Musical
Well they did. And I think we should have another go.
I think we should be a bit more precise about taking back control. Not parochialism, nationalism, or individualism, but humanity. Our shared humanity, taking back control.
Technology businesses can move the needle on human welfare in ways that would otherwise not be possible. However, robust global public institutions, cooperating and appropriately configured, are surely the vehicles which offer the best chance of a secure, happy, collective future for everyone born today and everyone yet to be born. For this to remain feasible I believe we need to reclaim the narrative that public service and human progress is best and solely deliverable through javascript and hyper-growth.
Humanity eats technology for breakfast. At least for now. Maybe you could help to make sure it stays that way?