Preparation Project - Katie

The following is a reupload of the original exercise we did to prepare for this assignment. This was originally published on Wordpress, before it was requested we host our blog on Blogger instead: 

After reviewing these sources, I feel like we’re entering a new era in society’s relationship with technology. I feel like starting around the mid-2000’s, with the release of the iPhone, we entered an era of great optimism about the possibilities of technology. Social media was going to connect the world, services like Uber and Amazon were going to make our lives easier than ever, and securing an office job at companies like Google would be long-lived, comfortable and lucrative. I think we have now entered an era of facing the consequences of signing a blank check for all these companies. In an era of unprecedented labour movements in response to shrinking wages and mass lay-offs, we have now learnt that these companies never had our best interests at heart and their products were never going to fix our societal ills– they were only ever going to exploit them for profit.

This exploitation can be clearly observed in cities like San Francisco, where ride-hail drivers are sharing the roads with self-driving vehicles that hope to take their jobs, all while these robot-taxis block fire trucks, emergency vehicles and city buses because they tend to freeze in the middle of traffic. Meanwhile, in New York, Local Law 18 has come into force and is forcing short-term rental hosts to register with the city, and are limiting them to two guests. It is, in effect, a ban on Airbnb rentals in their city, which have been reeking havoc on the local housing market. This is proof that some local authorities are waking up to the negative impacts of Big Tech. However, regulators are still running to try and contain more recent developments, like AI, before it starts to destroy entire industries. These companies behind these open-source generative AI projects are dependant on the work of overworked and underpaid annotators and content moderators and on the robbery of millions of artists work to keep up the illusion that they’ve created something intelligent from wires and transistors. Beyond their effects on labour, these technologies raise complicated questions about transhumanism that have previously only been theoretical, like how people in the depths of grief can use AI chat bots to create convincing facsimiles of the people we’ve loved and lost.

Still, these companies persist in selling us new methods of mass surveillance for the sake of convenience. Samsung are bringing out a new service called Samsung Food. “It’s an AI-powered app that enables you to manage your recipes, plan your meals, create your shopping list, get suggestions based on what ingredients you actually have, and so on. And it also connects to compatible devices, so once you’ve decided what you’re going to make it’ll automatically sync the appropriate settings to the appropriate device: your air fryer, your microwave, your oven and so on. In the long term it might also integrate with Samsung’s Health app to plan healthier meals, or meals that help you manage specific conditions.” Apps like these appear harmless on their surface, but are in fact an attempt at creating a profile of your spending and lifestyle habits. They can use this internally and also sell it on to third-parties who can use your grocery list from that week to curate your targeted ads.

Looking at how many of these companies who could once afford to run at a loss, thanks to their investors, that are now struggling to balance the books is another strong signal of an era ending and a new one beginning. For example, back in August, WeWork was reporting that it’s “current ‘losses and negative cash flows’ raise ‘substantial doubt’ over its ability to continue operating.” For me, this suggests that companies with this laissez-faire attitude are no longer going to get the level of corporate backing that they could have in the previous decade. A new approach will be needed.

Still, it’s not total doom and gloom. It’s hard not feel a twinge of hope while perusing the articles being published by MIT around what’s being done in the fight against climate change. As much as it can be our peril, technology can still be a tool for societal good. It can be used to reduce carbon emissions from transport by building ships that run on ammonia instead of petrol or building batteries that are reliant on water instead of lithium.