Can tech bring equality and peace? From left: James Surowiecki, Nandan Nilekani, Jack Dorsey, David Miliband, and Genevieve Bell. Techonomy
Sometimes, when tech VIPs get together to opine about “the future,” the ambition goes a little over-the-top. On the other hand, if you’re going to go there, why not swing for the fences?
Such was the case on Sunday night at Techonomy, a gathering of tech CEOs, startup entrepreneurs, scientists, and assorted big thinkers put on by veteran tech journalist David Kilpatrick.
In a restaurant lounge at the Ritz Carlton overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the question of the evening was: “Can tech bring equality and peace?” Given the high profiles of the panelists assembled to entertain an answer, you could almost be forgiven for thinking they were going to come up with a definitive yes-or-no.
The group included Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and CEO of Square; anthropologist Genevieve Bell, director of user experience research at Intel; IT mogul Nandan Nilekani, who led a massive project to create and issue a universal ID for hundreds of millions of Indian citizens; and former British foreign secretary David Miliband, one of the U.K.’s most visible public officials and now president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee.
If anything close to a consensus emerged, it was that technology can’t transcend history or politics. And within the everyday messiness of human lives and conflict, that technology is only as good as the hands of the people it’s in. “It certainly can’t alone,” Dorsey said, when asked if technology could bring equality and peace. “To me, technology fundamentally is just a tool. It’s up to us to figure out how to use those tools and how to apply those tools.”
‘The potential exists that someone could have an idea, that someone anywhere around the world could have an idea, and it could spread instantly.’
For Dorsey, the question of technology’s capacity to empower us but also keep us down is especially fraught. Twitter is credited with helping to spawn revolutions, but it has also become a funnel for bullying and harassment. Dorsey acknowledged that the tool he helped create—and others like it—could be misused. But he remained committed to the optimistic notion on which he has staked his career: that enabling radically efficient human connections nets out to the good.
“There is the potential for quality of voice, at least,” Dorsey said. “The potential exists that someone could have an idea, that someone anywhere around the world could have an idea, and it could spread instantly.”
The Work to Be Done
On the topic of equality, Bell pointedly noted that she was the only woman on the panel, which was moderated by New Yorker business writer James Surowiecki. The imbalance corresponded closely to the lopsided gender ratios at big tech companies.
Trying to decide whether a technology is a tool or a weapon misses the point, Bell said. “It’s both of these things and neither. It has no agency,” she said. “Technology can’t do the work that we as a society must do ourselves.”
In a way, the ID project led by Nilekani is one of the most striking examples in recent memory of trying to use technology to do that work. The effort to create a unique digital ID for every Indian citizen was intended to make access to everything from healthcare to banking easier in a country that lacked the equivalent of, for example, the Social Security number given to every U.S child at birth. But Nilekani would not make a blanket claim for technology as an automatic enabler of a better life.
“A lot of it goes down to how you design it for empowerment,” he said. Toward the end of the conversation, Kirkpatrick pointed out that Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a kid on the subway both have the same iPhone. A kind of equality, right? Nilekani responded that such parity doesn’t mean much when 100 million kids can’t read. “The iPhone 9 isn’t going to solve that problem.”
Instant Translation
One problem Miliband hoped that a problem a future iteration of the iPhone could solve was instant translation. As the head of a global organization with teams posted to refugee crises around the world, he said that the ability to speak and be understood universally could be a powerful tool. “That is a democratizing and equalizing change,” he said.
Miliband also praised technologies like Twitter as a way to draw near-immediate attention to hypocrisy and atrocities. Miliband, who has his own complicated relationship with the Edward Snowden leaks, said that technology has great potential for abuse by the powerful. But it also offers a way to push back.
“The means of secrecy are always renewed,” he said, “but they’re under much greater pressure.”
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