Chapter 4: A story of technology.

We must rethink what reality we want to build.

Welcome back. This is the first chapter of the second half of this series. Previously I had the great opportunity to talk with brilliant people like Maria Capel (UX/UI Lead Designer at Naughty Dog), Ignasi Tudela (Global creative director at Polaroid), and Danny Camprubí (FC.Barcelona Innovation Hub).

If you are new to the series, I invite you to read and enjoy our previous three conversations. If you follow me on this fantastic journey, you know that the conversation I had with our next guest was an eye-opening experience.

Carina Lopes is the Head of the Digital Future Society Think Tank at the Mobile World Capital Barcelona. She is one of the wisest and enlightening people I ever met. Her ability to connect the dots of what’s going on in our modern society with technology, social movements, COVID-19, and human behavior is unique.

This is the result of our conversations.

One man’s tool is another man’s weapon.

Technology has been with us since our first tools around 1,76 million years ago. Since then, our progression has been spectacular. How is it possible that an ape species like ours, almost extinct on our own planet, has been able to walk on the moon?

Technology has barely been questioned ever. This point was precisely the center of our conversations.

Carina: We have been evolving and creating new technologies and innovations just because we can without questioning ourselves if we should. Think about it. The real technological revolutions happen in the grey areas of our society. Before any technology impacts the world, it is developed and tested by people and organizations with their own interests. Usually, by the time we start talking about a specific technology or digital tool’s challenges or negative aspects, it is already deeply ingrained into our day-to-day life.

Oliver: Like many others, I recently watched the Netflix documentary “The social Dilemma.” I know that it is very controversial. Many people say that it is created by the same people who designed systems to provoke addiction and anxiety in all of us. Anyways, some companies developed such a powerful technology without asking if they should is a problem. It is a very complex one because our society automatically understands that you are entirely against it if you criticize something.

Carina: Think about, for example, the facial recognition technology that is widely used in our cities and by police forces. It has been reported to have a very high mistake rate for black people. Most people don’t know that this rate is far worse for black women, rising from 35% of mistake probability to 65%.

O: There are horrifying statements related to facial recognition tech. Like the Detroit police chief did. Just imagine that some security service or corporation relies on this software. It can be a human catastrophe. This is the thing our tools are only as good as the use we give them.

C: Exactly, think about where corporate power is today — at some of the largest technology companies that the world has. We have the GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) and also Microsoft.

These companies do how they see and understand the world. The space we give them as a society to roll-out their services profoundly impacts our business ecosystems, cultures, local communities, and even youth mental health.

These companies can easily buy small and innovative startups, keep them alive or directly close them down, based on their market strategy. This practice is profoundly affecting the capacity of innovation and disruption of smaller companies or entrepreneurs.

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us” Marshall McLuhan.

At this point in the conversation, I realized even more how technology is deeply connected to us, our society, and our world. As a modern society, the practices that we are all allowed to have a significant impact on us back again.

Carina explained to me how we are feeding into a slow but growing social-tech backlash. The poorest people are the most mistrustful of technology. The lack of access to it, together with the inability to access good education and excess misinformation, feeds into this fear.

Fear of being replaced by a robot or a computer and losing even more life quality because of technology and artificial intelligence.

How have we allowed this?

It only takes one setback at a global level like the crisis we are experiencing with COVID-19 to lose years of gender equality progress. According to a report published by the United Nations, I quote:

“There’s the shadow of the pandemic, which is rapidly unraveling the limited, but precious progress the world has made toward gender equality in the past few decades.

As summarized by a new UN report about COVID-19 and women. The shadow can be seen in a spike in domestic violence as girls and women are sheltering-in-place with their abusers; the loss of employment for women who hold the majority of insecure, informal and lower-paying jobs; the risk shouldered by the world’s nurses, who are predominantly women; and the rapid increase in unpaid care work that girls and women mostly provide already.

The current emergency is poised to deeply exacerbate a stubborn one: while early reports suggest that men are more likely to succumb to COVID-19, the social and economic toll will be paid, disproportionately, by the world’s girls and women.”

We have adapted to the demands established by the economic system and technological advances in each industrial revolution. Society has tried to find remedies for all those left behind in the interest of efficiency.

The technological transition does not take into account advancing in parallel with society. Make all the agents involved learn and understand the human impact of technological advances.

Now we are on the verge of another revolution. Once again, we advance without regard to the human cost, regardless of the new social divides and inequality created.

Social tech-backlash.

The backdrop has always been the same, our increasingly unequal and radicalized capitalist system. A system that we know only too well not to generate happiness, well-being, or stability. A system that urgently needs to be revised and updated.

Carina: Technology advances alongside those who can use it. Let’s look at what’s happening with education right now.

The pandemic has focused on the severe inequalities in the educational systems of different countries, on the extreme difficulties in using technologies that we cannot even say are new but merely inaccessible in no small part of the population.

What will happen when teachers operate with the help of IA? Only students who have the technology, the connection, and the lifestyle that has normalized its use will keep up with progress.

COVID-19 is creating a before and after in everyone’s life. We are not prepared to fit what is to come in winter. In this hyper-polarized moment in which we live, we wouldn´t have imagined that an essential element for our health, such as a mask, could become a political icon.

Oliver: The polarization stretches to extremes as is logical; however, it is causing fractures and voids on a social level, not only on the political class but also on the economic level, on the level of education, on the level of gender equality, on the level of racism.

The United States has taught many countries and many leaders how the new policy works. A master class on handling the media, populist messages, and society’s polarization in recent years.

Carina: In these November elections, they will again mark a before and after. If Trump wins the election, the rest of the world will see American society as a lost cause. However, if Biden is finally elected president, the whole media machine of confrontation will be set in motion against the election’s credibility.

The question here is who will lose. In all likelihood, democracy will fail; that is, ordinary people like you and me, but ordinary people can no longer take many more hits and less ranting from the class supposed to be leading the world but with no institutional credibility.

Technology is no exception. History has shown us that technological advances have always been on the side of the most influential societies.

Global polarization also affects social innovation and technology. We see this with the debate on social networks. We see this with business policies and new legislation in the home office. We see it discussing the universal minimum income and evictions in the middle of a pandemic.

We are also in a tremendous opportunity.

Now we see clearly the things that work the least and the things that we can reset. Now we can think about why we do what we do as a society at the innovation and technology level.

We now have the opportunity to think about what kind of impact future technological and social innovations will have on society.

We have the chance to put the human being back at the center and technology and innovation at their service and not the other way around as is happening right now on many occasions.

More and more technologists, innovators, thinkers, and professionals from different fields are advocating putting people at the center of everything and thinking about putting technology to work to improve society and our lives.

We are now on the verge of a neo-humanism era.

We must bring back the human.