Tech 63100 Week 12
The Exponential Age
Question: How do we create responsible technology?
Abundance and Equity
Azhar (2021) hit on several important themes throughout his book, The Exponential Age:
We are getting more from less leading to exponential technologies that leave exponential gaps.
The abundance of value that exponential technology generates comes with an abundance of waste and resource extraction.
Exponential technology is de-stabilizing as it challenges well-established systems resulting in unevenly distributed consequences where the negative outcomes tend to favor the poor nations and communities.
Exponential technology leads to superstar companies that increasingly dominate aspects of society not traditionally in the province of firms.
To address the exponential gap, technology must be designed responsibility. The IF Responsble Technology by Design framework establishes a shared language around responsible technology needs, principles, and patterns. It consists of an outer ring of Experience Characteristics, in orange, that focuses on the human experience with the objective of achieving trust in the services provided. In between the Experience Characteristics, are The Enablers, in yellow. These enablers define responsibility requirements to be enforced in the technical infrastructure and system architecture in order to achieve the associated Experience Characteristics (Ridpath, 2022). While this is a simply a framework, it acts as a holistic guide for design considerations in creating responsible technology. By ensuring technology is responsible, we can better understand, anticipate, and regulate its socioeconomic impact.
Virus in the Age of Madness
Question: What is digital contact tracing?
Life, they say
The COVID-19 mandate to stay home helped accelerate digital transformations in several industries such as e-commerce, tele-health, tele-work, distance education, and fitness in an attempt to make social distancing easier and more palatable for the general public. While the genesis for these digital products and digital apps were for the greater good negative effects were inevitable, particularly around user data, increased screen time and a subconscious addiction to our devices (Levy, 2020).
An example of this conundrum is digital contact tracing. Contract tracing is an approach taken byy the government to control disease in a population. It requires trained workers contacting individuals who may have been exposed to a contagion during a public health outbreak. Tracers then interview those that test positive to identify others who were in close contact to the infected individuals in hopes to quarantine them and contain / restrain the spread. Contact tracing was proven effective in containing London's 1854 cholera epidemic (Jared, 2020).
Digital contact tracing leverages smartphone technology to identify those in close contact with infected individuals at speed and scale (Jared, 2020). While the intent was to improve the overall human condition by proactively identifying who may have been exposed to COVID-19 with the negative effect being the exposure of user data to the government and big tech companies (Levy, 2020). The result was tension between individual liberty and the good of the community as there was potential for future use of user data by the Government (Jared, 2020).
References
Azhar, A. (2021). The Exponential Age. Diversion Books.
Jared, S. (2020, Jul 21). The right balance: digital contact tracing and privacy. Retrieved Apr 2024 from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: https://www.unc.edu/discover/the-right-balance-digital-contact-tracing-and-privacy/.
Lévy, B. (2020, Jul 28). The Virus in the Age of Madness. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ridpath, J. (2022, Aug 11). Introducing IF's Responsible Technology by Design Framework. Retrieved Apr 2024 from Medium: https://medium.com/writing-by-if/introducing-ifs-responsible-technology-by-design-framework-cdb4146fcfc5.