Besides making many things possible, IT & C technology is also impacting society in negative ways.
First of all, technology has crossed the point up to which it was helping us slow down speed up (interesting slip of the fingers there!). We’ve passed the peak in Tech 1.0, so to speak. We now need Tech 2.0 to cope with Tech 1.0, but we still believe that Tech 1.0 is the holy grail. No. We now need to take a step back and look at what we need to do next instead of blindly continue full steam ahead.
That dawned on me when I was in an ERC meeting at which biases in algorithms were discussed. We now need algorithms because of what technology has made possible. In the past, people used to apply for one or maybe two jobs per week, if not less. Nowadays, requirements for receiving benefits (social security) can be that people apply up to five times per day because the huge job application sites have made this possible. Companies therefore now often receive huge numbers of applications, often from people who are not suitable for the job, but who simply need to meet their job application targets. That’s where algorithms come in.
In countries with large housing shortages, such as the Netherlands, getting to live somewhere is highly regulated, in all sorts of ways. There are housing allocation websites in which many of the dwellings get thousands of people expressing their interest. This is partly because expressing interest affects your position in the waiting list positively. In order to handle this, people can only express interest in two dwellings, no more. If the next day, you happen to spot something super for which you are also at or near the top of the waiting list, you’re out of luck. It gets even crazier. The more often you click on homes that you don’t actually want, the higher you move up on the waiting list.
Second, most people still think as if this is the 18th or 19th century, with everyone using fountain and feather pens and horse-drawn carts and who see computers as akin to fountain pens and the internet the same way as they see horse-powered travel.
This is also what happened in the Post Office scandal in the UK. The computer system said that a lot of postmasters had committed fraud, so they were prosecuted.
A computer is not like a horse or a fountain pen at all. Horses can get injured or collapse. A fountain pen can break or be stolen. That’s visible. Computer data are just zeros and ones, or little pulses of electricity or light. They are essentially invisible, but produce output that most people still tend to trust and believe in as if it had been written with a fountain pen in front of them.
They can’t compute IT because they like SEEING things and HEARING things and they trust their senses. So they believe what is printed and what is on their screens. Just like many cats and dogs have now learned to watch TV and YouTube and sometimes get confused, the human species too is still adapting to this new reality.
You can probably see this as a form of epistemic injustice (hermeneutical). Many people lack the knowledge to be able to process what’s happening. It is not only related to them being in a disadvantaged position, it also puts them in a position of disadvantage and makes them vulnerable.
On the other hand, hackers and other IT people also experience epistemic injustice, namely testimonial injustice. Their warnings are or were often dismissed as coming from nerds and goofballs with for example an anxiety problem. (This may also go for the first victims of the following types of crime.)
The resulting proliferation of scams and the use of voice cloning are now slowly starting to change that. It alerts people to the fact that when the screen says that ABN AMRO or Lloyds bank is calling you or emailing you, that isn’t necessarily the case, even if everything appears to check out. The same goes for if your grandchild – claiming to be stranded in Mexico or Turkey – calls you to ask for money.
Businesses, too, and other organizations such as museums now know – or should know – that email conversations can get hijacked and that they may no longer be communicating with their supplier or art specialist who they need to pay and think they are writing to but a scammer.
