elevenM Senior Consultant and Victorian State Director of GovHack, Jordan Wilson-Otto explains why it’s important to maintain a sense of optimism about the future of technology and society.
It’s judging time for GovHack, the largest open data hackathon in the southern hemisphere. Looking through this year’s submissions, I’ve been thinking about how GovHack’s mission of optimism, civic engagement and empowerment presents a partial answer to the hard questions we raised in elevenM’s recent post about parenting, privacy and the future.
When we talk about technology, it’s easy to focus on the things that can go wrong. Few things in this world don’t have secondary effects, and we need to think about the implications of the systems that we are building and using so that we can harness their benefits while anticipating and mitigating their downsides.
Undue focus on benefits can lead to bad outcomes, but undue focus on harms can lead to bad outcomes too. If we can’t imagine a more equitable, sustainable or humane world, or a world where technology has made life better and not worse, then there can be no progress. The best we can hope for is stasis, or perhaps the return to some imagined golden age.
But optimism is hard. Almost all the modern narratives about technology are dystopian. Automation is coming for our jobs, algorithmic bias is perpetuating inequalities and killer robots are just around the corner. Meanwhile surveillance capitalism leads to our every online move being tracked, while spy agencies look on and hackers and trolls wait in the wings ready to pounce. And we’re powerless to respond, disabled by an increasingly polarised and dysfunctional political discourse, powered by social media.