IMPACT COMMUNICATION
AND INNOVATION
AND INNOVATION
Last week, Daniel Harvey published a long, yet precise and necessary, thread of tweets on his profile. As the head of product and brand design at The Dots, a network for freelance creatives, his talks and content revolve around the responsibility behind these individuals and their relationship with technology. While participating in the UX Crunch event, Harvey brought up the topic of dystopias as a central theme in his reflection on how we think about (and build) the future, taking into account our creative and human potential combined with technology.
What Harvey discusses, however, is especially important for those working in innovation and futurology. Among these professionals, many are associated not only with areas related to technological development but also with communication and, in particular, advertising. In such a context, catchy phrases and inspirational quotes dominate a logic of constant stimulation. For this, nothing beats the quote by science fiction writer William Gibson in a 2003 interview with The Economist: “The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed.”
As Harvey points out, this quote usually precedes a presentation full of “trend fetishism,” completely ignoring the subversive and political aspect of the second part of the sentence. What many fail to realize (or choose to ignore so as not to dismantle their own reasoning) is that this phrase speaks precisely to the fact that one person's future is another's dystopia and, thanks to the internet, we have the capacity to spread this dystopia much further—to the point where, by the time we realize it, it will be too late.
And why can't we see this happening? Because, as Harvey argues, we are constantly influenced (and distracted) by a perspective where the concept of dystopia becomes synonymous with a future in which machines become super-intelligent and, of course, turn against us in true Terminatorfashion. The thing is, this type of narrative sells in Hollywood movies and, following that same logic, also appears in the discourse of big tech names like Elon Musk. The problem is that this fallacious view immediately triggers our most primitive survival instincts, and because of that, we end up echoing and reinforcing these ideas in a way similar to fake news.
Harvey believes these visions of the future and arguments are ridiculous. To explain his opinion, he cites a quote from Pedro Domingos, a professor at the University of Washington and machine learning expert: “People worry too much about computers getting too smart and taking over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.”
In other words, what Harvey highlights with this quote is that we already live in a world permeated by computers, which are equipped with artificial intelligence that isn't truly intelligent and that operates in tandem with a flawed mindset of technological innovation. And this is the greatest danger we face today. As civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander also reinforces, “It is tempting to believe that computers will be neutral and objective, but algorithms are nothing more than opinions embedded in math.”
And the issue of bias in algorithm development is what led to Apple failing to include information on women's health related to menstruation in its health app, or when predictive policing software ends up reproducing prejudicesThe most terrifying thing, however, is not the thought of a superintelligent AI being developed to exterminate humanity, but that our clicks on internet ads have been used to capture data that will be used to build a society of surveillance and control, as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci reveals in another quote cited by Harvey.
What these three quotes lead us to understand is that, yes, we are already living in a dystopia, but it is not one populated by robots using human bodies as batteries to survive. In reality, we are facing a highly flawed and harmful artificial intelligence, because it already carries many biases itself and has been used solely to generate profit for companies with dubious (if not purely profit-driven) motives.
To illustrate this, Harvey brings up the case of Bobbi Duncan. The example in question addresses how, despite Duncan having customized her privacy settings on Facebook, the platform let it slip that she had started participating in a queer choir group at her college. That is how her parents discovered her sexual orientation, and in response, Duncan was disowned and even attempted suicide. All because the group's settings on Facebook overrode the user's own preferences.
In 2016, Harvey reminds us, Facebook also became the primary source of news in Myanmar. The consequence of this was that, between August and September 2017, hate speech on the platform reached critical levels, and at the same time, more than 6,700 Muslims were murdered by Buddhist citizens and the military. Such an outcome is particularly curious if we take our local context into account: according to research conducted by the Reuters Institute, Brazil still has Facebook as its main source of news (66%), followed by messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and Skype, with nearly half of those surveyed (48%) stating they use WhatsApp to access journalistic content. Our consequence? The results of the last elections and the waves of politically motivated violence.
Beyond that, we still have various examples of even more obscure data collection and surveillance methodologies. Harvey cites how China is using dove-shaped drones to monitor its citizens, while Australia has The Capability, a database that gathers biometric data even though similar systems have already shown that 92% of the matches made were incorrect. Baltimore also serves as an example in Harvey's tweet, as a local company called Persistent Surveillance Systems uses drones to feed a predictive policing system.
It is cases like these that give rise to the concept of Stochastic terrorism described by Clayton Delery in his book Out for Queer Blood. It is defined as the “use of mass media and public communication, usually against a particular individual or group, which incites or inspires acts of terrorism that are statistically probable but happen in an apparently random manner.” With resources like deepfake technology becoming increasingly popular and realistic, stochastic terrorism is even more prominent, as such technological uses can range from falsifying a speech by a politician to the misuse of other people's images in superimposed defamatory content.
In this sense, science fiction author Aldous Huxley had already predicted “the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.” The quote brought up by Harvey, though old (as he died in 1963), still proves not only relevant but a revelation from the past that defines what we struggle to understand in our present, permeated by fake news and post-truth.
But what can we do about this, whether as consumers, creators, or as a society? For Harvey, we need to fix this, and we cannot simply disconnect and run away: “Running away doesn't help solve the problems of those left behind, and it neglects our own responsibility in this mess.” So, as individuals, what we can do is change our relationship with technology, as advocated by movements like Time Well Spent, which suggests tactics such as:
1. Only allow notifications from other people;
2. Use your phone in grayscale to avoid addiction;
3. Keep only tools on your home screen;
4. Open other apps by typing their names;
5. Buy an alarm clock;
6. Quit your habit or addiction cold turkey, not gradually;
On the other hand, as workers, the collective action we could take, according to Harvey, is to engage more and more in activism. As an example, he points to the possibility of opposing the search system that Google is creating for China, the Google military contracts, or even supporting decisions like those of the people who left Google due to sexual harassment in the workplace, as well as Stanford students who took a stand against Salesforce over its decisions regarding immigration and border control.
As voters, what we can do is support laws and regulations that prioritize the human right to privacy over the premises of corporate-created surveillance complexes. Some examples of this are the General Data Protection Regulation, the Oakland anti-surveillance ordinances and the proposal for a Consumer Data Protection Act by Senator Ron Wyden.
As designers and technologists, we must reinforce terms of service to be more equitable and fair, ensuring no one is above the law or above those terms. Furthermore, creating better definitions for protected groups and more accurate algorithms for detecting hate speech are some of the tools to reduce this type of content being circulated online. Designers and technologists can also improve copyright tools, not just to generate revenue from entertainment, but to combat deepfakes that put democracy at risk, as well as other content harmful to vulnerable audiences like children.
With this new perspective, Harvey suggests we also consider how advertising is not the answer to everything, and that there are other ways to monetize and generate revenue that do not depend on ads. Some possibilities include subscription services or even direct-to-consumer commerce, without intermediaries, for example through e-commerce sites. Additionally, blockchain applied to marketplaces is also being considered as a way to eliminate intermediaries and facilitate these processes, for instance, through tokenization.
But above all, Harvey concludes his statement by saying that we, mere mortals who do not belong to Silicon Valley (but are, often, part of the Valley of Silence), we aren't going to solve the problems caused by these American tech entrepreneurs precisely because they chose to lack diversity in their projects and companies. What we need, Harvey asserts, is "real diversity and inclusion in tech if we are going to fix anything at all."
And that is exactly what we addressed at the Roadsec 2017 event, when we brought up for debate whether the future is female, when in reality, we were talking about a future built and conceived in a more inclusive and diverse way. After all, futurists aren't capable of predicting the future, but rather of helping to build more positive future scenarios. And for these to be truly positive, we need to think of the future as a plural noun and a complex concept: not because it is difficult, as Bruno Macedo would say, but because it is full of nuances. If it isn't singular and isn't equally distributed, then why should the thinking and construction of the future be?
