Reminiscent of the gold rush of 1800s, the 21st century has been a
tech-rush powered by young and influential billionaires from Silicon Valley. For years we have been put under the impression that technology will solve all of our world's problems and, while some of them can be solved this way, not all can. To make it worse, those that can't are usually root social and political problems that either need a change in ethos or need broader solutions involving many more areas of expertise.

ECONOMIC INEQUALITY

First thing that comes to mind is economic inequality within minority groups, which according to a HuffPost article is becoming a problem not only concentrated within minority groups. There is a pervasive thought among people in the "first world" that they can help eradicate inequality and poverty by just building mobile apps for various initiatives. I believe this is not how it should work. I find that it establishes a false sense of accomplishment among people that could be of some help if they just didn't waste their time, knowingly or unknowingly, "helping".

FAKE NEWS IS HERE TO STAY

What better way to show this problem than with the 2020 United States elections. Social media has exacerbated the pandemic of misinformation going around. According to NBC News, falsehoods are spreading much faster through social media than truth. Only one or two election cycles ago this would not be possible, and the technology used for electric voting and counting the votes has been a source of many of those fake news. A sad and worrisome fact is that fake news is here to stay and we'll just have to deal with it.

A DANGER TO OUR DEMOCRACY

Elections are probably one of the most underestimated problems we face when merging them with digital technology because they have a weird mix of two opposite goals. When a citizen votes, he must be anonymous as not to encourage voter fraud, but his vote also needs to be somehow trusted or verified to discourage that same voter fraud. Therefore, election officials are worried about people taking pictures of their ballots because you should not be able to prove how you voted. Otherwise we could have situations like: "Discount for X voters" or "Vote Y or you'll have problems".

A PROBLEM WITH DIGITAL ELECTIONS

Why is digital technology one of the biggest problems when it comes to voting practices ? Isn't physical voting imperfect too? Yes, it is imperfect, but as Tom Scott, a computer scientist of Internet fame, put it, attacks on physical voting don't scale as well as attacks on huge interconnected digital systems with voting machines. Most problems with physical voting have already been experienced and we know how to defend from most of them (like granny voting or Bulgarian trains) and an attacker can get only a few people into the fraud before someone discovers him and his scheme. On the other hand, when an attacker gains access to digital voting systems he can flip a switch and instantly defraud tens of thousands or more voters from their democratic privilege.

A MATTER OF TRUST

But can't this be solved with new technologies, passwords, hashes, checksums, open-source software… maybe that buzzword blockchain? Some of these are currently used in many electronic voting systems around the world, from the United States to Estonia, but there is a catch. Even if we had the most secure voting systems, voting is a special case where this is just not enough because there needs to be trust in the system the whole population uses to vote. If there is no trust from the wider population then the voter turnout suffers and subsequently even smaller voter fraud can impact the results of an election. People can inherently trust pen and paper because they are familiar with them, but when you start throwing phrases and words at people that they don't understand or have never heard of, they will start to get suspicious. Why would my 80-year-old grandfather trust that glowing hunk of electronics to record his vote correctly and not just show him his vote, but record another one? Not to even mention what would happen if a foreign nation tried to break trust in the elections as we've seen in the last two election cycles in the United States. Currently, this whole idea seems to be understood only by the Estonian government.

STEM IS NOT A MAGIC WAND FOR EDUCATION ISSUES

Although we have only talked about elections up until now, this is not the only problem that occurs when you try to fix things using technology in a reduced sense. I have been personally bombarded by a number of ads, posts, initiatives, and people that believe the holy grail of education is introducing STEM (whatever that means for any of these is almost always different) to our classrooms and giving every child a laptop or tablet. According to prof. Kentaro Toyama from the School of Information at the University of Michigan "Technology doesn't fix broken school systems, so no amount of technology is going to turn around a situation where children aren't learning." We should stop using our schools as places where we cram young people with information and make them shining temples of reason and palaces of creative thinking.

SMART CITIES OR "TRACKING" CAPITALS?

Some technologies allow us to live a comfier life, but they create problems of their own. This is the case with the privacy issues around many of the services we use today. A unique part of this story are smart cities, which are advertised as something inherently good. I'd argue that this heavily depends on their final implementation. The recent development with Google-linked Sidewalk Labs and their smart city project in Portland, where they rejected to implement a smart city solution, has revealed that even Google's own off-shoot companies are worried about personal privacy and implementation of city wide "tracking" solutions. Considering the amount of information Google collects, this has a certain weight to it. This only shows that technology implementations must be preceded by laws and regulations to stop such projects from having a sinister impact on our lives and force them to be utterly transparent with everything they are doing.

A COURIOUS CASE OF PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

A case where such tracking technology is currently being tested for nefarious purposes is PR China with its social credit score system. This is a national blacklist system acting like a social network which punishes people whose behavior includes negative factors such as playing loud music, eating in rapid transit systems, making reservations at restaurants or hotels and not showing up etc. If you don't have a high enough credit score, you can get rejected for plane or train tickets or even worse. Sounds like an episode of "Black Mirror", doesn't it? This is what happens when advanced enough technology is misused and there is no regulation that can stop it or worse, the regulation itself is made so that technology could be used against the general population.

NOT ALL IS LOST

Rarely is any product of science and progress inherently destructive –the way it's being used usually defines it-. Technology is just a tool that we use to make our lives better, but we always need to think about the impacts of such additions to our lives. This requires first principles thinking, empathy, some knowledge of philosophy and history to know how people dealt with new things before and many more skills that one profession like computer science cannot have alone. Our current drive towards highly capable artificial intelligence has been followed along by many more scientific branches than just engineers, like AI ethicists, philosophers, and renowned academics like the late Stephen Hawking. If we build the habit of stopping and thinking more deeply about problems in our lives, maybe we'll get Terminator-like robots one day, but they'll be helping us take care of our old in care homes instead of inflicting pain and suffering on other human beings.