Escherichia coli, the bacterium that was the focus of the MIT/Harvard project. Photograph: Bsip Sa/Alamy
One of the seminal texts for anyone interested in technology and society is Melvin Kranzberg’s Six Laws of Technology , the first of which says that “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral”.
By this, Kranzberg meant that technology’s interaction with society is such “that technical developments frequently have environmental, social and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices and practices themselves, and the same technology can have quite different results when introduced into different contexts or under different circumstances”.
The saloon-bar version of this is that “technology is both good and bad; it all depends on how it’s used” – a tactic that tech evangelists regularly deploy as a way of stopping the conversation. So a better way of using Kranzberg’s law is to ask a simple Latin question: Cui bono? – who benefits from any proposed or hyped technology? And, by implication, who loses?
With any general-purpose technology – which is what the internet has become – the answer is going to be complicated: various groups, societies, sectors, maybe even continents – win and lose, so in the end the question comes down to: who benefits most? For the internet as a whole, it’s too early to say. But when we focus on a particular digital technology, then things become a bit clearer.
A case in point is the technology known as “machine learning”, a manifestation of artificial intelligence that is the tech obsession de nos jours. It’s really a combination of algorithms that are “trained” on “big data”, ie huge datasets. In principle, anyone with the computational skills to use freely available software tools such as TensorFlow could do machine learning. But in practice they can’t because they don’t have access to the massive data needed to train their algorithms.
This means the outfits where most of the leading machine-learning research is being done are a small number of tech giants – especially Google, Facebook and Amazon – which have accumulated colossal silos of behavioural data over the last two decades. Since they have come to dominate the technology, the Kranzberg question – who benefits? – is easy to answer: they do. Machine learning now drives everything in those businesses – “personalisation” of services, recommendations, precisely targeted advertising, behavioural prediction… For them, AI (by which they mostly mean machine learning) is “ everywhere ”. And it is making them the most profitable enterprises in the history of capitalism.
As a consequence, a powerful technology with great potential for good is at the moment deployed mainly for privatised gain.
