ARTICLE FOR THE WEEKEND …… ARMING THE REBELS

As young academic, years ago I was called a REBEL ACADEMIC – challenging the conventional education then – every meeting – every program review meeting I challenged the conventional, much with the scoff of people of the time. Today those changes are taking place. Same situation I see today in welcoming AI and automation in our work life. There are people who oppose it. The Rebels. As in my times I thought - I as a REBEL should be armed – the REBEL FOR TECHNOLOGY SHOULD ALSO BE ARMED TODAY ALONG WITH THE ADVOCATES OF TECHNOLOGY, FOR SYNERGY OF BOTH, IN BETTERMENT OF SOCIETY.

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Read the article to understand the case ………. ??

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?We are all afraid—for our confidence, for the future, for the world.

That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every

civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it

has set itself to do.

—Jacob Bronowski

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In many ways, the world today looks a lot like it did in 19th century. ?New

powerful machines have revolutionized industries, destabilized legacy

institutions, and changed the fabric of civic life. Workers are worried about becoming obsolete, and parents are worried about what new technologies are doing to their children. Unregulated capitalism has created an extraordinary amount of new wealth, but workers’ lives aren’t necessarily getting better.

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Society is fractured along lines of race, class, and geography, and politicians are warning about the dangers of rising inequality and corporate corruption.

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In the face of these challenges, we have two options.

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First option - We can—throw our hands up, unplug our devices, opt out of modernity and retreat into the wilderness. Or we - can step into the conversation, learn the details of the power structures that are shaping technological adoption, and bend those structures toward a better, fairer future.

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Personally, I’m for second option. I think we have a moral duty to fight

for people, rather than simply fighting against machines, and I believe that for those of us who aren’t tech workers, that duty extends to supporting ethical technologists who are working to make AI and automation a liberating force rather than just a vehicle for wealth creation.

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I call this strategy “arming the rebels,” not because I think resisting

technological exploitation should involve violence of any kind, but because I think it’s important to support the people fighting for ethics and transparency inside our most powerful tech institutions by giving them ammunition in the form of tools, data, and emotional support.

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On a practical level, I think this strategy is likely to be more effective

than trying to tear down these institutions altogether. History shows us that those who simply oppose technology, without offering a vision of how it could be made better and more equitable, generally lose. The Luddites earned their place in the history books by breaking their weaving machines, but they didn’t reverse the effects of industrialization. Skeptics who pooh-poohed the idea of space travel in the mid-twentieth century were complaining into a void, but those who actually engaged with the project—including underappreciated heroes like Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Maryn Jackson, the Black female NASA engineers whose contributions to the space race were memorialized in the book that I read long back - Hidden Figures—got to shape one of our nation’s greatest technical accomplishments. The people who lamented the early days of the internet might have been satisfied on their moral high ground, but they also missed the chance to help shape the online spaces that would affect billions of people’s lives in the coming decades.

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I routinely get emails and messages from—rank-and file workers at Facebook, Amazon, Google, and other tech giants who tell me that they’re horrified by some of the tools their companies are building, their workplace practices, and their failures to contain the harms resulting from the use of their products. These people believe that they can be most effective as ethical advocates from the inside, but they’re grateful for the efforts of journalists, researchers, and activists who are pushing from the outside, adding more voices to the chorus calling for change.

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And outside the big tech companies, there are plenty of righteous machine-makers we can support and learn from.

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I would like to cite the case of ?Rohan Pavuluri, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who started a legal aid nonprofit called Upsolve in 2016. The organization uses automated software to help low-income Americans file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, a process that allows them to shed burdensome debt obligations and get a fresh financial start. So far, the service has helped families clear more than $120 million in debt.

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Or Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, two AI researchers who studied

three leading facial-recognition algorithms, and found that all three were

substantially less accurate when trying to classify darker-skinned faces than lighter-skinned faces. The study led several major tech firms to reexamine their AI for evidence of bias, and pledge to use more racially diverse data sets to train their machine learning models.

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As we fight to shape today’s technological landscape, I think we have a

special obligation to fight for the people who stand to lose the most from AI and automation, including historically marginalized communities and people who don’t have much of a safety net.

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I also think we need to resist the urge to push the AI conversation too far

into the future. I’ve always loved the concept of the “adjacent possible,” a term coined by the evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman to describe the way biological organisms evolve in gradual, incremental steps.

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The adjacent possible is a useful concept to apply to the world of technology, because it takes us out of the realm of sci-fi and narrows our

scope to more realistic outcomes. A world in which robots flawlessly perform all human labor, freeing us all up to make art and play video games every day, is probably not part of the adjacent possible. But a world in which we use machine intelligence to reduce carbon emissions, find cures for rare diseases, and improve government services for low-income families might be.

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It’s on us—the people who love technology but worry about its use—to

explore this adjacent possible and push for the best version of it.

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It’s also important not to get too discouraged, and to remember, despite

all of our worries, that AI and automation could be unbelievably good for

humankind, if we do it right. A world filled with AI could also be filled with

human creativity, meaningful work, and strong communities. And it’s worth reminding ourselves that, historically, technological shocks have been followed by social progress, even if it’s taken a while. The worker unrest of the Industrial Revolution led to labor reforms and the first institutionalized protections for workers. Worries about automation in the middle of the twentieth century strengthened the middle class by expanding the power of labor unions. The rise of the “gig economy” in the first decade of the twenty first century has already created a groundswell of organizing energy to protect contract workers from exploitation.

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Look, I don’t judge people for wanting to unplug their devices and flee to

the hills. And I’m certainly not opposed to adopting a balanced lifestyle that puts technology in its proper place. But technological abstinence is not the answer to our problems, and I believe that we have to engage with potentially harmful systems in order to influence their trajectory.

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It’s easy to see how AI could tear us apart. But it’s also easy to see how it

could unite us. Technology can force us to study ourselves, and figure out our own strengths and limitations. Machines can foster resilience and creativity, as we come up with new and creative ways to stay ahead. And AI and automation could bring us together, armed with new superpowers, to solve some of our biggest problems.

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But none of this will happen without us. The future is not a spectator

sport, and AI is too important to be left to the billionaires and bot builders.

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We have to join the fight, too.