A technology promising a cancer-free world can cause cancer.
A technology promising us democratic values such as freedom of speech and agency can also threaten democracies.
In a world of infinite digital connectivity, millions of people still feel alone. Isolation and depression are public health crises.
Digital technology is aiding our culture to reject reason yet heavily reward outrage, untruths, and myths.
Technology has hastened humans' tendency to run our resources into the ground, metaphorically and literally, instead of aspiring to regeneration and sustainability.
This should come as no surprise, because hindsight is always 20/20. Rarely at the time of invention are creators the best judge of how their system will be used, nor do they truly know what good or harm will come of it.
Industrialization increased our standard of living, but it also led to a lot of pollution. In a similar way, technology has exacerbated the effects of climate change. The planet is in full-on emergency mode. Emissions are on the raise. Earth is turning into desert. The oceans are heating up. Species are going extinct. The Amazon is burning at an alarming rate. Ecosystems are crashing. The ice is melting. The coral reefs are dying.
We need to do something. And we need to do it now!!
We are clearly the last generation that can alter the course on climate change, but we are also the first generation experiencing many of its unintended consequences.
WHY ME?
For most leaders, it can be challenging to keep up with the many unintended consequences of emerging technologies. As a futurist, a technology entrepreneur, and an engineer in Silicon Valley—specializing in future-think and scenario planning—it's my job to help leaders understand and prepare for the impact of the unintended consequences of technology (UCOTs).
Fifteen years ago, I would never have predicted that I would be talking about the unintended consequences of technology, let alone writing a book about them. After tragically losing both my parents, I was a kid (the child head of my family) in rural Uganda waking up every day worried about what I and my younger siblings were going to eat that day. That's as far as my concerns about life on this planet went. A lot has changed since then. With the help of a charity organization and the Helms family in Oakland, California, I was sponsored to attend UC Berkeley Engineering School. With lots of hard work and determination, I became an engineer and an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. I focused my attention on creating products and services that bring healthcare to individuals in hard-to-reach areas. I was successful at building several companies. My work won me accolades. I found myself in front of highly influential people at the biggest platforms on Earth, like the World Economic Forum and TED conferences. It's there that my world and level of ambition opened up a bit more.
You see, I am a product of someone else's generosity. I am what I am because some stranger showed me love, empathy, compassion, and care—the things that make us truly human. We are slowly losing these qualities in the age of exponential technology development and usage. I would not be here if it weren't for another human being whom I had never met caring deeply and wanting a better life for me.
The way we are training technology systems today, I am afraid we may not be passing on these amazing human qualities to systems and machines that are increasingly running human lives. The way technology is being developed and commercialized has reached a point where some of its components are not serving humanity's best interests.
I vividly remember sitting in the audience at TED conferences listening to one speaker giving a mesmerizing but also terrifying talk about AI. Computer scientist Supasorn Suwajanakorn showed us how, as a grad student, he had used AI and 3D modeling to create photo-realistic fake videos of people synced to audio. These are now commonly known as deepfakes. I sat there with my head spinning, wondering about how this technology could be misused and abused. This—along with many technology abuses that have affected me personally or that I keep reading about—played a huge role in setting me on this path.
With a very strong conviction, “somebody has to do something about this” became the new tune on “repeat” in my head. Not long after hearing that TED talk, I became pretty convinced that for the next decade, I needed to put my energy, resources, and time toward focusing on the unintended consequences of technologies (UCOTs).
If not me, then who; if not now, then when? I dove right in!
I founded the Institute for Unintended Consequences of Technology (UCOT), where my team and I bring together thousands of people from all walks of life, such as technologists, policy makers, futurists, engineers, professors, change makers, entrepreneurs, investors, philosophers, artists, students, and other thought leaders. Our mission is 1) to advance public understanding, awareness, and perception on unintended consequences of technologies, and 2) to accelerate solutions and collaboration toward a collective large-scale action.
THE BOOK'S GOALS
In this book, I provide concerned citizens, business professionals, and people in decision-making positions with a blueprint for key technologies on their current and future potential unintended consequences. The book also includes tips on how best to prepare yourself, your community, your businesses, and our shared spaceship called planet Earth about what's to come.
I have chosen a few technologies and trends that I believe have the ability to transform what it means to be human and what I strongly believe every leader should pay attention to today. Technology is not good or bad; it's just a tool. It's who we are as a people that make it good or bad. And sometimes the bad brings lots of concerns.
Within technology's concerns and dangers hides an opportunity of first-mover advantage:
To reactively create solutions for the things already going wrong
To proactively strategize and mitigate future potential harm before it happens
There are technologies in this book like AI and big data that have huge unintended consequences as stand-alone trends. However, the applications of data and AI also overlap a lot with other technologies and other trends. My goal is to write about them individually, but they will also keep coming up in the other subjects.
WHAT THIS BOOK COVERS
This book suggests a series of steps we can take to deal with the unintended and willfully ignored consequences of technologies. The bad news is that so long as technology is here, so are its negative externalities. Those two go hand in hand. The good news is that with intention, smarts, and safety engineering we can deal with unintended consequences of technologies before they even occur. This book breaks down what needs to be done to get there into two parts.
Part I: How Humanity Got into This Mess. Chapter 1 explains how capitalism, greed, and the myth of meritocracy got us into this mess and is keeping us there. Chapter 2 explores the power imbalance between governments of nation-states and the giant technology companies (tech-states) founded by a handful of its citizens.
Part II: Technologies and Trends with Lots of Promise but also Uncertainty. The chapters in Part II explore different technologies such as 5G, AI, gene editing, blockchain, and many more that are extremely powerful, with a potential to fundamentally change what it means to be human and the future of our planet.
In most chapters, I begin with