Technology & Innovation

Too many robots, too few taps: Time to rethink our management of technology?

February 01, 2016

Global

February 01, 2016

Global
Simon Trace

Consultant and writer on technology and development

Simon Trace has over 30 years’ experience working on technology and international development. He was the CEO of Practical Action from 2005 to 2015 and was associated with the organisation during a period of strong growth and rising international recognition for its work, including the annual publication of The Poor People’s Energy Outlook report, which encourages change on energy access, and supplies information to support it. A civil engineer by training, Simon has previously worked for CARE and Unicef and spent 10 years in Zambia and Nepal prior to moving to London to take up a series of positions with WaterAid. In 2016 Simon was awarded a CBE for services to international development.

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How can companies manage the evolution and use of technology?

Two reports published recently by two very different organisations point, interestingly, to the same problem: the need to find a better way to manage the development and use of technology.

At Davos, the Swiss financial services giant UBS published a report for the World Economic Forum on the economic implications of the "Fourth Industrial Revolution". One key message was that automation and the deployment of artificial intelligence will result in greater inequalities.

UBS’s findings are essentially the consequence of the doubling of computer processing power roughly every two years since the mid-1970s. A computer processor chip in 1985 might have run just over 30 times as fast as one in 1975. But by 1995 it already ran 1,000 times faster. And the chips in our computers today process data at over a million times the speed of their 1970s ancestors. This means our capability to automate tasks is now growing extremely rapidly—and not just the repetitive and easily codified tasks of the production line, where, for example, we have seen robots assembling cars for some time. Advances in artificial intelligence and pattern recognition mean that computers are now not just building cars, but also driving them (think of Google’s driverless car).     

According to UBS, this headlong dash towards automation is likely to disproportionately benefit better-off countries and higher-earning individuals, increasing inequality. In the developed world automation will extend from low- to middle-skilled jobs, polarising the workforce and raising questions about whether we can create new jobs fast enough to replace those that can now be done more cheaply by machines. Meanwhile, the competitive labour-cost advantage developing countries have offered could also disappear, with the trend to offshore production being reversed as costs of automated production in the US and Europe start to out-compete labour costs in the Global South.

 Additionally, a report by the international development charity Practical Action on technology justice explores the idea that an effective response to the urgent challenges of poverty and environmental sustainability will require a major rethink in the way the development and use of technology is governed.  The report draws attention to a number of "technology injustices" such as the lack of access to electricity, which is still beyond the reach of many: 1.1bn people still have no access to electricity, while over 780m lack safe water supplies and 30% of the world’s population still cannot access basic medicines. Meanwhile, Practical Action argues that we struggle to direct technology research in the right direction: investments into clean energy technology are still dwarfed by the subsidies flowing into fossil fuels and in the health sector.

In November 2015 world leaders joined together and sketched out a vision for a fairer and more sustainable world which resulted in the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). What both the UBS and Practical Action reports do is highlight that our collective technological effort is not heading in the right direction if our goal is to achieve the fair and sustainable principles envisaged in the SDGs. We need to rethink how we can drive our global technological innovation effort so that it focuses much more tightly on solving problems of poverty and environmental sustainability.  Moreover, we need to work out how we can govern the use of existing technologies so that everyone has access to those necessary for a basic standard of living. 

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited (EIU) or any other member of The Economist Group. The Economist Group (including the EIU) cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this article or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in the article.

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