Last year we have seen major breakthroughs on generative, multi-modal Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models that are generating a lot of excitement in and outside the tech world. It is yet unclear how the public reaction will unfold, but it is already apparent that we are getting a mixed response with strong concerns about risks and possible abuse of these technologies.
Technology, while being a main driver of our modern age, has often generated a mixed response from society. From an economic perspective, technology is certainly about improving productivity. But socially, the question whether technology aspires to replace the human work force or serve as a tool to the worker is an open question we have no answer for. And this certainly plays a role with AI technologies as well.
However, I believe today there is a more recent and urgent concern with technology we need to address. Very broadly, we could summarize this concern as the question whether AI and more broadly, technology is able to make us better humans, to improve society and social interactions in general.
Of course this sounds cheesy and you could brush it off as a concern “too-broad-to-be-just-technological” if there wasn’t recent past evidence with social media that technology can and did disrupt society and social interactions in direct, strong and often harmful ways. We know dealing with social media is an unsolved problem and, while better social network tech could help, the problem goes beyond technology. Society also needs time to learn, adapt, control and improve its online behavior.
Borrowing from the term technological debt in software egineering but extrapolating it to the debt technologists have with society, I would argue that social media have increased the technological debt with society well beyond the traditional workplace uncertainty. Note that I am not stating who owns this debt – techies or society – it is rather the mismatch between the two that matters.
We are already facing another huge, different kind of technological debt in recent history: climate change and ecological breakdown due to machines using oil and gas. We all know the payback is being very expensive and massively life threatening. Let’s therefore agree that recognizing and addressing technological debt towards society as early as possible is very important.
Coming back to Artificial Intelligence, I would like to now state a proposition about what ethical AI should mean to us. Ethical AI should be about directing progress and deployment of Artificial Intelligence towards reducing technological debt with society instead of augmenting it.
And if AI could help reduce intrinsic technological debt as in self-correcting and healing systems that would be awesome, too!
An aging software egineer
in January 2023
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