We have been producing responsible technology with communities and governments, for over a decade in South Africa, and across the region. Centring communities within the technology development process has allowed us a very different perspective for building our own technology “agenda” - and it has been instrumental in helping us realise what an inescapable conversation sustainable development is for the future of technology and our future of technology. The important start of this conversation must be a realisation that technology is a product, and producer, of social, political and economic consequence. Whether or not that consequence is unequal, or equal, nurturing and sustaining, or detracting, will ultimately depend on the active choices we make. So what might those choices be?

 

Impacts of emerging technologies

The culture of historical technology-building has been unashamedly “agnostic” to broader impacts. Facebook’s (now maligned) originating philosophy was “Move fast and break things”. A disregard for the human and environmental impacts of technology development have to be a culture that is challenged head on. Whilst the era of “Move fast and break things” is supposedly over, the destructive legacies of capitalism-driven technology practice has embedded short-termism in the ways technology is imagined, and even in the “standard” processes adopted to forward the building of these systems.

 

To move forward, we should be repositioning what the purpose of imposing or creating technology is. Bernd Stahl (2020) has highlighted in his recent work that, for Artificial Intelligence to be ethical, it should not be driven by seeking economic gains alone (e.g., efficiency), but instead must be defined by its pursuit of the furtherance of “human well-being” . Sustainable development provides a rich body of insight, then, for helping to deepen the understanding of how human well-being can be actualised in policy and practice - and provides practical hope for managing the depth of inquiry that such an undertaking requires. This is a priority as both technology development and adoption accelerates, but also as our development narratives become constructed fundamentally by digital pursuits - as for instance in the emerging centrality of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) agendas.

 

The agenda of building

If we reimagine what technology is for, we must reorganise ourselves to produce that technology. The “big picture” thinking of pursuing human well-being needs to be embedded in the actual practice of technology development - and our processes should be adjusted. Our own work on human-centered design processes has posited that technology should be designed with both human-centered and impact-centered principles; where user needs are balanced against broader social impact goals and community context, rather than focusing solely on individual user satisfaction. Design processes must actively consider structural inequalities, unintended consequences, and community-level effects to ensure technology creates positive social change, rather than amplifying existing problems, or serving narrow interests. And you can adapt your design processes to pursue these more holistic, sustainable pursuits. But these processes also need to be embedded within organizational cultures that allow their ultimate goals to be realized. I think for instance of the early days of our own technology projects, where one of the earliest concepts brought to me as (then) a Strategic Advisor was a “Hot or Not” tool for assessing parliamentarians. It wasn’t just that the technology was sexist and meaningless - it was one of the first times I realized that politics, which include the understanding of how power relates and impedes, was not a familiar framing of the world for many of the technologists I worked with. This in spite of the fact we were working in civic technology. Our organizations need to be able to centre political conversation openly, honestly and fearlessly so we can grow as responsible implementers. We need diverse teams to help drive diverse conversations - and it is hard work to create the actual spaces for this kind of culture in our everyday management.

 

A discrete example of how we have done this is in our own AI organizational policy. When our own team makes a decision about whether to “ChatGPT it”, they need to nuance privacy, social impact and a myriad of other concerns all alongside a simple epithet: “Is it really worth the damage we are causing to the environment”?

 

Sustaining the (un)sustainable

Our AI policy was designed the way it was because the AI euphoria that has frequently tried to centre AI as a key to achieving potential “climate gains”, frequently overlooks the very negative impacts these tech-nologies are already objectively having on the environment. The compute required for training and deploying machine learning models is a dramatic consumer of energy (resulting in a massive carbon footprint); cooling servers wastes radical litres of water; e-waste is hazardous; and the necessary mining for raw earth minerals is destructive. Yet, currently, most of us are feeding into these impacts because we are too lazy to effectively use Google search. Ultimately, Sustainable Development demands that we interrogate how to create sustainable (note the “small s” use of sustainable) products. And this includes technology products. The elephant in the room of some of the DPI engagements I have been in is an unwillingness of everyone to answer the very discrete question: “Who will be responsible for sustaining these infrastructures over time?”. As a non-profit civic tech organization, we have often had to maintain essential technologies for both public and private actors, even after grant funding dried up, because their development was driven by a short-term vision that ignored how the innovation would ultimately be embedded in the commissioning institutions. Whilst DPI conversations imply both public and private funding will be used to develop technologies and “infrastructures”, the political economic climate that will be necessary to foster these in the longer term is often not present to sustain them (at least, not in South Africa where we are based). Just as organizations must be designed to build responsible technology, the responsible deployment of sustainable and responsible technology at scale, like in DPI, will mandate institutions begin to do these very same re-imaginings themselves. The "sovereignty" many public institutions and governments hope for in their deployment of technology necessitates them having the capacity to exercise control to sustain them internally - as both a political, and Sustainable Development, imperative. If they cannot be so sustained, they become unjustifiable waste across a number of offending fields.

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What we ask

 

The African experience of developing responsible technologies has taught us a variety of critical lessons. These lessons demand of us that we reimagine why we design, develop and nurture technologies at both the organizational, institutional, national and global levels.

We are asking a lot. We are asking you to reimagine what the purpose of technology is, to help move it better toward a future where we demand, and receive, its positive contribution to our Sustainable Development Agenda. We are asking that you do this reimagining across spheres, and across stakeholder groups. And, as much as we are ultimately asking for an embracing of complexity to help consider the critical role technology plays in both social, political and economic spheres, we might be able to provide a simple short cut for doing so. When you think of building technology, make sure you can answer the questions: “Why do we need this? What will its impact be? How will it be sustained? And ultimately, who will benefit?”. If the planet itself is not one of those beneficiaries, our current emergency mandates you to do better.