The price of progress

Two uplifting emails popped into my inbox this morning. One listed the finalists of the UK technology4good awards, which recognise charities or technology specialists that have used technology successfully for the common good.

The finalists include Lifelites, a children’s technology charity that provides fun and educational technology packages to children’s hospices throughout the UK. Another was the Frenchay Computer Assessment and Training service, based in Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, which helps people with physical, cognitive or language difficulties to benefit from computers. 

And technology should be and almost is synonymous with social progress: it can help to include the socially excluded, to enable self education, and to simplify relations between the citizen and the state, for example.

However, advances in technology also have an obvious social cost. The second email was from Computing’s partner charity, ComputerAid, and included a report setting out solutions that will help solve the global e-waste problem.

For those who don’t know, e-waste describes broken or discarded electronic equipment.

The battle with e-waste is a long-standing one and the problem is generated by the technology industry itself: no sooner have solutions and packages been released to market than the same developers begin work on new products to replace them. This creates mountains of defunct goods of no use to anyone. Although software updates and, to an extent, cloud computing can help alleviate this problem, the root cause is the fact that companies are always looking to increase market share, sell more products, and boost their profits.

Similarly, technology is used to increase efficiency in business and the public sector but this is often detrimental to society as a whole. At a recent event, a spokesperson from BlackBerry said Portsmouth Hospital had saved £220,000 per annum through the use of BlackBerrys. A member of the audience asked how many staff lost their jobs to achieve these savings; the BlackBerry spokesperson didn’t know. I would argue that he should.

Technologists should be aware of the social costs of their products. Technology is supposed to support people; it is not valuable in its own right. Although I understand that these job losses are perhaps not entirely the technology industry’s responsibility, where does the buck stop? Putting people out of work without any redress, with a single-minded focus on profitability and efficiency, is a bad thing, and technologists, among others, should consider the ramifications of their work.