Is Technology Our Savior — or Our Slayer? | Ruha Benjamin | TED

This transmission is for future generations.

As it stands, a small sliver of humanity

is currently imposing their visions on the rest of us.

They invest in space travel and AI superintelligence

and underground bunkers,

while casting health care and housing for all

as outlandish and unimaginable.

These futurists let their own imaginations run wild

when it comes to bending material and digital realities,

but their visions grow limp

when it comes to transforming our social reality

so that everyone has the chance to live a good and meaningful life.

We are in many ways trapped inside the lopsided imagination

of those who monopolize power and resources

to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

And as I see it, there are two stories these monopolists sell us

about what the future holds.

The first is the Silicon Valley version,

in which all our preferences are tracked and desires catered to.

Chatbots, virtual assistants,

driverless cars at our beck and call.

All our wants and needs met in an instant.

This is their utopia, where technology is our savior,

a future where our automated offspring know us

better than we know ourselves.

Ease and convenience, just a click away.

And in their wildest dreams,

we merge with technology,

optimizing our potential to be stronger, smarter, superhuman.

The other story, preferred by Hollywood, is grittier, more chaotic.

Conflict and competition run rampant.

It's "Hunger Games" meets "Blade Runner"

meets "The Matrix."

People are ruthless and unpredictable.

Inequality and precarity are permanent features in our lives.

In this dystopian vision, technology is our slayer,

displacing and dominating humanity.

And while these sound like opposing narratives,

they have different endings for sure,

one in which we're saved, one in which we're slayed,

they actually share an underlying logic.

And in both, we give up power.

Both stories assume technology is in the driver's seat,

propelled by a will of its own.

In the utopic and dystopic stories,

technology impacts us for better or worse.

But our impact on technology, the human inputs, shall we say,

are missing.

The values, assumptions, interests and needs

that shape our digital and physical worlds are nowhere to be seen.

To move forward,

we have to pull back the screen.

Rather than agonizing about a coming dystopia

or longing for a future utopia,

we have to reckon with ustopia.

Ustopia is a word I'm borrowing from Margaret Atwood

to describe the fact that the future is us.

However loathsome or loving we are, so will we be.

Whereas utopias are the stuff of dreams,

dystopias, the stuff of nightmares,

ustopias are what we create together when we're wide awake.

Ustopias invite us into a collective imagination

in which we still have tensions,

but where everyone has what they need to thrive.

When I was a grad student at UC Berkeley in the early 2000s,

I witnessed firsthand how innovation often deepens social inequity.

As the tech sector grew,

people who had lived in the Bay area for generations

were displaced and discarded.

At the time, I was researching the social dimensions of biotechnology.

As I observed scientists growing heart cells

using pluripotent stem cells beating in a petri dish,

I thought about how hard it is to grow empathy for other human beings

in our everyday lives.

Here were billions of dollars being poured into the future of medicine,

but health care for all was somehow far-fetched.

This is what I mean by a lopsided imagination,

where we can imagine regenerating sick bodies

but not an ailing body politic.

Utopias require inequality and exclusion.

Ustopias center collective well-being over gross concentrations of wealth.

They're built on an understanding

that all of our struggles,

from climate justice to racial justice,

are interconnected.

That we are interconnected.

Take what's happening in Barcelona, Spain,

where a large-scale participatory experiment has been underway

for almost ten years now

using a digital platform called “Decidim,”

which means "we decide" in Catalan,

alongside in-person neighborhood-level deliberations

to create policies that respond to people's actual needs.

And the thing is, technology companies are not driving what's happening.

The collective intelligence of people from all walks of life are.

Proponents call it a “New Deal on Data” that recognizes data sovereignty, privacy,

collective rights to data.

Decidim is open-source software,

so it's already been adapted and used in over 80 other cities,

guaranteeing public transparency in a way commercial platforms don't.

Once you install Decidim,

you can create, comment, consult on ideas

and track what happens in real time.

Over 40,000 residents have submitted proposals

on everything from affordable housing to air quality,

and about 70 percent of the government's action plan

have been derived directly from these proposals.

(Applause)

Take “Superblocks,”

an initiative to cut carbon emissions and improve air quality,

where 12 city districts have been closed to through traffic

so the interior blocks are more hospitable to pedestrians,

cyclists, more green space.

On the Barcelona coastline, another initiative is underway

in which residents are working to make it more accessible to locals,

rather than simply a playground for elites and cruise ships.

Notice how different this is

than the typical top-down, "we know best" approach

to shaping the future.

Like what happened with Sidewalk Labs in Toronto,

Google's urban development smart city play

that would have collected masses of data

data in order to create more efficient and convenient city services.

But which in the end was tech-driven rather than people-driven.

Sidewalk Labs staged public input sessions

in order to appear responsive to residents' concerns

about the newfangled surveillance that would have been embedded

into the Quayside neighborhood.

But people saw through the proposal and put an end to the development.

In fact,

there are ustopias taking shape right here in Atlanta.

Known by some as Silicon Peach

or Techlanta,

because it’s the fastest-growing urban tech hub in the country,

it’s also the city with the highest income inequality in the nation.

Which shouldn't surprise us when we remember

that the fantasies of some are so often the nightmares of others.

In many places, tech booms actually exacerbate inequality,

increasing the cost of living, displacing local residents

and creating high tech tools for surveillance and social control.

But that's only half of the story.

Because here in Atlanta, and in many other locales,

we're also witnessing a historic mobilization of residents,

creating ustopias that prioritize people over profit,

public goods over policing.

It started a few years ago,

when Atlanta officials announced plans to build Cop City,

a massive 90-million-dollar facility

that would have trained police from all over the country.

The development would include cutting down Weelaunee Forest,

one of the four lungs of Atlanta

that protects against heat waves and floods,

and which is located next to a predominantly Black

working-class community.

But ATLiens were having none of it.

(Cheers and applause)

Utilizing direct action, digital tools,

a broad coalition has formed

to push back against the militarizing imagination of the city.

Atlanta's forest defenders remind us

that true community safety relies on connection,

not cops.

On public goods, like housing and health care,

not punishment.

They understand that protecting people and the planet

go hand in hand.

From college students to clergy,

environmental activists to Indigenous elders,

they’re inviting us into a collective imagination

in which our ecological and our social well-being

go hand in hand.

An ustopia right in our own backyards.

And even children are pushing back

against the lopsided imagination of city officials.

Like one who asked,

"What did cops do to deserve a playground?"

As they sat in the kids zone outside of the city council meeting

where hundreds of people had showed up to speak out

against Cop City.

Together, they're reminding us that deadly systems may seem durable,

but they're not inevitable.

And we don’t simply have to click: submit.

We can each work to strengthen the social fabric in our own locale

and create a shared vision in which no one is left behind.

We can follow the example of data justice organizers in Barcelona,

forest defenders in Atlanta,

imagining and crafting the worlds we cannot live without,

just as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within.

The first step

is to stop policing the borders of our own imagination.

A world without prisons?

Ridiculous.

Schools that foster the genius of every child?

Naive.

Work that doesn't drive us into the grave?

Impossible.

A society where everyone has food,

shelter, love?

In your dreams.

Exactly.

(Applause)