Activists sitting and blocking the apple store in Bordeaux, France, on 29 November 2019. Block ... [+] friday against black friday makes actions in Bordeaux in France, starting by a march with the march for the climate, some activist sit and block the stores galeries lafayette and the apple store tin the center of Bordeaux, by the associations of youth for the climate, extinction rebellion, and AnvCop21, some activist sit in the apple store before the police get them out.,cops, police,aressted (Photo by Jerome Gilles/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

I occasionally go through my spam folder since I have had to create a few dozen filters due to Gmails inability to catch the phenomenal amount of spam I receive daily. I am not sure if having a typically male name is what attracts all the lascivious offers with photos I receive daily or if the fact that I write on tech and cultural politics is what stuffs my spam folder full of advertising for all things tech and trendy. But I do know that this part of new technologythe marketing component to new techmakes me think that it has not advanced our society whatsoever. It has merely added a new tech branch to marketing and consumerism.

Still, I am acutely aware of the many benefits that new technology has afforded me personally from being able to skip bank lines and have all my bills paid automatically, to have communications sent across the planet within a second, and even to find out, amid a dinnertime discussion, where and whenJoe Frazier and Muhammad Alifought and why it is called the Fight of a Century. Indeed, from the practical to the informative, information technology has more positive attributes than negative, but still the onslaught of consumerism seems to be what has propelled this technological machinery to the core. And new technology has, in turn, affected our culture radically such that we can no more pretend that AI (artificial intelligence) is purely a result of scientific innovation any more than it is a by-product of human communications andcomplex systemsof organizing, engaging and communicating within the world.

From our current era, the struggles we face as a planet are now at their most critical with global warming effecting the sea levels in places likeVeniceand theSolomon Islands, democracy in retreat around the world and with political struggles to push against ecological andrenewable energy technologiesthat might truly move our humanity forward. Between the security and energy sectors, we are living in a cultural climate of fear where we are sold a bill of health on new technology which tells us that new tech will reduce the carbon footprintof businesses, for example, even ifrecent dataregarding AI tells quite another story. A recent study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst assesses the energy consumption required to train several common AI models. This study concludes that the training process alone has the potential to emit over 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide which is the equivalent of 300 round-trip flights between New York and San Francisco or nearly five times the lifetime emissions of an average car.

Still despite all the data that new tech has helped to uncover regarding our ecological health, we know that resource extraction (eg. mining and farming) is responsible forhalf of the planets carbon emissionsand methane emissions from coal mines could stoke a climate crisis. Indeed, theenergy industryis divided in how it approaches the mining of toxic and radioactive minerals and the human repercussions to this extraction. More companies are starting to rethink how to do energy be they more traditional mining companies likePheasant Energyor the recent UK governments315m initiativelaunched last month whose mission is to find new technologies that can shrink the carbon footprint of the most polluting factories to help meet the UKs climate targets. While the earlier predictions of Bitcoins disastrouscarbon footprintnow seem to have been slightly exaggerated, we know that new technology can make our planet and our societies healthier, better functioning and even more democratic. That is if we use these technologies properly.

When look back to howTaylorismtook the ills of the Industrial Revolution (ca. 1760 to 1840) create a form of scientific management that produced certain kinds of changes within the factory environment, society and within what would come to be called management, we can see that old technologies of human organization have nothing new tech. Where Taylorism automatized human actions, fragmenting the assembly line into minimal skill requirements, new technology capitalizes on workers abilities to learn, adapt and expand. Where Taylorism separated direct labor from indirect labor, new technology brings the two together adding management systems that can be accessed on the cloud and from a mobile telephone.

One contemporary example of this isKrishna C. Mukherjee, an industry leader who worked to increase Microsofts AI technologies by commercializing AI in the 1990s and creating the Intelligent Filling Manager, also known as intelliFM, an AI-based technology which automates workflow systems. Today intelliFM, is employed in many industries to include insurance, legal, finance and health care and has greatly improved the efficiency of business processes. And although AI has grown substantially since the 1990s, we can see how AI is moving from the specific purpose of marketing andrisk-assessmenttowards other uses such inmental health care, thejob marketandemotion recognition technologysuch that the management of companies and factories is now moving towards the management of human life.

And we see the increasing use of new technology to bring together the management of all things from businesses to life. Take a look at one companys website,Dooply, which claims to help clients to achieve their personal, business and social goals and whose mission is to utilize knowledge, creativity, networks, and lobbying expertise to help clients bring their visions into life. So much of what new tech promises us today merges the private with the public, taking on the mission of maintaining the personal and social as much as the technological and business-oriented. Its almost as if new technology and management culture have joined forces to create products of us all. And we have been duped into this form of progress and self-corporatization by being told that we are better humans for it and that we are actually empowered by becoming at one with our mobile devices and social media presence.

Its not enough that we use new technology to effectonline paymentsto pay our rent each month or that we can go to the latestdating siteto find the love of our lifewho also happens to be environmentally conscious, we need to extend the use of new tech into our everyday practices. We must also encourage our local and national industries and governments to embrace the benefits of new tech to compliment democratic exercises and ecological activities. We must not allow new technology make hostages of us and instead demand that new technology be used for the betterment of our political and ecological exercises.

See the rest here:

How New Tech Has Made Us The Necessary Victims Of Progress - Forbes