Finding My Place

On May 4, I contributed to an event associated with the United Nations STI Forum, introducing the STRINGS Project, Steering STI for the SDGs, that is, Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals. The event summary and recording is here.

Here is what I said:

Thanks for including me in both the STRINGS project and this session. At this time in history, it’s really important to take on the big challenges at global scale. And those challenges have gotten deeper since we started into this work together. Let me take a few minutes to make that clear.

• STRINGS Project was undertaken in a world where wealth and power were already sharply concentrating through new applications of technological capabilities. 
• We were already experiencing deep inequalities on a global basis.
  • We are sitting in comfortable places, watching something happening in a different time zone on the Internet. That reality is very far away for most people in the world. I challenge each of you to take a moment now and picture someone who is not watching today because they don’t have those conditions. Picture someone nearby and someone far away. [I shared some pictures here, of homeless people in Seattle, a barrio in Maputo, a favela in Rio]
  • That has given you a personal sense of the depth of the inequalities in the pre-pandemic world. Now for some numbers:
    • At the end of 2018, 26 people owned as much wealth as the poorest bottom half of humanity — the poorest half of the world’s population. (round numbers 4 billion people)
  • And now for the connection to “technological capabilities” — seven out of ten of the richest people in the world in 2020 made their fortunes in the IT industry.
    • The IT industry is just the latest example at the center of a technological revolution that brings wealth to some people and places and leaves others behind. We have been living in such a revolution for several decades, and the gaps are still widening.
    • This is a pattern that has characterized the world economy since the 16th century. Each time a technological revolution reorganizes wealth and power, we need new institutions to reverse the pattern and let us all in to participate again. The STRINGS project is a part of that reversal.

• The pandemic has made all this worse, vividly demonstrating divergence in life outcomes:
  • Vaccines developed in record time with highly sophisticated biomedical knowledge.
    • Even the regulatory bodies have shown us in affluent countries the importance of expertise.
  • What we know is that it is going to take a long time for those vaccines to reach the people we pictured earlier. National contexts make a huge difference —
    • even the homeless are being vaccinated here. One-dose is much better than two-dose.
    • India is not projected to be fully vaccinated until much later this year.
  • People dying by the hundreds of thousands.

• India is getting the current headlines, but it could be many places.
• The infection rates in India until a few days ago were lower than in the U.S. So why were people dying? You can fill in the blank yourself, but the key is that the health infrastructure could not handle them. That is not a short-term issue, but rather a long term issue of investment in what people need.
  • Reminder: India’s GDP growth rate pre-pandemic was among the fastest in the world.
  • It prides itself on its role in the IT industry, in Bangalore — that world-changing technological revolution.
  • Even Kerala, the icon of equality, now has the highest level of inequality of any state in India, following its entry into the Knowledge Society.
• And despite the fact that science is the hero, public trust is sagging to lows we never expected in the technology community.
  • Even health professionals do not trust the products of research, certified by the best expertise.
  • Another example of ironic and threatening gaps in how people understand safety, security, prosperity in their worlds.

• Ecological disaster is looming; the decision process is stuck. 
  • This is not my area, so I am commenting as a listener in the conversations.
  • On the one hand, I hear the news about big ocean-changing events happening earlier that projected — ice shelves collapsing, glaciers melting. I am checking the elevation of Redmond, WA, because I don’t think being on the 4th floor will be enough, and we have nowhere to store a boat in our apartment.
  • On the other hand, I do not see the “developed” world having a plan to move fast enough to prevent the catastrophic events. We appear to be stuck, or perhaps vacillating between poles. And we have no time to vacillate. Given the ecological damage, the loss of species, even a sudden rescue like carbon capture and storage might not pull us out fast enough. And there is no consensus on that, as far as I can tell from the outside.
• So — the STRINGS Project is incredibly important, as an effort to point the needle in a different direction, avert catastrophe, and start to recreate the world we want with the technological regime we have.
  • We desperately need to rethink the relationship between our social, economic, and political institutions and the use of our human capacity to know.
  • That’s what STRINGS is helping us to do.
  • Thank you, Pedro, for supporting it, and thank you, STRINGS leadership for undertaking it.