The shape of the future: How will technology transform our lives?
Where is technology leading us? When we speak about the future, what does it mean for our identity as individuals and as citizens of states? When we arrive home, what will it look like? Themes of identity, place, and mediation were explored at the SRI graduate workshop “Views on Techno-Utopia” by presenters Rushay Naik (University of Toronto) and Lilith Acadia (National Taiwan University).
How might technologies help make sense of our place in the evolving world around us? In envisioning utopian futures, what potential does technology have to shape our identities, and what potential does it have to provide identity in an egalitarian way that ensures all people are represented, especially those who are invisible to the state? Themes of identity were the focus of the opening panel at the Schwartz Reisman Institute’s 2021 graduate workshop, “Views on Techno-Utopia,” held in conjunction with its first annual academic conference, Absolutely Interdisciplinary.
Securing identity in a collapsing state
Rushay Naik, a MSc health policy student at U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, argued that identity is a category both stable and tangible—tied to the state, overseen by governments, embodied in ID cards and social insurance—but also in flux, compromised by insurgency and conflict. How do those on the move, such as refugees, or individuals fleeing armed struggles, access social support services when states are in the midst of collapsing? If identities can no longer be verified by a state that once provided them, who does the verification?
One possible answer lies in, of all things, a blockchain—the digital ledger technology distributed across peer-to-peer networks. In his presentation, Naik ventured that blockchain technology offers a sufficiently robust decentralized alternative to identity systems that are traditionally centralized. In the absence of the state being able to provide verification of one’s identity, blockchain could offer a solution by enabling a “portable, self-sovereign ID” that stateless people could use to access services.
Notably, this speculative solution is already a reality. In 2017, the World Food Programme launched its Building Blocks program, which used an Ethereum-based platform to give Syrian refugees cash transfers using iris scans, while the Sovrin Foundation has similarly used iris scans in development of their own digital identity system.
However, as blockchain grows into an increasingly appealing solution for self-sovereign IDs, Naik observes certain challenges must be addressed in order for such forms of documentation to align with humanitarian principles. For one, there’s the matter of agency: those hoping to implement blockchain in stateless contexts need to pay mind to the reality that electricity and internet access are not guaranteed in low-resource, fragile contexts. Further, there’s risk to neutrality: despite the collapse of states, does blockchain technology run the risk of state coercion or interference? Finally, there’s the matter of privacy: careful design would be required to ensure that people in the most fragile of contexts have the ability to remove their data from the blockchain should they so choose.
The shared home of the future
While Naik’s presentation looked to utopian identities within reach, the panel’s second presentation by Lilith Acadia, an assistant professor of literary theory at National Taiwan University, turned to the imaginary. In “Power on: The actually inhospitable smart homes of SF,” Acadia looked to a host of media—from The Jetsons and Fahrenheit 451, to Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle and E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops—to highlight the range of ways in which smart homes are portrayed in science fiction.
As Acadia observed, smart homes in science fiction often reflect our fears of technology. For every idyllic or utopian representation of smart home technologies, there are dozens of counterexamples invoking surveillance, manipulation, and even endangering their inhabitants. Drawing upon these diverse representations, Acadia asked a deeper question about the nature of artificial intelligence: what roles should human qualities, such as empathy, have in our models?
Much of science fiction dwells on worst-case scenarios, in which the machine’s interests conflict with the humans whom it has been designed to serve. These stories serve as warnings for how such technologies might trap and control humans—exhibiting “intelligence without empathy,” as Acadia observed. But can the smart homes of science fiction offer a fresh and exciting model for conceptualizing AI, rather than acting as merely a harbinger of concern?
Most scholars conceive of AI as striving to replicate qualities believed to be characteristic of the human brain, such as computation, cognitive unity, temporal integration, and emotional experience. However, Acadia highlights three science fiction texts—Octavia Butler’s Dawn, Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, and Becky Chambers’ A Closed and Common Orbit—which present speculative smart homes that subvert traditional assumptions of AI, challenging ideas of human centred-linear time, and decentering the premise that emotion is a uniquely human trait. These examples ask: in approaching the future, should we rethink our assumptions about AI, looking past the confines of a human-centric model of intelligence in order to develop a broader conception of identity? By drawing from speculative fiction in the search to find solutions to core problems in AI development, Acadia’s presentation exemplified a core message of the conference: in the face of today’s technological problems, interdisciplinary approaches offer great potential for new solutions.
SRI Graduate Fellow Yang Liu moderates a Q&A with Lilith Acadia and Rushay Naik at the Schwartz Reisman Institute 2021 graduate workshop, “Views on Techno-Utopia.”
Meeting the demands of a transforming reality
Both Naik and Acadia point to how technologies can reflect our changing ideas of ourselves and reshape our relationships with others. In a time where our bodies are extended by smart phones, and the boundaries between in-person and online realities grow ever more fluid, turning to blockchain methods for identification would come as a natural extension of the decentralized and digitized character of our modern-day identities. Similarly, in a time where we’ve been bound to our homes—our bodies and living quarters practically becoming one after the repeated lockdowns of the coronavirus pandemic—looking to the imaginative implications of smart homes to question AI’s alignment problem seems a wholly sensible place to begin.
As we look to harness the power of technologies to envision and build a better future, interdisciplinary discussions such as those presented by Naik and Acadia at “Views on Techno-Utopia” offer meaningful insights into the challenge ahead, while urging us to think both critically and holistically about how technology will ultimately shape our identity, our home, and our interactions with the external world.
Want to learn more?
About the author
Daniel Konikoff is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and a graduate fellow at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. He is interested in the intersection of criminology and science and technology studies (STS), with an emphasis on police technologies, big data surveillance, and predictive justice. Konikoff has worked on a number of interdisciplinary projects on topics such as serial homicide, cannabis law, and the organizational behaviour of robbery teams. Prior to his PhD, Konikoff volunteered for the John Howard Society’s Centre of Research, Policy & Program Development, where he assisted with projects on bail reform and police record checks.
