Don't Be a Technocrat

 

Much as some engineers would like to ignore politics, it's irresponsible to do so.  I'm not saying you have to be a political junkie, but an awareness of the ultimate purposes and effects of the organization you work for is part of being a responsible engineer.  Writing in the Human Life Review, bioethicist Wesley J. Smith has issued a call to defeat technocracy before it takes over more of our lives than it has already.  And every engineer should hear that call.

 

The meaning of the word "technocracy" has changed over the years.  Engineer William Henry Smyth coined it back in 1919 to mean democracy as mediated through scientists and engineers.  For a brief time in the 1930s it became a small political movement of its own, favoring the management of society by engineers and other experts rather than by democratic means.  That sense is usually the one which is used today.  A pure technocracy would be in radical contrast to a democracy, where the ultimate authority resides in the people at large.  In a technocracy, all important public (and many private) decisions are made only by experts, qualified by the usual professional credentials of education, licensing, or other signs of expertise.  And by implication, a technocrat is a sort of technically-educated bureaucrat, one of those experts to whom power has been entrusted to do the right thing for the uneducated rabble, who aren't smart enough to know what is good for them.

 

As you can tell, I'm no fan of technocracy, and neither is Wesley Smith.  He sees technocracy as a primary threat in a spectrum of what are called "life issues":  abortion, euthanasia, healthcare rationing, and the destruction of the privilege of conscientious objection for medical workers.  The problem stems from the stunted view of human life that technocracy tends to have.  Because this stunted view seems to be all too common among engineers, I'll pause to describe it in some detail.

 

Engineers are great at getting things done, but not so great at deciding what things need to be done.  In a technocracy, certain fundamental assumptions are made without questioning or even thinking about them.  For example, one such assumption is that increasing a country's GDP (gross domestic product) is a good thing.  So anything that contributes to the GDP is good, and anything else is bad.

 

That sounds nice, except what about all those useless old people in rest homes?  They can't contribute to the GDP—they're too old to work.  And what about children?  Same deal—they are a drag on the economy, not a benefit.  Even the worst technocrat can see, you would think, that if a culture quits having children, pretty soon there won't be any culture to worry about.  But it was technocrats who came up with the brilliant idea of China's one-child policy, which threw a giant monkey wrench into that country's demography and is threatening to wreck its future economy even now. 

 

Engineers are great at coming up with more efficient ways to do things.  And within the proper context, greater efficiency is indeed a worthwhile goal, if you're talking about, say, energy efficiency or reducing a waste stream.  But when you try to apply that same attitude outside its proper sphere, you end up like Peter Singer, the Princeton philosopher that Smith quotes as saying the respect one should receive depends on your "capacity for physical, social, and mental interaction with other beings."  A person with such an attitude, which is entirely consistent with the goal of increasing a country's GDP, will take a dim view of people with disabilities of any kind, and will see nothing wrong with, for example, aborting any baby with Down's syndrome, or refusing health care to an old useless guy with only a high-school education who's probably going to die in a few more years anyway, in preference to a young productive college grad. 

 

Essential to doing engineering ethics right is the cultivation of one's moral imagination.  The easy way out is simply to do what you're told, acting as a small cog in the large organizations that most engineers are a part of, and not asking about the wider implications or effects of one's work.  But it's attitudes like that which have allowed China to start constructing their social-credit system, which Smith cites as an egregious example of technocracy gone bad.

 

For those unfamiliar with it, think of social credit as your credit score, only applied to your whole life instead of a narrow aspect of your financial behavior.  The Chinese government, with input from their technocrats, decides what kind of citizen they want.  Then they set about giving points to people who behave the way they want, and taking away points from those who don't.  Intrusive technologies such as GPS tracking, facial recognition, and of course, informants, are deployed to find out who you associate with, what you do in your spare time, and what websites you visit.  (Even here in the West, our technocratic watchers in the private sector have perfected the website part of the business.)  And for people who do things the government doesn't like, such as going to church or meeting with other Christians or Muslims, loss of social credit score can mean restrictions in travel, loss of employment, or worse, not only for yourself but for your children as well, who had the bad judgment to be born to such ne'er-do-wells.

 

It can't happen here, can it?  Wesley Smith doesn't seem to think so, at least not in the full-bore prison-camp variety, because the Constitution would prevent it.  Well, I'm not so sure, because lately the Constitution has been found by its nine Supreme Court interpreters to say a lot of things that most people didn't think it was saying.

 

But one thing is for sure:  if engineers, who are vitally necessary to any sort of technocracy, individually and collectively refuse to destroy democracy and replace it with technocracy, that will be the end of technocracy.  Idealistic?  Maybe.  But the first step is to understand what technocracy is and what its goals are, and only then can you decide to oppose it.

 

Sources:  Wesley J. Smith's article  "Defeating Technocracy is Crucial to Life," appeared in Human Life Review, vol. 47, Winter 2021, pp. 30-38.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on technocracy.

Facing Google In Your Living Room

An article on cnet.com recently described how Google's new smart assistant, called Google Nest Hub Max, uses facial recognition technology to tell who is talking with it.  This feature has raised privacy concerns, as Google has admitted that they reserve the right to upload facial data from it to the cloud to help improve "product experience."  But whatever Google does legitimately, a hacker might be able to do too, and so we are approaching a time when the telescreens of George Orwell's dystopian fantasy novel Nineteen Eighty-Four have become a reality—not because of the unilateral command of a totalitarian government (at least not in the U. S.), but because we want what they can do.

For those unfamiliar with the novel, Orwell's book was a warning to the free world to beware of what a dictatorship could do with communications technologies of the future.  Telescreens were two-way televisions on which propaganda by a dictator known only as Big Brother is transmitted, and through which images of whoever is watching are transmitted back to the party's central headquarters.  Orwell was simply extrapolating the efforts of regimes such as the Nazis of the 1930s and the Soviet Union of the 1940s to spy on their populace twenty-four hours a day to enforce total obedience to the regime. 

At the time the novel was published in 1949, no one took the telescreen-spying idea very seriously, because it would take a huge number of human monitors to spy on a significant number of people.  Carried to its logical extreme, the only way the government could watch everybody would be if half the population spied on the other half, and then took turns. 

But neither Orwell nor anybody else at the time reckoned on the development of advanced artificial-intelligence (AI) systems using facial recognition technology.  In China, the government is deploying many thousands of cameras and taking facial data from millions of people with the intention of developing a Social Credit rating that measures how well you measure up to the regime's model of the ideal citizen.  If you have been caught on camera by computers going to suspicious places or meetings, your Social Credit score could go in the tank, making it hard to travel, get a job, or even stay out of jail. 

None of that is happening in the U. S., but the fact that a large corporation will now have electronic access to views in millions of private residences should at least give us pause. 

Leaving the hardware aside for the moment, let's examine the difference in motives between a government, such as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, spying on its citizens for the purposes of controlling behavior, and a commercial entity such as Google using images to sell both its own services and advertising for others.  The government spying is motivated by suspicion and fear of what people might be doing while the government isn't watching them.  Whatever the regime sets out as an ideal of behavior, it watches for deviations from that ideal, and punishes those who deviate from it.  Participation is not voluntary, and people have to go to great lengths to avoid being spied on.

Now contrast that with a benign-looking thing such as the Google Nest Hub Max.  Nobody is going to make you buy one.  And if you do, there are ways of turning off the facial-recognition feature, though it will be less convenient to use.  And the device is intended to serve you, not the other way around.  It's sold with the vision portrayed in so many TV ads of people happily using it to make their lives better, not for means of social control like Orwell's telescreens. 

But maybe the differences are not as great as they first appear.  Both the telescreen and the Nest Hub Max are intended to change behavior.  If they don't, they have failed.  True, the ideal behavior that a totalitarian government wants and the ideal behavior that a company wants are two different things.  But neither ideal is the way the citizen-consumer was before the screen or Nest Hub shows up, namely, unwatched and unbenefited by the products or services that the company wants to sell.

Nobody should read this blog and then go around saying "Ahh, Stephan's saying Google is Big Brother and they're trying to take over our lives!"  That's not the comparison I'm making.  My point is that the mere fact of being watched by someone, or something that can inform someone about us, is going to change our behavior.  And that change by itself is significant.

Now, the change may not necessarily be bad.  Already, virtual audio assistant devices such as Alexa have been used in criminal cases when bad actors set them off, either by accident or on purpose, and the data thus generated has proved to be incriminating.  Though this is ancient history, I am told that in the days when some middle-class and upper-class people had servants, families tended to behave better when the servants were around, although I'm sure there were exceptions.  Alexa isn't Jeeves the butler, but as virtual assistants play a more significant role in domestic life, it's not beyond imagination to think that some of the worst behavior in homes—domestic abuse, for example—might be mitigated if the victim could call 911 by just shouting it instead of having to pull out a phone.

I'm not necessarily crying doom and gloom here.  Millions of people are already using virtual assistants with few if any problems, and adding two-way video to the mix will only increase the devices' capabilities.  But we are entering a new territory of connectivity here, and it's bound to have some effects that nobody has predicted yet.  Perhaps it's not too helpful to predict that there will be unpredictable effects, but right now that's all I can do at the moment.  Let's hope that the security features of the Nest Home Max are good enough to prevent nefarious use, and that people who buy them are truly happier with them than they were before. 

Sources:  The article "Google collects face data now.  Here's what it means and how to opt out" appeared on Sept. 11, 2019 at https://www.cnet.com/how-to/google-collects-face-data-now-what-it-means-and-how-to-opt-out/#ftag=CADf328eec.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Nineteen Eighty-Four and Google Home.  I thank my wife for pointing this article out to me.

The Stork Goes Digital

Pregnancy and childbirth, as well as the activities leading up to these, are among the most private matters women are concerned with.  They can also be some of the most expensive medical conditions that otherwise healthy young women encounter.  It comes as no surprise, then, that a company called Ovia has developed a system that lets women employees track their fertility and resulting pregnancies digitally. 

Originally, Ovia planned to promote their product directly to the consumers—young women—but as described in a recent Washington Post article, the company began to get inquiries from employers wanting to know how they could encourage their women workers to sign up.  Why?  The hope that Ovia would reduce medical-insurance costs for expensive infertility treatments and problem pregnancies.  Ovia showed employers that women who use the app can indeed benefit from the improved monitoring and awareness of warning signs that it provides.  Presently, Ovia's website clearly prioritizes this mode of delivery, and the typical user can even receive small payments from her employer to encourage her to keep checking in and providing data.  But what happens to that data?

Ovia stresses that all identifying information is stripped from the data before it is passed to the employer, who can then use it to anticipate health-care costs and glean a detailed picture of the most intimate aspects of their women employees' lives.  The contract Ovia signs with employers includes a promise that the employer will not "de-anonymize" the data to figure out exactly who is pregnant, for example, but there have been bad actors in the business world before, and it's not hard to imagine someone doing this for illegitimate reasons. 

Ovia is one of the more prominent apps of a variety that track various aspects of user health—Fitbit being the most well known.  Using such an app simply for one's own benefit is one thing.  But signing up to share intimate details with an employer-sponsored app is a different matter.  According to statistics provided by Ovia, the benefits are real—they say that users have a 30 percent reduction in premature births, and  a 30 percent increase in natural conception, as opposed to costly and absence-inducing infertility treatments. 

In a country where the burden of health insurance typically lies with the employer, one can't fault employers for doing whatever they can to minimize this cost, and gynecological-related procedures are among the most expensive ones that young women predictably encounter.  So the synergistic cooperation among Ovia, employers, and their women employees looks mostly like a win-win situation.

All the same, the article interviewed experts who expressed privacy concerns.  As long as there are no data breaches, these concerns may be largely imaginary.  But one aspect of engineering ethics is trying to imagine what could go wrong before it happens, and here's one way an app like this could be misused.

In a free country where agreements are freely arrived at between employees and employers, voluntarily sharing information is one thing.  But in countries with less freedom, such as the Peoples' Republic of China, governments are systematically worming their way into increasingly private aspects of their employees' lives.  I'm sure Ovia would like to have a market of the 1.3 billion or so people in that country.  But what if women there, instead of being offered the option to use the app, were forced to use it as a requirement of employment?  And what if turning up pregnant without first informing Ovia could be a cause for fines or imprisonment? 

It sounds awful, but such regimentation is becoming just another part of life in China, where all kinds of digital information on citizens is being used to come up with a "social credit" score.  It's sort of like a financial credit rating, but measures your reliability as far as the government is concerned.  In the dystopian novel 1984, the omnipresent Big Brother monitored everyone's actions through telescreens, which were sometimes laughed off by readers at the time because it would have taken half the population to sit behind the monitors to watch the other half.  But now in the age of AI pattern recognition, the watchers are 99% digital, and what was formerly thought impossible because of the absurd manpower demands has become quite feasible for a government that sets no bounds for snooping on its own citizens.

So far, Ovia seems to be simply another employee benefit that really does make things better for both users and the companies they work for.  Working women who get pregnant always encounter more or less conflicted situations, and anything that reduces the conflict, making employers less bothered about their women employees who have children, seems to be a good thing.  Still, it's another step into the digital future, which young persons especially seem to be embracing with little or no regret.  Things that once people blushed to tell even their doctors are now fodder for online posting, and as long as the privacy Ovia and similar apps promise is not breached, I suppose this is a good thing if it leads to healthier mothers and babies. 

Still, one wonders where the sharing of formerly private and personal data will stop, if ever.  Freedom, as an abstraction, can get overlooked in the rush to convenience that so many digital advances offer.  And so far, it looks like Ovia really has kept their promises that users' privacy will not be compromised.  But in the hands of a malevolent employer, or worse, a malevolent government, these kinds of personal-health apps could lead to serious incidents of abuse.  Let's hope that we can keep the benefits of Ovia and related apps while fending off any attempts to use it for nefarious purposes.

Sources:  The Washington Post article "Is Your Pregnancy App Sharing Your Intimate Data With Your Boss?" appeared on Apr. 10, 2019 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/10/tracking-your-pregnancy-an-app-may-be-more-public-than-you-think/?utm_term=.ed37e1fbda64.  I also referred to Ovia's website at https://www.oviahealth.com/.