Who’s Responsible When Tools Decide?

Where is deep-tech leading us? According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024, 82.2 per cent of 14-16-year-old children in rural India use smartphones. While 76 per cent among them use social media, only 57 per cent use the same for educational purposes. Another survey, conducted over the past three years, has found that the rate of cyberbullying victimisation rose by 200 per cent; the victims now being two times more likely to suffer from clinical depression and suicidal tendencies. In the same vein, the number of registered cybercrime cases against children in India rose from 232 in 2018 to 1,823 in 2022.

On the other hand, data from a leading fin-serv company shows that although its transaction volume increased forty-fold between 2019 and 2024, the number of customer support employees fell from 1,100 to just over 400. AI chatbots are now being used to resolve more than 90 per cent of customer issues. We all know about the state thousands of employees of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) are in. Moreover, the general condition of our legacy IT workforce is not encouraging either. At the other end of this world, Meta’s AI investment boost led to 8,000 employees being sacked in a month last May, alone!

These dystopian facts lead to a second very pertinent question. How did we reach this place? No, I am not a so-called Luddite; rather, I have been thriving in the heart of micro/nano-manufacturing for the last 15 years. Hence, as a tech-pragmatist, I intend to find objective answers together with you in this piece.

A Brief History

Every technological age has transformed us and our collective truths in ways manifold. Ancient ‘tools’ gave us protection and elevated physical prowess; giving advantage over nature. In the later era, agricultural and industrial machinery defined community-labour; the railways served the needs of the collective over individuals. In the more recent history, household appliances replaced certain forms of manual labour transforming a particular section of society.

Broadly speaking, pre-modern technology functioned within the realm of natural resources and individual existence. In the modern era, industrial capital has steered technology towards mass production and economic expansion facilitating its penetration into the inner walls of socio-political power structure; bringing sweeping changes to our biology, behaviour, relationships, forms of labour and, of course, culture. But through all these ages, one phenomenon remained absolute—machines depended on human beings and we maintained our individual and collective autonomy.

But that narrative of human autonomy within technology-dependent modernity has transformed fast with the gradual yet continuous and consecutive arrival of computers, the internet, social media and, finally, artificial intelligence (AI). Today that truth of machine being an instruction-obeying and dependent ‘helper’ is a thing of history. AI, day-in-day-out transfers activities as remembering, calculating, interpreting and decision-making, the very capacities that traditionally defined human cognition to machines.

We ourselves are the market. We are the customers. And we are the ones labouring for wages at these very companies that own the technologies. And now our handmade large language models (LLM) are threatening to engulf that very job market. The very data centres that devour our livelihoods to our unknowing will also decide what we eat, what we watch, what we listen to and what we think through targeted algorithm push. And children losing their childhoods or the wreckage of our mental health would be termed the collateral side-effects of technological advancement! I wonder if this is the bare face of tech-fascism?

The sadder part also resides elsewhere. Our addiction to social media and GPT show no sign of diminishing in spite of all that I have shared above. Some commercial products have been made readily available to us, but without the conceptual framework needed to decide when, how and why they should be used. Think about it: every machine comes with a user guide. But do social media platforms and GPT interfaces either have one? In place of a user guide, they flaunt user agreements, with underlying clauses that has gifted us a socio-psychological phenomenon—historically termed as ‘The Agentic Shift’.

With Great Power Comes Greater Responsibility

Let me unpack a little further. In the early 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram embarked on an experiment. His purpose was to discover how far an ordinary person would obey an authority’s command when that very command is in conflict with their own conscience. Participants were told to take part in a study on the relationship between learning and punishment. They were assigned the role of a ‘teacher’, while another person—an actor working with the researchers—posed as the ‘learner’. The rules were simple: every time the learner answered a question incorrectly, the teacher would administer an electric shock. With each wrong answer, the voltage was to be increased by 15 volts, progressing from 15 all the way up to 450 volts. Physically, no shocks were delivered, something of which the participants were ignorant.

In the experiment, 26 out of 40 participants—65 per cent—went all the way to the maximum of 450 volts. Later, when they learned the truth, they said: “I was only following the authority’s instructions. I did not want to fail the job at hand. What happened beyond that was not my responsibility.” Milgram termed this psychological transfer of responsibility as ‘agentic shift’. His controversial experiment showed us that once power and moral responsibility are separated, people can be induced to do almost anything; irrespective of the collective outcome.

In the 1990s, Neil Postman, a professor of media ecology at New York University, brought Milgram’s insight into the courtyard of tech-society interface. In his book, Technopoly, he devised a thought experiment. A bank customer seeks to know how much money is in his account; the bank employee replies, “The computer is down, so I cannot give you that information.” In context, Postman asks: why does the employee’s responsibility disappear along with the technological failure?

What he points to is the fact that without us noticing, the statement ‘We use computers to calculate’ had metamorphosed to ‘The computer calculates’. The game of ‘technological authority replacing human accountability’, which began in mundane places like these, kept expanding until—without our even realising it—our society and culture had been handed over to algorithms.

The Adult In The Room

Well, when the frog in the boiling tub realises that ‘he was being slowly cooked’ really late, the responsibility of survival now returns to it. What I mean is when we are the market, the customers, knowingly or unknowingly, have handed our society and culture to algorithm-wielding corporations at almost all levels, there is little point in whining. To stop unfettered technology from making human sensibility and culture dance at the flick of its finger, Postman proposed several measures. Taking my cue from one of his earliest suggestions, I would propose that before admitting the harvest of any technology, let’s ask ourselves three questions:

·         Does this technology actually solve a problem?

·         If it does, is that problem genuinely a problem of our personal and collective lives?

·         If it is not, could succumbing to its conveniences create an entirely new problem?

It is smart to make technology work for us, but it is wiser not to hand the moral responsibility accompanying that power over to the technology itself. Otherwise, we will surely overlook the techno-capital snake slipping quietly into our bedrooms—and although being its customers we will end up in its grasp. But, if we enter the market as ‘the adult in the room’ and begin asking critical questions like the above, we will retain the market and the technology both to our advantage.

(Views expressed are personal)

(The author is a microfabrication process engineer at GE HealthCare in France)