The Internet and data are making new demands on society, and we’re increasingly being asked to adapt as individuals, not as communities. How we shop, speak to our neighbors, find romance, and seek important and life-changing advice have all become decoupled from our sense of place. This is also incrementally changing the places we live in: Post Offices are closing, while corner shops are turning into pickup centers for online shopping. The social glue that held local communities together has become differently stuck.
As everyday life becomes more screen-based and automated, there’s an urgent need for new and different thinking about the support structures we need as individuals and the shared amenities that communities need to thrive and survive. Facebook, Amazon and Google provide increasingly large amounts of the daily infrastructure we need to live our lives but have little accountability for the way their services are reshaping the physical world. And the social infrastructure that has traditionally been so important to our shared, communal quality of life—culture, health care, community space, places to play—is being moved ever more online.
But where do we turn if Google doesn’t know the answer? How do we talk to our neighbors without Facebook? How do I buy food if all the local supermarkets have closed? How can I make an appointment with a doctor if I’ve run out mobile data? And who can guide me through a crisis when I’ve nowhere left to turn?
Technology is changing our real-world interactions so quickly and subtly that it’s hard to notice until after it’s happened. Most people don’t need to learn to code, but we all need to work out how to cope with the ways data and algorithms are shaping our lives.
Our social infrastructure needs refreshing and reinvigorating for these data-driven times, so we can navigate the future collectively—not just on our own, while looking at our phones.
There is a need for new social infrastructure that supports our access to data and connectivity. Civic planning, education and foresight all have a role to play in this—but there is also a need for more elemental sense-making, for design cues, language and intuition that help to help us describe and sense the systems we encounter and move through. It is difficult to question things we can’t see; data needs more visibility so it can be subject to deeper kinds of enquiry.
As we look into the uncertainty of increased automation, more of humanity deserves the tools to shape technology and its effects, rather than simply being expected to catch-up and respond. To do this, we need data and connectivity to be legible and imaginable, so that non-technologists—including civil society—can bring their expertise to shape technology and its effects more actively and not simply respond after the fact to the ways it is changing human experience.
These unfolding realities hit me when I participated last Thursday in the launch of the “3Zero House” in Mandaluyong. As I mentioned in my recent column, the 3Zero Global Alliance promotes new approaches to contemporary challenges, while radically reshaping the way individuals, businesses and communities live, work and interact:
Zero exclusion—because the vulnerability of marginalized populations can be reduced through the promotion of inclusive institutions, governance mechanisms, policies and concrete actions;
Zero carbon—because we want to pass on to our children an economy that respects natural balances, an ecologically sound development model and a global governance of the common good; and
Zero poverty—because poverty is an intolerable waste of talent and the reproduction of poverty from generation to generation is not inevitable.
As reiterated during the launch, it is essential that we devote time and effort to develop human capital to master the skills needed for the jobs of the future.
Additionally, it is essential that we commit to become accountable for our responsibilities to create a better world for present and future generations.
In this context, it is essential that we recognize that many of our students will not find jobs because we don’t generate enough jobs. It is therefore essential that we also focus on entrepreneurship training, make use of the great ideas of MakerSpace, and convince universities to prepare students for the gig economy. I am convinced that more and more employers around the world will hire experts on a short-term basis. Filipinos are already very visible on gig web sites, but the requirements for short-term experts will grow very fast.
Feedback is appreciated; contact me at schumacher@eitsc.com