In the world to date we have technology nearly everywhere! In our pockets, in our homes and on the outside! We have reached a state were we use a lot of technology in our every day lives and, in fact, the trend is integrating more and more technology for the everyday use as we go on. Personally I am very excited about having new and helpful technological solutions and I am not against that. It’s the fact that technology as it has evolved, is closer to the market’s best interest rather than the public’s. So I am questioning if whether we as the public are in control of the technology we are using today and whether or not we may have an active role in defining its evolution. Can we share technology between us or do we have to continuously buy new products and services in order to keep technology integrated in our lives? And finally, is technology more like a service that belongs to the people or is it more like a product that belongs to commerce?
The technology we use comes from people and their motivations.
First of all let’s understand that technology is made from people: scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, people with new ideas, guys who know how to manage and sell where all of them as people, or as groups of people, happen to form personal driven goals and motivations. These motivations actually mold and shape the technology’s path as it may sound unexpected but technology is more about taking a choice, agreeing or disagreeing between people, teams or companies rather than solving a complex puzzle. Under the motivation scope, the best public interest and the motivation to improve the world may not necessarily be a company’s or an individual’s best interest where the former is set aside and may become highly disengaged from the overall system.
How does the market affect technology?
We all know that the technology market and every kind of market is concerned about its profits. If we think of the electric cars for example; although they might be cheaper have more benefits for the user and the environment versus the diesel ones which are dominant in the present; the companies in hold of the latter ones would not want the existence of the former ones on the market as they would stop selling the remaining oil. Therefore, in this specific example the market is kind of jammed. It is not on the people’s favor as it should be but it rather tries to satisfy a small portion of wealth holders such as the oil sellers by prolonging the market’s lifespan as long as it’s possible. Moreover let’s not forget, the market wants to survive and for that it needs to keep on running and keep people hooked. Under this process, it does not care if it is doing the right or the wrong thing. In the presented example, it is in the oil holders’ best interest to be willing to fight research over alternative power sources to keep their profits running. Finally, from this example, as in others, we may understand that the money cycle, even though we live on a fast age, in some cases becomes really slow and stiff to be shifted towards another direction while technology which aims to help people may have to either co-align somehow with the current state as it is, wait for a while or be oppressed as a financial threat.
University research’s part in the publicly applied technology?
None can argue that the human research driven by universities and research centers has made significant steps into our technological evolution as research’s main pursue is about pushing the state of the art of technological advances. Although the scientific process is a necessity, as it is now, it lacks on the appliance part. In more detail, research in its main body, is only concerned about the discovery of new solutions rather than their implementation. In other words, when something new is being discovered and published the scientific process restarts all over again, the problem here is that there is no appliance in the loop, the material is published but no significant effort is made into bringing it out for the public to use. It is then considered the market’s opportunity to take up research and commercially apply it in a product to be deployed for the public. This approach becomes a problem as most of our modern-day problems would have been solved by applying already existing technology under the right approach without necessarily involving the market for every sollution. For this reason, maybe in the future we might reconsider a researcher’s work to not stop only on publication but to also continue on the appliance part.
Our approach towards the market
The modern man has become more of a consumer rather than a problem solver. We continuously expect from the market to produce something new that promises a small change rather than asserting our best interest in the loop. The problem with this approach is that there is no real dialogue between the consumers and the market as it is a one way road, they make and we buy. What if we were in a position to develop systems which would support and enhance the target consumers to take an active role by expressing their needs for future commercial projects? New systems start to appear that fall under this thinking like Kickstarter or Patreon where the final user has a more active role and is able to evaluate a series of products or even in some of them to express his opinion towards the creator before mass production. The final consumer needs to have a choice and therefore more systems and firms should start to behave similar to this approach.
A solution for the matter
The main goal here is to change this situation by redefining the way we perceive and produce technology by including the best public interest back in the loop. There are some existing philosophies such as to fight the system and not use technology at all, or to go to the extreme and become hackers so that we may know and understand how technology works from the inside out! What if I told you that the approach is much more simple than these extremes which tend to grasp the problem but fail on the solution part?
It is time to start investing on the public domain!
The solution is much more simple than the aforementioned trends. Instead of thinking the technology as a product we have to start thinking it as a service. A good example can be a park! Each one of us may take a walk in a park and none of us has to pay for it. At least not directly but rather indirectly from taxes. Somehow the park is in every one’s use and functions as a service rather than as a product. As opposed with the physical world, in technology things are easier! For the best part software may copied and transferred really fast without cost. In fact, when making software the cost lies only in its development and maintenance, from the development point and on it may be copied over and over. The solution here is very simple, to fund the development of open software licensed for everyone and every use. In other words invest in, as we call it, the public domain! If we manage to push as many things as possible for the public use we may end up to have more to share between us without cost and thus to increase our public wealth of sharable technological solutions and implementations. Software can be free to distribute so that someone may take it, change it or even resell it.
How can this happen?
There are ways to achieve this goal. We could either crowdfund or push governments and organizations to fund the development of source code, protocols and design projects licensed for the public domain that we might later use, change, implement to our own working projects and even make profit by using or reselling them. For example to crowdfund the design of a mobile phone so that when we buy it since the design schematics are already paid we could save money and pay only for the production cost or even a case where the government funds the development of a firewall software where medium and small companies could then use it free of cost, skip on expenses for this part and focus their wealth on something more demanding. Finally, when technology is licensed for the public domain from its birth it stays like this for the rest of its days.
kostiskag 