Need of the hour

We live in a world of technology opulence. Every moment, somewhere some brilliant minds are uncovering innovative applications of technology and trying to announce some new-age applications of their innovations.

These technological developments are taking place across a wide range of fields right from ICT to nanotechnology, biotechnology, space, and quantum computing and so goes the list. They are all inherently disruptive and unleash paradigm shifts in how societies view technology and its functioning and usage.

Technological advancements initially tend to gravitate to commercialization by offering a new and efficient business solution. A kind of “Business Efficiency” window of technology takes hold and technological innovations find their myriad applications in solving business problems. For democratic governments, the key challenge that emerges is how to mainstream the technology through wider adoption and diffusion for public use in a non-discriminatory way. Public use of technology is to be perceived in the broader context of citizen access to public information, efficient and non-discriminatory allocation of public goods in the form of uninhibited and legitimate access to public services provisions — be it education, health care, financial services, or various social protection measures. The concept of Public Interest Technology (PIT) has gained momentum to underline a singular message that technology has to be proven as socially responsible. Thus any possible sweeping notion that technology does not call for a pre-designed approach and efforts to mainstream for public use and that it is just a matter of a market-driven golden tornado that lifts the technology and mainstream seamlessly tends to be an erroneous supposition and squarely overlooks many embedded nuances associated with technology and its pen-ultimate mainstreaming to serve the societal needs at large. Before a technology becomes mainstream for societal needs and qualifies to be truly PIT, it passes through many real-life challenges unlike the applications of technology for business solutions. To the business, technology has to yield the returns on investment made. For technology to be genuinely useful for society, the challenges are more complex.

In fact, a plethora of apprehensions, ambiguity, doubts, and obtaining socio-economic conditions — all stand in the way of mainstreaming technology to readily serve society. Some of these challenges faced by modern democratic governments of countries like India have been highlighted by many researchers and technology think tanks.

Firstly, dual use of technology in the sense that technology can be put to both civil and military usages and applications. How to draw a visible distinction or overcome a vexed trade-off poses serious dilemmas to governments. A geographical position system (GPS) can very well be put to embark upon covert military surveillance on the residents. Some drone technologies can be used for military purposes.

Technology can hardly remain localized in its scope of applications. Thanks to global integration, a technology's effects and consequences can spread quickly to countries across the globe. The innovators of technologies are not necessarily always sensitized or get to know the likely consequences of their innovation beyond the local limits of a given geography they normally are familiar with. Some of the technologies are viewed by many countries as central to national security and thus create much suspicion and doubt about the adoption of new technology.

Technological advancements are mostly taking place beyond governments. The rate of innovation is clearly outpacing States’ ability to keep abreast of the changes and breakthroughs and their potential societal impact. This itself poses enormous policy challenges for policymakers because of a lack of adequate knowledge of the power and consequences of fast pacing technological advancements.

A far larger number and variety of actors are now involved and they do not have the means to consider the broader, cross-border societal implications as the technologies are now having cross-border reach and have to interact with different values and political systems. Technologies are proving to be disruptive not only in market terms but also in disrupting established legal and regulatory systems that have been put in place by national governments of countries across the world. This itself is causing serious conflict and mounting tensions.

Complicated international laws, agreements, standards and protocols, trade, business, human rights standards, national regulations, and self-regulations are giving rise to a host of normative and legal touchstones making the technology adoption and mainstreaming much more complex, if not inhibiting.

Finally, technological governance has become a big challenge for democratic national governments as it touches upon so many policy areas ranging from a country’s socio-economic arena to the political-legal fabric creating tension and conflicts. Resolving these challenges is not easy for any national democratic government and its policymakers. There are already so many trade-offs between national priorities.

The question arises of how governments deal with such situations. Outright rejections of technology have their own socioeconomic costs and at the same time management of these concerns has a direct bearing on mainstreaming technology to serve society. The delayed response has serious implications for a country like India which has embarked upon a series of ambitious technological missions to bring technology to the doorsteps of common people. It's time for working towards building a cogent and balanced strategy for mainstreaming technology for laying a durable non-discriminatory public interest technology regime capable of serving the vast multitude of people.

The writer is a former civil servant and is Principal Advisor at the Center For Digital Economy Policy Research, Delhi. Views expressed are personal