Dear Colleague
In this month's Humanitarian Futures newsletter
- Transformative technologies, humanitarian implications, benefits and challenges
- Data colonialism and the future of humanitarian action
- Data Protection in Humanitarian Action
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Transformative technologies, humanitarian implications, benefits and challenges
You may recall that our last Humanitarian Futures newsletter focused on the positive humanitarian benefits that outer space technologies can have on earth-based systems. And, while we extoled the positive, we also noted that those with humanitarian responsibilities needed to bear in mind some of the ‘humanitarian downsides’.
More and more humanitarian organisations are using an ever growing range of technologies – directly and indirectly – to assist the crisis-affected. Clearly, for example, satellite communications are helping to trace flows of refugees and displaced persons, telemedicine is providing levels of assistance which in many countries are unprecedented and drones are increasingly being used to provide supplementary foods, medicines and even shelter material. The list of technologies being used for humanitarian purposes is already long, and will inevitably be much longer.
Data colonialism and the future of humanitarian action
However, at the same time there is also growing concern that these technologies not only can violate the human rights of the crisis-affected, but also can threaten their very lives. A sense of that danger has been ably captured by Kristin Bergtora Sandvick in her post Perpetuating Data Colonialism Through Digital Humanitarian Technologies, for the Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Krisitn notes that
Operating at the interface of bio and sensor technology, wearables such as activity trackers and smartwatches facilitate the measurement, selection, screening, legibility, calculability and visibility of data associated with human bodies. Tracking operates through and upon multiple layers: general biodata, such as height, weight, gender, age and race; bodily fluids, including blood, sweat, sperm and tears; and the capture of individual characteristics, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, and voice and face recognition. These are conceptualized as smart devices that can be placed on or inside human bodies for many purposes, including tracking and improving health, safety, and nutrition.
Wearables for tracking and protecting health, safety and nutrition offer interesting possibilities for the humanitarian aid sector due to their ability to monitor the needs and movements of aid beneficiaries that can improve the efficiency and timeliness of aid allocation. By tracking aid beneficiaries, aid agencies are able to deliver or monitor reproductive health services, strengthen security and accountability through more efficient registration of wearers, or ensure adequate nutrition to those who need it.
However, while the sociological literature on tracking devices focusing on individual self-tracing and consumer behaviour is large and growing, little critical scholarly attention has been paid to the use of tracking devices in the Global South, and none at all to their use in the humanitarian context. The deployment of wearables in emergencies entails deployment in contexts where there are deep, extra-democratic power differences between beneficiaries and structurally unaccountable humanitarian actors, donors and private sector actors—something that requires urgent attention.
Data Protection in Humanitarian Action
This sort of concern clearly underpins the International Committee of the Red Cross’s Handbook on Data Protection in Humanitarian Action. The handbook, which will be launched at the beginning of September, intends to raise awareness and assist humanitarian organisations in complying with personal data protection in carrying out humanitarian activities. Its focus on protection covers data that amongst other techniques includes artificial intelligence, biometrics – the automated recognition of individuals based on their biological and behavioural characteristics - and blockchain - “in essence an append-only decentralized database that is maintained by a consensus algorithm and stored on multiple nodes (computers).”
All these important and more than timely warnings and advice raises other overarching issues. For those with humanitarian roles and responsibilities, there can be little argument that on the whole, humanitarian crises reflect ‘normal life’ – the ways that societies structure themselves and allocate their resources. They are not generally speaking aberrant phenomena. If the former is the case, then one must ask how technological transformations might affect societies in general around the globe, and what sorts of potential vulnerabilities might they create.
In that context, the United Kingdom’s Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, has observed in his book, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, that
our health and our environment can benefit still more from further progress in biotech, cyber tech, robotics and AI.
To that extent, I am a techno-optimist. But there is a potential downside. These advances expose our ever more interconnected world to new vulnerabilities. Even within the next decade or two, technology will disrupt working patterns, national economies and international relations. In an era when we are all becoming interconnected, when the disadvantaged are aware of their predicament, and when migration is easy, it is hard to be optimistic about a peaceful world if a chasm persists, as deep as it is in today’s geopolitics, between welfare levels and life chances in different regions. It is specially disquieting if advances in genetics and medicine that can enhance human lives are available to only a privileged few and portend more fundamental forms of inequality.
(p. 5)
To the extent that Lord Rees’s observations might be seen as relatively optimistic, then Toby Ord in his recently published, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, provides a more dystopic vision that inevitably will spill over into humanitarian challenges. Ord, a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, foresees that
even though the largest risks we face are technological in origin, relinquishing further technological progress is not a solution….Our current predicament stems from the rapid growth of humanity’s power outstripping the slow and unsteady growth of our wisdom. If this is right, then slowing technological progress should help to give us breathing space, allowing our wisdom more of a chance to catch up. Where slowing down all aspects of our progress may merely delay catastrophe, slowing down the growth of our power relative to our wisdom should fundamentally help.
(p. 206)
The issues raised by Sandvik, the ICRC, Rees and Ore are part of growing efforts to understand the implications of transformative technologies upon the potentially vulnerable and the world as a whole.
In our next newsletter, Humanitarian Futures will take these perspectives and others to offer its own view of the technology-humanitarian interface in the Changing dimensions of human agency.
We hope that all those with humanitarian roles and responsibilities will find this HF perspective useful when it comes to planning from the future.
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As always, we very much look forward to staying in touch, and please never hesitate to forward any comments or questions you might have.
With our very best wishes
The Humanitarian Futures team
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