Juha Saarinen has an end of week rumination on where technology is taking us, to good and bad places

If you've been knee-deep in the technology industry for as long as many of us have been, it's hard not to feel that you're part of the problem and not the solution.

Which is probably too bleak a view. There's no doubt that tech can be a force for good. Sometimes directly, like Google using artificial intelligence to diagnose tuberculosis cases. Yes, TB is still a dangerous disease that affects something like 10 million people a year.

TB is treatable, but it needs to be diagnosed. Google's Health Acoustic Representations, catchily abbreviated as HeAR, can help with that. Researchers from Big G said they trained the HeAR bioacoustics foundation model, which is a large general purpose artificial intelligence "blob" of statistical inferencing, on 300 million pieces of "audio data curated from a diverse and de-identified dataset".

A cough model - yes, that's what the researchers call it - was trained as part of the above, with around 100 million cough sounds. The sounds come from copyright free (!) sources like YouTube clips and recordings from a Zambian hospital. AI is very good at spotting patterns in data, and an app on a smartphone can be used to listen to people coughing, and help diagnose TB.

In fact, patients can simply use their mobile phones, cough, and receive a TB diagnosis with 94% accuracy.

There are many other applications of AI for healthcare, like developing promising new mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) vaccines; for New Zealand, the AI melanoma detection tools for doctors and dermatologists are particularly relevant and already in use.

AI for hearing aids is another. Humanity is growing increasingly hard of hearing, as the world is growing louder and louder - in no small part due to technology subjecting us to ear-battering noise levels. This is, somewhat unironically, now becoming another business opportunity for tech companies that can repurpose earbuds to help people not miss important verbal communication, with AI suppressing background noise while separating out speech. 

That's now being developed as a useful accessibility feature, along with other things like live captions and haptics (buzzing and vibrations) for alarms and alerts that might otherwise go unheard. Have a read of Apple's page on the subject of hearing accessibility.

Nothing of the above is for free, and technology doesn't take place in isolation. As has become increasingly apparent, the power requirements of AI are truly monstrous. Data centres are "pigs when it comes to energy use, and now they're the size of an elephant" as Eric Woodell told Reuters recently. Woodell is an expert on that subject whose consultancy "offers guidance to companies on how to prevent IT outages, safeguard online transactions, and protect customer data". 

That's before we get into PFAS - per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances - being used extensively to make chips, or semiconductors. The "forever chemicals" which don't break down and disappear are toxic, but we don't know quite how bad yet.

At a political level, it may seem weird that with so much room for improvement in their industry and opportunities to improve people's quality of life like, not wrecking the planet for everyone, the IT grandees have flipped right-wards, and quite openly express disturbingly unkind opinions. Elon Musk is one example, but who hurt Marc Andreesen, the coder who was instrumental in developing the Mosaic web browser that became Netscape Navigator back in the 90s?

Andreesen is now enormously wealthy. As the founder of Andreesen Horowitz the venture capitalists, the money means he's being listened to. People might even take his incoherent "techno-optimist manifesto" from last year seriously, in which among others he name checks an interesting chap from the 1900s, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. 

Marinetti was one of the authors of the Fascist Manifesto, and you'd think openly endorsing a losing ideology like that, one which caused immeasurable suffering to humans and the world, is not something anyone would do. There you have it though, and Andreesen is not alone. 

Some of the political tilt to the right no doubt comes from the geeks becoming rich while growing old and bitter, with their already low empathy towards other people being further blunted.

Another factor is that if you're in tech, and have made a decent fist of it, you can get away with almost anything. Tech can be difficult to understand, since much of it is black box stuff: most people don't know how it works, particularly not by looking at it. Which is fine, and true for other industries as well, but it does leave the people who understand tech in a powerful position.

Sometimes though, there's no need even to understand tech. You just need to be able to convincingly repeat important sounding terms and run slide shows with numbers presented without meaningful context.

Like at a certain event recently in New Zealand, which I will not name so as to avoid give nonsense like web3 and crypto oxygen. It was attended by important people who clearly take an uncritical view of the comically bad tech in question, and never bothered to check media reports on who was sent to prison recently for money laundering. Tech is fine to pull wool over people's eyes with, but getting tricksy with money? Uh-oh. Don't try that. 

And no, I'm not going to mention Donald Trump flogging NFTs along with pieces of his suit. Oh oops, I did. If you think about it, it means Trump understands the purpose of the tech, albeit not the finer details of it.