By Lauren

Who owns the future? (Hint: It could be us)

ABC’s new partnership with the John Adams Institute (JAI) got off to an inspiring start on 17 June with a talk on tech, imagination and inequity in the 21st century, where audiences were tasked with pondering how tech might be reimagined in the pursuit of justice and equality for all.

Speaking to a crowded house in Amsterdam’s majestic Rode Hoed, the Netherlands’ oldest and largest hidden church-cum-events space, sociologist and MacArthur Genius Ruha Benjamin, author of Imagination, convincingly busted the neutral tech myth.

She’s coined the term “New Jim Code”—referring to the American Jim Crow laws from the late 19th through mid-20th centuries that kept Blacks and whites segregated—to describe how today’s technologies often reproduce and reenforce social biases.

The people programming the new technologies are human after all, mostly guys (71% of AI-skilled workers are men compared to 29% women), with their biases often embedded into all of our futures, creating a digital gender (and racial) divide.

“A small sliver of humanity is currently imposing their visons on the rest of us,” said Benjamin. “They invest in space travel and AI super intelligence and underground bunkers, while casting health care and housing for all as outlandish and unimaginable. These futurists… let their own imaginations run wild when it comes to bending material and digital reality, but their visions grow limp when it comes to transforming our social reality so that everyone has the chance to live a good and meaningful life.”

Silicon Valley promotes the story that technology is our savior, she continued. Hollywood, meanwhile, promotes a dystopian vision where technology is our slayer. “They’re not opposing narratives—slaved or saved, fantasy or fear. They’re “two sides of the same bitcoin.”

Speaker Robin Aïsha Pocornie, a computer scientist and AI ethicist, corroborated Benjamin’s theories with her own sordid example of technological bias: she was the first person in the Netherlands to legally challenge facial recognition software after it failed to detect her face during Covid’s remote classes because she’s Black. She didn’t ultimately win, but she’s been an AI justice advocate ever since.

“Don’t leave tech to the techies,” she said. There are several ways to reclaim it, from Slow AI with its alternative AI narratives to taking part in a “union for digitalized citizens” initiative.

Marietje Schaake, a Dutch politician and former member of the European Parliament who recently published The Tech Coup, joined the others with suggestions for citizen involvement in keeping AI for the people: organize, change your own tech diet, join a political party, talk at your clubs and divest from Microsoft in schools.

“The EU has leverage over governments because we buy so much technology,” she continued. “We need to tap into the sense of pride of who we are in Europe. We stand for kindness, inclusion, the freedom of speech. We should be proud of who we are, not defensive. Investors will return to the EU, which can provide an alternative tech world to Silicon Valley.”

When asked if she could recall an instance when imagination was injected into politics, Schaake cited the creation of the European Union—an effort, she said, to make a stronger, kinder Europe based on the Continent’s shared values following World War II.

I wish I could remember exactly what she said, but (ironically), my phone died before the talk began and I was low on writing paper. But it was so rousing that I’ve been obsessing about infusing imagination into politics ever since.

I see it everywhere—from Amsterdam’s logistics-defying A10 Ring road party to my hometown New Amsterdam’s pick of a Democratic Socialist for its democratic mayoral nominee.

“It’s a moment of great opportunity,” said Schaake. We should all take it.

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Signed copies of the books by Ruha Benjamin and Marietje Schaake are currently available in all ABCs.

Click here to see the John Adams Institute’s fall lineup, beginning with the season opener on September 4: On the Edge with Nate Silver, statistician and author (The Signal and the Noise and On the Edge), who will speak about all things predictions, polls and American politics.

Please note that ABC Booklover Card holders are eligible for discounted tickets!