A prevailing theme in the tech industry has been concern around a widening technological inequality, also coined the “technological divide”. Many would agree, it’s been fueled by the explosion of new capabilities in the GenAI space. The usual perspective these discussions take is ensuring access to tools. Here, I want to share a thought on the other side of that coin: access to problems.
Anyone could navigate to and interact with chatgpt.com, but more importantly, do they have opportunities to apply it to meaningful problems? Without access to real-world, high-impact problems, access to tools remains symbolic.
I hope we’ve learned from the “who should have access to the internet?” days and can come to the consensus that everyone should have access to GenAI. That’s not to say everything that private companies build should be open-sourced and given away, but more in the context that we should build these technologies for the benefit of all, not just the 1%. Although providing wide-spread access to GenAI is still a challenge, let’s say for the sake of discussion that everybody has access to these tools, like ChatGPT or Gemini. We play with it, explore the boundaries, and maybe even tinker with its capabilities to invent new capabilities.
To what end?
We could be given any new “tool”, be it GenAI or a bleeding-edge quantum super-computer, but without real, practical problems to apply our tinkering and then to subsequently solve even bigger problems from those learnings, the technological divide still exists. Perhaps even widened. Organizations that have the skillsets to identify valuable problems and the resources to afford to toil away at solutions, will always gain an advantage over those that have neither.
As the privileged organizations to continue gain knowledge by exploiting new tools, they also gain power. Power to dictate what the problems worth solving are, and how we should use new technological capabilities and the common people’s labor to solve those problems. Of course, in the way that best benefits itself.
When you give your sibling an Xbox controller, but you’ve unplugged it from the console, are you really sharing the Xbox like your parents asked? They have access to the controller too, right? Organizations can give us tools, but they are meaningless if there aren’t opportunities to solve meaningful problems.
Stop hoarding the big, valuable problems and learn to solve them together. Defining “democratized AI” as simply giving access to the masses is simply a facade for an excuse to get ahead at the expense of the people.
Behind all my conjecture, I feel there is an underlying strategy we should embed into our tech organizations.
- Put the tool in the hands of your entire workforce.
- Bet on your talent. Empower your workforce to both identify problems and solve for them. Advocate for team members based on conviction, not job title.
- Extend beyond the confines of your organization when searching for solutions to your problems. Embed touchpoints for the community to engage with and guide how you leverage technologies that can change the course of history.
Most organizations have #1 and #2 down pat. What I’d like for you to take away from this is to think about #3. Are you handing out unplugged controllers? How are you actively embedding the will of the people in the products you build, that will change the future of those very same people?
Giving access to tools isn’t democracy, when the privileged can limit the problems you can solve with those tools.
Share the problems.
