What is Technosolutionism in Human Rights?
Technosolutionism is a way of grasping how the world prioritises and values engineered solutions to human problems. It is the theory that a machine, software program or mobile phone application can improve the way something is performed. Typically, this improvement is quantified through speed, as it matches the unsavoury need the Western world has for development
Technosolutionism is a way of grasping how the world prioritises and values engineered solutions to human problems. It is the theory that a machine, software program or mobile phone application can improve the way something is performed. Typically, this improvement is quantified through speed, as it matches the unsavoury need the Western world has for development. However, with the rush to embrace immediate technological fixes comes new human rights violations (Mattix, 2021). These are viewed as unfortunate side effects by creators of technology, ignored by the end-user and justified by the ultimate problem sped up and solved.
Furthermore, there is an ideology of competition with modern technology that parallels the neoliberalist agendas of Western civilisation. This ultimately leads to architects of technology releasing a product quicker than their opponent, negating that it may not be finished or fully assessed by the end-user. With this comes the belief that technical issues and human rights violations can be patched on the run.
There are two other important issues to consider in the invention of technology. Firstly, there seems to be a belief that repairing problems with technology will lead to a finish line, where all the world's dilemmas are solved. The Western world overlooks the need for comprehensive assessments of how technology influences the human rights discourse. Without this understanding develops an inherent risk of creating new human rights violations that need to be solved by yet another solution.
Furthermore, technology is skewed on the biases that create it. Silicon Valley is a long way from the heart of where most refugees come from, and its confidence outweighs its capability to solve issues it does not completely understand. This has been identified by several scholars and activists who have outlined that there is "tremendous denial on the part of Silicon Valley elites and governments to acknowledge and act upon the myriad social harms that emanate from their products and services" (UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, 2020, p. 5).
A prime example is in the documentary Coded Bias by Kantayya (2020). Here Kantayya outlines that artificial intelligence features such as facial recognition services are "based on data, and data is a reflection of our history". This statement is made following the detection of systemic failures in this software to identify physical features based on the racial bias from data input during the creation phase, and further explains how machine learning algorithms utilised in the asylum seeker application process can perpetuate society's existing racial, class and gender-based inequalities.
With a frightening reminder that technology is not neutral, it embodies the assumptions and prejudices of those who build it.
Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash
The Pitfalls of Technosolutionism and Refugee Rights
The rationale for the consideration of technosolutionism for refugees is the growing trend of digitalisation across the world and the numerous obstacles it could help solve. It profoundly changes the context and execution of humanitarian assistance and how refugees are processed (Stoll, 2017). However, the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (2020) outlines that two distinct groups are at considerable risk of cruelty from racial discrimination exacerbated by the use of new technologies: those in the criminal justice system and refugees.
Landing on the coast of Kos, Greece, a Syrian refugee accompanied by his wife from the war-torn city of Homs withdrew his mobile phone from a resealable plastic bag and proclaimed,
"Our phones are more important than food!"
- Wael, Syria (Assir, 2015, p. 1)
Unfortunately, the same devices refugees use to navigate, translate, educate and communicate during their journeys are utilised by governments and private sector actors as powerful instruments of surveillance, exploited to shape human beings into digital evidence (Taylor & Graham-Harrison, 2016).
The rationale for the consideration of technosolutionism for refugees is the growing trend of digitalisation across the world and the numerous obstacles it could help solve. It profoundly changes the context and execution of humanitarian assistance and how refugees are processed (Stoll, 2017). However, the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (2020) outlines that two distinct groups are at considerable risk of cruelty from racial discrimination exacerbated by the use of new technologies: those in the criminal justice system and refugees.
In this framework, both groups are exceedingly vulnerable to the detection and creation of evidence against them. The concept of digital evidence is critical in this analysis of technosolutionism. Oldham (2020) defines digital evidence as anything that the senses can perceive to support an assertion (Oldham, 2020). Although assertion can be both positive and negative in its hypothesis, the assertion often comes from the individual defining it and in first-order logic.
Its relationship to refugee rights is simple. All refugees claiming asylum worldwide are automatically judged and branded by immigration officials with the assertion and assumption that they are lying, and the evidence will prove that. If it just so happens that the evidence disproves this assertion. Well, that might be just luck on the side of the refugee.
Technology that helps accelerate the process of asylum applications does so on a mathematical agenda, which prevents the analysis of a case-by-case basis. Instead, it turns the application process into a judgmental, biased calculation formulated by technology that carries the same racial, gender and class-based inequalities as society. These calculations are not neutral and are based purely on omnipotent Western governments and their determination of merit. Furthermore, with modern technology feigning as a saviour to the worlds refugee problems, new human rights violations are born.
For technology to prevent these assertions, bias's, and human rights violations leading to immigration officials being mere facilitators of this inequality discourse, there needs to be a line drawn in the sand using technosolutionism in the asylum seeker application process. This line will prevent the overriding power imbalance, control and pre-perceived judgement of a refugee before they even arrive at a country's border. Additionally, it will reinforce the privacy and rights of refugees to allow the fortification of cultural sensitivity during the application process.
Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash