When we see technology as an island, we often encounter two major challenges. First the coding of the technology often adopts the bias, injustice, inequality existing in the ecosystem in which the innovation is occurring.

Second, when we ‘scale’ the innovation, we focus on scaling the technology not the environment in which the innovation occurred. This has exponential impact because of challenge one. Injustice gets coded in, then the technology is taken out of the context it was created and placed in a new environment.

The injustice and inequality becomes viewed as ‘objective’ because it is part of the technology. We forget the injustice was in the data used to code and train the technology.

Technology is not an island. Nor does it evolve by itself in a vacuum. It happens in a context. We forget the context at our peril.

Photo by Tom Gainor