Putting the Public Interest in Front of Technology

In the past 30 years, digital communications and data-driven technologies have transformed how we connect and engage with the world around us, creating opportunities in every area of contemporary life. But as often as these technologies foster learning and create opportunity, they have also been used in ways that amplify systemic inequities.

Policy makers are struggling to regulate everything from AI-operated phones to advertising models. Tech producers are incentivized to maximize profitability. Consumers enthusiastically adopt new apps and services, often without understanding the adverse consequences they entail. As a result, everything from privacy and justice, to teen mental health and the ability to distinguish truth from fiction, are becoming casualties in the race to create and deploy new tech.

Marginalized communities often bear the brunt of technology’s adverse consequences, whether through biased algorithms that determine Black patients need less pain medication than white counterparts or through extensive surveillance programs that track undocumented immigrants. What’s clear is that the solution to these challenges lies not only in an approach focused on developing tech for good but in always asking, “good for who?”

The Ford Foundation’s technology and society program has spent more than a decade working with the talented technologists, researchers, leaders, and advocates who are asking these questions at scale through a pioneering new field: public interest technology.

Public interest technology is an interdisciplinary approach that demands technology be designed, deployed, and regulated in a responsible and equitable way. That’s why public interest technologists—engineers, scientists, community organizers, activists—explicitly center the experiences of historically marginalized groups who have been both targeted and neglected by technology.

Over the course of this series, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, some of the sharpest minds in this field will explore why and how advancing public interest technology will function best with widespread participation, particularly across four key sectors: academia, civil society, private and public sectors. In an increasingly interconnected global ecosystem, progress toward effective standards and regulations that protect the public must map to global consumer and human rights frameworks. Creating and distributing technology that works for all is an imperative for technologists, social entrepreneurs, business leaders, philanthropists, civil society leaders, and academics in our institutions across the globe.

^{(Series illustrations by Vreni Stollberger)}