A new book has appeared on the scene, The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism, edited by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney. The book is published by Bloomsbury this year. It is a collection of relatively short chapters, all aiming at filling missing words in the sentence “Good Technology is … “. The tone of the chapters is conversational, designed to engage with the readers, helping them to think whether good technology is possible or what counts for good technology.
The leader of the Southeast Asian Hub of the Feminist AI Project, Soraj Hongladarom, has contributed a chapter to the book. His chapter is “Good Technology Is Possible, But There Are Conditions.” In this chapter, Hongladarom argues that the question “Is good technology possible?” sounds rather like the question “Are good politicians possible?” However, in the democratic society, people cannot live without politicians, so the latter must indeed be possible, and the question then becomes how to make them accountable to the people.
Hongladarom argues that the same goes for technology, and he outlines three conditions under which good technology is possible. They are, firstly, that technology must be beneficial; secondly, that the ethical dimension must be part of the design and raison d’être of technology itself, and, thirdly, that there must be a viable ethical theory that makes the first two conditions conceptually viable. In other words, Hongladarom says that in order for there to be good technology, it must provide tangible and lasting benefits to us and also to the environment.
The book is also nicely illustrated by line drawings, thus making it attractive and stand out from other books about technology or AI, and it should appeal to a broad audience.