Technology Fans the Flames of Inequality, Educators must Extinguish Them

Technology has exacerbated inequalities in our society, from epistemic inequality to wealth inequality to inequitable outcomes for citizens based on race, gender, ability, and age. Meanwhile, schools and educators across the globe have invested massive resources to build cutting-edge STEM programs in order to teach skills--like coding--while neglecting to address the impacts of these new technologies on our society. We teach algorithms, but we don’t grapple with their shortcomings, like that Facebook’s algorithm promotes anti-vax misinformation and dangerous white nationalism. We teach AI, without confronting how AI's baked-in biases create discrepancies in sentencing, hiring, and home-ownership depending on one’s gender, zip code, or skin color. We teach robotics, but don’t discuss how businesses use robots to surveil, extract data, and eliminate jobs.     Currently, how we teach technology and how we employ technology breeds a "tech-solutionism" in our constituencies that furthers the inequalities created by technology. At every turn, we have chosen to bring more technology into our schools without any risk-assessment or transparency. This has led to more relationships with tech companies, more accounts, more applications, and worst of all, more time online (for students and teachers). We’ve added unprecedented surveillance including cameras and microphones with some schools and classrooms adding voice and facial recognition. We’ve allied with companies that actively steal our data (i.e Google) and our intellectual property (i.e Turnitin), with some schools employing AI to monitor our community’s emails and social media posts. These changes result in more stress and anxiety, less privacy, and fewer safe spaces to learn and grow. Not only are we ill-informed about the technology we add, but we’re engendering in our students the sense that technology adoption and its exploitation of us is inevitable all but assuring this gets worse for our schools and our society.   To extinguish the flames of inequality that our we are currently fueling, we need to write new policies, add new classes, and build new programs. Educators should draft impact assessment procedures so constituents are more informed on the pros and cons of the technology adopted. Every STEM class should add an ethics component. And all classes should add equity and social justice work especially around technology and how it's changing society. Finally, we need to add instruction into our auxiliary programming like in media literacy/digital citizenship, and, of course, in diversity, equity, and inclusion to ensure our students have a holistic view of technology's role in our society.     Schools and educators have a duty to reject the immoral and unethical ways that technology is intensifying inequality in our politics, our economy, and our humanity. Now more than ever, we need citizens with moral compasses that reject techno-solutionism and instead advocate for privacy, truth, and equity.