At a job application, I was asked what I thought about the role of technology in humanitarian work, here is my answer:
Like any other field, technology is the new reality when it comes to improving effectiveness and outcomes. Smaller medical equipment can help diagnose patients sooner at the scene of a disaster, smarter temporary housing units can help shelter thousands of displaced quicker and more comfortably, and fewer aid workers can impact more lives.
But as with other fields high-tech solutions may not always give the best answers, sometimes it is innovation with low-tech solutions that make the difference. For example, in Berlin planting trees and creating green strips of grass by the sidewalk has been effective at preventing floods as the soil absorbs rainwater.
Technology also has a rôle in creating preventative measures that minimize the need for humanitarian work. More precise meteorological predictions can move people to safety before a storm strikes, improved safety standards at nuclear and hazardous facilities can detect and prompt response before it gets out of hand, and drones can help monitor activity between warring factions to ensure the safe passage of aid matériel.
Technology wins an easy ‘yes’ for humanitarian efforts, I’ve been fascinated by the logistics and aviation technology that went into the Berlin airlift shortly after the commencement of the cold war. The latest tech have been helping us maintain the basic human rights to food, shelter, and water since (or before) the second world war. It reflected the ‘free world’s’ undying spirit of sacrifice and assistance at all costs to do what is right.
But technology has its limitations, as Max Weber noted in his 1913 lectures “Wissenschaft als Beruf”, technology can only tell us what we are able to do, not what we ought to do. Yes, we can do more with what we have now, but to what situations should we apply it to? To what extent is deception an appropriate course of action to save lives, say, in the case of the white buses of the Bernadotte’s Swedish Red Cross in WWII? Is election rigging (over 120 cases in the past century between just the US and the USSR) justified to prevent violent conflict? What kinds of morals are we willing to sacrifice in order to assert our moral high ground, or should we even consider it in the first place?
Technology helps with the implementation of humanitarian work, that is an uncontroversial and comfortable truth. The deeper question to push decision makers, or even the general public to think of what is controversial and uncomfortable, to generate a discussion over the moral constructs in which our society operates. Only then, will we be able to determine when and how we should provide humanitarian aid, and with which technologies.
A great engineer can only tell of what is possible; it takes experience to become an arbiter of moral good.
