By Miles Pilgrim
Beyond the aspect for gaming, the development of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) has incredibly useful application for humanity. Most notably is its utility as a learning tool; for teachers and schools, students and medical staff. And in fact, Microsoft is now aiming its new HoloLens AR headset directly at business rather than consumers. Adoption of the technology is already growing in which the HoloLens “has been picked up by workers in warehouses, factories and other industrial settings” (Financial Times, February 25).
HoloLens application can already be found in work involving the maintenance of buildings. An example of this is the company Thyssenkrupp which has equipped “its elevator repair engineers with HoloLens so they can see schematics inside the display” (Financial Times).
But where the technology has the ability to benefit humanity by making work safer and more efficient, under a global economic system that puts profit first, its application will not always be for the greater good:
Microsoft recently agreed to a $479m deal with the US military to develop a platform for use by soldiers in which 100k headsets will be used to “increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide and engage before the enemy” in a government explanation of the program
(https://www.bloomberg.com/news/).
The deal, made without the democratic agreement of Microsoft employees, prompted a negative reaction from more than 50 staff who publicly demanded that the company back out of the agreement: The engineers who have worked on the technology have essentially lost the ability to make decisions about what they work on while also set to be implicated in further US imperialism and war violence in which AR will effectively be used as a weapon.
This is not the first time that complaint has emerged within the technology sector recently; there has been “a growing labour movement in the US technology industry” in the past couple of years involving engineers and staff of large companies like Google, Salesforce, and Amazon who are increasingly speaking out about working conditions and how their products are used. https://www.theguardian.com/)
Mass unionisation and planned strike action by tech workers to demand change is likely the most effective way to tackle these issues in the short-term; but ultimately, under a capitalist system growing more chaotic, uncertain, and unstable each passing day, the weaponising of technology will be a reoccurring symptom. In short: where technology can be used; it will be used, regardless of morality.
It is the system itself that must be changed.
February 28, 2019
