THere is a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology needs to be expensive, energy consumptive and difficult to engineer. That is because we are encouraged to believe that modern technology is regardless of bombs that billion -billion claims it, whether the commercial spacecraft or the endless iterations of generative AI tools.
As Canadian technology and engineer Ursula Franklin said, technology fantasies will have it that change is always “driven by investment, shiny, born in the lab, experiment, exciting”. But more often than not, in the real world, it is “driven by need, festive, in location, iterative, practical, meaningless”. The real technologies of today’s leadership are truly the benefit systems I want to call “frugal tech”, and they have lived not by billions -billions of billions but by people who make less. They do not impose top-down “solutions” that seem to be complicated by our lives while making some people rich. It turns out that truly modern technology can really free people.
Last month on Berlin’s hippy once hippy, which is now incorporated re: public conference, for example, I have identified researchers from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), which uses technologies such as software-specified radios despite limited bandwidth, power, hardware and communication infrastructure. These technologies are the basis of local community networks that provide 2.5 billion people around the world who lack access to the internet. In Niger Delta, suffering from toxic levels of air pollution from its oil industry, the APC places connections and disposesing cheap sensors that monitor the environment. They play an important role in how locals can advise children when to stay inside and which areas to avoid playing. This infrastructure is managed for and the municipality, is serving a pressing demand and can be installed and constructed by the people who put it. Unlike, say, chatgpt or a blue source of rocket space.
In fact, while Generative AI is praised as a minute technology, iterations such as Dall-E 3, Google Gemini and GPT are not related to those who do not have enough internet bandwidth to use them. The new digital division is the gap between the top end of the global population-with access to these intensive power technologies-and those underneath, that access to the Internet, or lack of, remains static. That is why some of the most intelligent thoughts today work on how to manage trade-offs between Internet and bandwidth ranges, and if there are obstacles in the way such as mountains and leaves.
The fact is that good changes often involve lobbying for good. So while Big Tech poured the way -millions of watering at the EU AI Act, great tech lobbies for better Internet provisions for everyone. Policy and change come together, which means the consequences of good technology have exceeded the technology itself, reaching the management and well -being of society.
In Re: The public’s “maker space”, I contacted DIY solar-powered sensors that could be built using a Raspberry Pi computer and off-the-shelf components such as moisture sensors. I lost my partner, an engineer by training, in a microscope designed by the OpenFlexure project made from the 3D -printed materials. Microscopes are essential for diagnosing infections but can cost millions of pounds, making them completely inaccessible for many people around the world. This one is lightweight, costs next to nothing and open resources, which means anyone can reproduce design by 3D printing parts and cobbling them with the purchased motor and circuit boards. It’s a bit like a cheap IKEA wardrobe, except for all the bits you need to gather it can be purchased cheaply from a local electronics store. Manufacturers from Ghana and Wales to Chile and Australia all use openflexure designs to give people everywhere accessing low-resource microscopy. We can imagine that Generative AI has attacked all the corners of our lives, but it cannot be more from the truth. What is really practical and related to the majority are cheap technologies that solve daily business and social problems.
While most of what we consider to be “hi-tech” is closed behind the ownership algorithms, open-source technology largely requires community involvement. This can be greatly empowering, and it can improve public confidence: difficult (and unfamiliar) to give yourself a technology that will not tell you how it works, especially if only predefined settings allow for small “privacy approach”. As I ask my students, if you can build an AI in your own home, and program it to demonstrate your values and prioritize your safety, can’t you trust it? Well, the idea isn’t too pointless – it just feels impossible because big tech companies want us to think about it.
What is the most important thing about economical change is not only that its technologies are amazing, but it can really promote systematic change by showing people that tech can develop locally, and not just import from the Silicon Valley. When farmers Chris Conder dug his own fibreoptic cables in his owner in Lancashire, he set “to prove that ordinary people can do this … it’s not rocket science”. By showing that the quick Internet can be connected to the fiber-optic cable, a digger and the desire to just go ahead and do so, he has released an organization called B4RN, which promotes community fiber partnership.
Tech Bros may want you to believe that there is no point in doing something new unless it is difficult, inaccessible and exclusive. But modern technology is about collaboration as long as the competition. For many people around the world, the value of a product is not in a high heavenly appreciation, or in this it is impossible to separate (such as irresponsible iPhones). Often, the wisest technologies are those who distance a problem up to the bread and butter components to spread a solution to the mass.
So, as modern individuals and communities around the world quietly continue to improve their lives and those around them, the time left us have stopped being a passive recipient of technology, and begins to ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live and how it is created. Should the setting for change be £ 1bn-plus buildings such as Google’s New London offices at King’s Cross, located in countries that can afford abdominal eye training costs and calculating power requirements? Or can we avoid modernization from within our communities – or households?
