Summary points
“BIMS registers every refugee life event: from marriage, to education, to death. More than 90 percent of Syrians residing in Za’tari have been forcibly registered into the system as a precondition for receiving aid.
“The involvement of tech companies and their products in state-led and international humanitarian work raises serious concerns about how their profit motive might compromise humanitarian principles. In particular, the absence of strong data protection laws renders data a profitable commodity to be bought and sold.
“Knowledge about emergencies and those affected by them is no longer being produced in context but rather through machines and artificial intelligence that dictate how humanitarians should intervene in crisis situations.
“There are good reasons to believe that the Herberts of the humanitarian world will save lives and protect humanitarian workers in dangerous situations. But they also represent a new form of robotic intermediation that threatens to render life-and-death decisions, like who gets food and who does not, up to machine learning. Although humanitarian dilemmas about how to deliver aid and to whom have always existed, humanitarian robots change these calculations and potentially absolve humanitarian actors of the ethical considerations required to meet people’s needs in moments of emergency.
“Moreover, these technologies are mirror images of those deployed in contemporary warfare—responsible for creating some of today’s most devastating humanitarian crises.” A recent example, Israel's use of drones.
“Humanitarian technophilia is rationalized as facilitating better forms of intermediation to meet people’s needs. But these rationalizations mask a complex system of power oriented toward data extraction and commodification.”
The data-driven future of refugee responses
Related
Comments