If you walk through the halls of most tech companies around the world, you'll find huge numbers of engineers, PhDs, and many MBA students as well, but the humanities tend to be underrepresented. In India, if you're looking to get funding for your startup, having an IIT and an IIM grad improves your chances, but a founder with ‘just’ a BA is more a hinderance.
But this isn't just a rant from a humanities student looking to create jobs. By studying the social sciences, and politics, you get a better understanding of human behaviour and of complex systems, and it's exactly this kind of understanding that our technocrats need to imbibe. It wasn't the case in the early days of Silicon Valley, where its problems and solutions seemed self contained. Today though, small decisions from a company like Facebook[1] can alter the course of elections[2], and as the biggest companies work to make ubiquitous artificial intelligences, there's a real risk of creating bigoted machines[3].
Google's had to apologise for its AI labelling black people in photos as gorillas[4], and just recently a soap dispenser was found to not work with black skin[5], because whomever designed it never thought to test it thoroughly enough with various skin tones.
Closer to home, we see this in the Aadhaar[6] rollout in India. Although there are arguments to be made in favour of the system, such as reducing waste, streamlining processes, and simplifying lives, a lot has been said about the potential for misuse, not to mention outright errors in the database, and the haste with which it's being insisted on by banks, telecom companies, and others, goes beyond unseemly....