When Henrietta Lacks was being treated for terminal cancer in 1951, neither she, nor her family who still struggle to make a living today, could imagine that the “HeLa” cells would become one of the most important tools in medicine.¹ 
Just how much control do we have over our bodies, our lives, and our stories? As a lifelong feminist, I had thought that all we needed to do was to shift the androcentric patriarchal worldview from its center, and then surely there’d be room for women.
It’s time to start a post-Copernican revolution, a social shift from “Reference Man” to “Reference Many.” For millennia, most worldviews have placed us, humans, at the center of the universe. And so Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is positioned at the center of the universe, standing with arms stretching out into the orbits of the planets. The center of the universe was not just the Earth, it was the umbilicus of a man, according to Da Vinci’s canonical mathematical proof.² And when the Copernican revolution downgraded Earth to a supporting role, man’s starring role was never questioned, nor was the supporting role of women.
Toffler’s Future Shock is itself a testament to “Reference Man,” never questioning its godlike narrative voice or how every man, woman, and child described behaved exactly like the single “Reference Man.” “Reference Man” is also a term for the standard for acceptable radiation exposure, as determined by measuring the effects on a healthy young Caucasian male.³ Obviously, children, women, small men, the elderly, and the ill would all be affected by a much smaller dose of radiation than that set by the Reference Man standard.
This deceptive Reference Man can be dangerous. In 2011, Chernobyl was declared a tourist destination on the basis of the seeming health of the nearby plant and animal populations.⁴ Adults also seemed to be fine. But children in the area were suffering from increased occurrences of cancer, almost certainly from early environmental radiation exposure.⁵
There are many more examples of harm being done to individuals, or entire populations, through our use of a single Reference Man standard. New drugs are only tested on men or male research animals because females have menstrual cycles, which make it harder to assess the impacts of drugs or treatments.⁶ Now we are discovering that many compounds effective on men have no effect, or worse, a very different effect on women, or ethnicities outside the test specifications. For example, physicians are being retrained in identifying heart attacks in women of all races because the symptoms are so different from the ones taught. And there is currently no answer as to why so many black American women die or have serious complications during pregnancy, including famous, healthy, and wealthy women like Beyonce and Serena Williams.
Eight out of 10 drugs removed from the market due to problems had negative impacts on women, impacts that had no opportunity to show in lab testing.⁷ Clearly women are not just small men because the physical construction of bodies is different on many levels. Women have a higher body fat percentage, and so drugs that metabolize via fat vs. water have very different gendered effects. Twenty-one years after Ambien was approved for sale, the FDA has given it a black flag warning and halved the recommended dosage. Why? Marketed as a safe mild sleep aid, Ambien has turned out to be very differently absorbed in the female body⁸, causing women to be affected more strongly and for a longer period of time than expected.
In the fields of the industrial design of products, size is still the primary criterion of difference, and even then we design only one size to fit all. The automobile safety belt, the airbag, and the crash test dummy have played huge roles in improving the safety of automobiles, at least for young Caucasian men. Their failure to protect women, children, and the elderly has been well known since the 1970s, but only now has US regulation required a second crash test dummy—a Reference Female—to be used in automotive testing. And for all women drivers, be warned: The female crash test dummy is only used in the passenger seat in the US.⁹
Technologies designed to protect large men are worse than ineffective on other groups. They can be a cause of danger, death, or injury, as was found in studies on the use of seatbelt and airbags. Short drivers, primarily women, are significantly more likely to die or be seriously injured in otherwise minor accidents due to the airbag, unless they use pedal extenders or other mechanisms to move them into the “typical” safety tested driving position.¹⁰
So technology may save us, but the impact is distributed unequally. But this is not a plea to put the genie back in the bottle. While technology creates new problems, it also creates extra value in the world, leading us to the most affluent and peaceful era that human civilization has ever experienced. Toffler’s fear of the rate of change 50 years ago seems no more than a blip when looked at through the scope of centuries.
Through such a magnificent lens, the call to move from Reference Man to Reference Many seems timely and eminently achievable. We are now in the era of Big Data and the Quantified Self. We are tracking all of our measurements in exacting detail. Or at least the early tech adopters are, and thereby are the people setting the reference standards for the rest of humanity. What gives a small few of us the right, right now, to define the definition of humanity? Or the Reference Many, as I prefer to construct it?
Society-changing decisions are already being made on the strength of our new modes of data collection and analysis, deep learning, and other algorithmic tools. And already, there are signs that we are failing to protect our neurodiversity, to avoid ethnic and gendered stereotyping. The naive idea that technology will always help us rapidly hits the crash test of reality.¹¹
Right now, deep learning is leading to algorithmic bias on top of human bias, creating a feedback loop that continues the process.¹² Then we embody that bias in our robots or smart devices, amplifying the effect. As we continue the “Cambrian Explosion” in robotics that Dr. Gill Pratt described when he led the DARPA Robotics Challenge¹³, we embed sensor technology and the ability to think and take action into every new device in our lives. Robots are everywhere. And our new robot overlords need no weapons! We happily hand over access and control of our lives.
But the largest problem we face right now is that the inherent nature of our new technologies displaces the individual as the unit of value in society. We often think that Moore’s Law, i.e., the number of transistors on a chip doubling every 18 months, is the basis of our technological society’s exponential growth. The basis is in fact Metcalfe’s Law.¹⁴
Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of network users. Can you imagine a single telephone or fax machine? But the increase of value is not linear, it’s exponential. As individual nodes we are nowhere near as important as when we are connected or aggregated with others.
Our identity is inextricably linked to our computing technologies. In the 1880s, the US Census Bureau was so overwhelmed by population data that they held a competition to find a machine or process that could speed up data collection and tabulation. Herman Hollerith’s punch card tabulator was so successful that versions of it were used at the Census Bureau until replaced by computers in the 1950s.¹⁵ Ironically, they were replaced by the computers that Hollerith’s tabulator company went on to build. In 1924, Hollerith’s Tabulator Company was renamed International Business Machines, or IBM.
Now that most of us are online, collecting data from people has become even easier. It’s estimated that there’ll be 40 zettabytes of data in the world by 2020. That’s 40 trillion gigabytes of data, and the amount of data in the world is doubling each year. In a 2013 study, IBM found that 90% of the world’s data had been created in the preceding two years.¹⁶ And this data is generating economic value. For example, there are 2.7 billion active Facebook users in 2019, and Facebook is worth about $550 billion, with an actual $8 billion annual profit from selling online advertising.
All of the global top 10 companies are capitalizing on the data they collect from our online interactions.¹⁷ Even Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway, who have extensive physical goods in their portfolios or processes, make profit from the ways in which they digitally aggregate supply and demand. Our aggregation as a society only increases as we demand more individualization and personalization.
Capitalism has evolved significantly over history. Initially the unit of value was taken from the natural environment as we bought or traded land and resources. Then we traded the improvements that labor made to land or resources. The introduction of machinery multiplied the amount of value that the same amount of labor produced. But it’s a mistake to assume increasing the competency of machines just increases the value created in conjunction with labor. For the first time, the technology alone is responsible for adding value.
The era of information capitalism started with the spreadsheet, which did the work of a calculator, but was also able to add new value by sorting and filtering data. These days very few spreadsheets simply calculate; therefore, information capitalism is qualitatively different from industrial capitalism. And now we’ve entered a new era, of surveillance capitalism, as described by business philosopher Shoshanna Zuboff.¹⁸ Today, the unit of value isn’t simply data, it’s the algorithm or the prediction. It’s the information that is created by the many, many parties who have access to our data.
The old wives’ warning is to be careful of what you wish for. We used to fear the social control that mass media had over our society, and the internet was seen as a way to hand control over our communications back to the individual, free from state or corporate control. In hindsight, mass media was far less dangerous due to its very public nature. In the public arena, facts could be checked and some ground truths existed. Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we have realized how vulnerable our social institutions are. Our society is built on the idea of public accountability, but in this era of surveillance capitalism, algorithms steer our information intake, based on our personalized profiles, as determined by invisible entities.¹⁹ Anonymity and privacy are, it turns out, vastly different.
“Because if we allow computation to substitute for politics, and we allow statistics to substitute for citizens, and we allow populations to substitute for societies, we are destroying democracy as we know it. And if we destroy democracy, all we are left with is this sort of computational governance, which is a new form of absolutism,” from Shoshana Zuboff IV in NYMAG Intelligencer²⁰
All smart technologies need sensors to operate, whether it’s a coffee maker or a car, an industrial robot or a smart home assistant. This is the first characteristic of our new lives under surveillance capitalism. And where people have established conventions as to what is and isn’t public, to a device there is no such distinction. Alexa is always listening; otherwise it couldn’t hear the wake word. A Tesla is always recording its surroundings with cameras, or it wouldn’t be able to navigate. And many of these devices have sensors that allow them to detect things that we consider private, such as the Wi-Fi activity of houses from the street.
In 2010, Google was caught using StreetView mapping cars to extract information about household and public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries in what was dubbed “the single greatest breach in the history of privacy,” according to Australia’s then Minister for Communications.²¹ That little announcement has since been drowned out in a flood of data and privacy breaches both accidental and deliberate.
Meanwhile, those of us with an interest in family history have probably used a DNA family tree service. Because we can’t imagine what other use can be made from our DNA, we happily sign away all commercial rights to it. I challenge you to read the terms and conditions pages!
Technology is never neutral.²² The very structure of a technology enables some actions more than others, and creates different value propositions. In our technologically mediated society, our individuality is now only valuable when it is connected. And the more connected, the more exponentially valuable our very individuality becomes. And yet, we have less and less power.
In a recent debate about the ethics of AI and robotics in society, Yuval Harari and Fei-Fei Li called on us to start developing technologies that protect and empower the individual, that are owned by the individual, and that prioritize the individual in the context of the good for society.²³ But the individual is no longer the unit of value in today’s society. What is valuable is the data, the algorithm, or the prediction.
In Future Shock, Toffler called for a diversity of data with which to educate the new humans with “the future in their bones,”²⁴ and those new humans are our Reference Many, whose very bones and bits, biological differences, online biases and actions, are already powering the future.
We are undergoing a social change as great as the Copernican revolution, only Reference Man is no longer the umbilical center of our universe. In giving birth to Reference Many, we have cut the cord. Our universe is now a multiplicity of stars. As Reference Many, and those profiting from Reference Many, it is our responsibility to ensure that our ecosystem has sufficient diversity to remain healthy. My hope is that the value of our diversity will at last finally be valued.
Andra Keay is the managing director of Silicon Valley Robotics, the nonprofit industry group supporting innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies. Andra is also founder of the Robot Launch global startup competition, Robot Garden maker space, and Women in Robotics, and is a mentor, investor, and advisor to startups, accelerators, and think tanks, with a strong interest in commercializing socially positive robotics and AI.
1. Skloot, Rebecca. 2011. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. London: Pan Books.
2. Isaacson, Walter. 2018. Leonardo Da Vinci. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.
3. “NRC: Glossary -- Reference Man.” 2019. Nrc.Gov. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/reference-man.html.
4. “Chernobyl | Chernobyl Accident | Chernobyl Disaster - World Nuclear Association.” 2019. World-Nuclear.Org. http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-accident.aspx.
5. “Health Effects Of The Chernobyl Accident: An Overview.” 2019. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/backgrounder/en/.
6. Colville, Deb. 2019. “Medicine’s Gender Revolution: How Women Stopped Being Treated As ‘Small Men.’” The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/medicines-gender-revolution-how-women-stopped-being-treated-as-small-men-77171.
7. Heinrich, Janet. 2001. “Drug Safety: Most Drugs Withdrawn In Recent Years Had Greater Health Risks For Women.” Gao.Gov. https://www.gao.gov/new.items/d01286r.pdf.
8. Rabin, Roni. 2013. “The Drug-Dose Gender Gap.” Well. https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/the-drug-dose-gender-gap/.
9. Shaver, Katherine. 2012. “Female Dummy Makes Her Mark On Male-Dominated Crash Tests.” The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/female-dummy-makes-her-mark-on-male-dominated-crash-tests/2012/03/07/gIQANBLjaS_story.html
10. Bose, D; Segui-Gomez, M; Crandall, JR. (2011) Vulnerability of Female Drivers Involved in Motor Vehicle Crashes: an Analysis of Us Population at Risk. American Journal of Public Health, 101(12): 2368-2373.
11. boyd, danah and Crawford, Kate, Six Provocations for Big Data (September 21, 2011). A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society, September 2011.
12. O’Neil, Cathy. 2017. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Great Britain: Penguin Books.
13. Pratt, Gill A. 2015. “Is a Cambrian Explosion Coming for Robotics?” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29 (3): 51-60.
14. Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian (1999). Information Rules. Harvard Business Press. p 184.
15. Gauthier, Jason. 2008. “The Hollerith Machine - History - U.S. Census Bureau.” Census.Gov. https://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/
16. Jacobson, Ralph. 2013. “2.5 Quintillion Bytes Of Data Created Every Day. How Does CPG & Retail Manage It?” IBM Consumer Products Industry Blog. https://www.ibm.com/blogs/insights-on-business/consumer-products/2-5-quintillion-bytes-of-data-created-every-day-how-does-cpg-retail-manage-it/.
17. “Biggest Companies In The World 2018 | Statista.” 2019. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263264/top-companies-in-the-world-by-market-value/.
18. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The age of surveillance capitalism the fight for the future at the new frontier of power. New York: Public Affairs.
19. “The Persuasion Machine of Silicon Valley.” CBC News. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and British Broadcasting Corporation. 28 March 2018.
20. Kulwin, Noah. 2019. “Shoshana Zuboff Talks Surveillance Capitalism’s Threat To Democracy.” Intelligencer. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/shoshana-zuboff-q-and-a-the-age-of-surveillance-capital.html.
21. Davies, Caroline. 2010. “Google Faces More Trouble Over Wi-Fi Data Collection.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/06/google-privacy-data-collection-street-view.
22. Winner, Langdon. 1986. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” In The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, edited by Langdon Winner, 19-39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
23. “Will AI Enhance Or Hack Humanity? - Fei-Fei Li & Yuval Noah Harari In Conversation With Nicholas Thompson.” 2019. WIRED Videos. https://video.wired.com/watch/will-artificial-intelligence-enhance-of-hack-humanity.
24. Snow, Charles Percy (2001) [1959]. The Two Cultures. London: Cambridge University Press. p 3.