On 22 October 2019 the BBC brought its 100 Women list to a live event in New Delhi. I spoke about technology in the criminal justice system, and my argument was that India should not wait for someone else’s tools: it needs to build its own, to assist judges and to help people implicated in false cases get their convictions reversed. That is what we did in Massachusetts with Data for Justice, and none of it required permission from anyone abroad.

The warning I left there is the one I keep repeating. There is still time to use data and technology to redistribute power among the people who have been historically forgotten. If we do not do it now, data and technology will only automate the status quo, with all the biases and inequalities already in it.