The Dangers of Technology: or, how to buck up and cope

One of the most important questions of our time is this: how are we, as a species, going to cope with the technology we create?

There is an article on the Wall Street Journal website that wrestles with some of the ramifications of that question. It’s titled ‘Are Smart Gadgets Making Us Dumb?’ and it’s dumb.

Actually, I take that back. It’s not entirely dumb in that it raises very valid questions about the implications of technology becoming increasingly ‘smart’. Examples abound: the HapiFork rumbles when you are eating too many bites per minute (no, really), the BinCam takes a shot of the trash you put in and tries to motivate people to be smarter about their trash choices, WiThings is a scale that tweets our weight. So on, and so forth. Yeah, they are profoundly stupid. I agree with that.

But the author’s central tenets:

That social engineering is being disguised as product engineering (shaming people into recycling via Twittering scales and bins)

That ‘intellectual poverty’ awaits us in a ‘smart world’

Are ones I strongly disagree with.

It’s true, technology that attempts to supplant our critical thinking process fundamentally mis-understands how technology is best applied: to remove tasks that do not involve critical thinking on our parts, so that we can get to that faster. Put another way, it exists to reduce the amount of information and increase the amount of data; reduce the amount of labor on a task and increase productivity.

Products like the HapiFork come from a very good intent (lets make people more aware of their diets!) but misses the mark by assuming that we respond well to another buzzing thing applying guilt to something we already feel guilty about. We don’t respond. We stop using the fork.

And that’s just it. Most articles of this nature point breathlessly to incredibly futuristic devices (the modern kitchen will tell you ingredients don’t go well together! Noooooooo.) but betray their complete lack of understanding about how humans and technology interact by forgetting that historically no one wants products like that. Geeks constantly try to make them, sure, and the market promptly rejects them. Remember Clippy the paper clip? Dustbin. Security alerts in browsers? Useless. How about grammar check, talking scales, and so on? Huh. Heck, how many of us pay attention to the check engine light? Engineers and entrepreneurs around the world make products based on the latest fad, and the current one is the assumption that somehow if it’s social, it’s awesome. Of course, it’s not, and really, social is the .com boom of the 90’s re-lived all over again.

So while it’s true those products are useless, they are also somewhat trivial and inconsequential. A larger problem is that extrapolating from that, the author goes on to produce such wisdoms such as:

“Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn’t mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.

With “smart” technology in the ascendant, it will be hard to resist the allure of a frictionless, problem-free future. When Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, says that “people will spend less time trying to get technology to work…because it will just be seamless,” he is not wrong: This is the future we’re headed toward. But not all of us will want to go there.”

This is particularly problematic thinking. On the one hand, because it makes a bizarre assumption that we as a human race will ever be able to produce a ‘frictionless’ society or that we shall suddenly stop making mistakes and be problem free. First… really? My, that is some strong crack you have there. Secondly, that kind of thinking, taken to it’s logical conclusion takes you down to:

“It’s great when the things around us run smoothly, but it’s even better when they don’t do so by default.”

YES. Because the answer to our problems is PROBLEMS. Why didn’t I see that particular solution before?

To be fair, what I believe he’s trying to say is that a life of ease is not necessarily what is best for us. In a society where wealth has made technology freely available, where we have more choice than ever before, and an abundance of peace and resources, why aren’t we happier?

That is a worthwhile question. For all of our successes, and for all the abundance of computing technology available to the average human being, can we definitively point to ourselves being happier than societies that live without our amenities and advances, or perhaps even more tellingly, can we say we are happier than we were a generation, or two generations ago? Certainly, there’s evidence to suggest otherwise; the United States has what is a very high depression rate relative to others, and there are even interesting studies such as this, which equate higher suicide rates in the states and countries that report themselves as happiest.

How exactly you measure happiness is, of course, a pretty good question too but even outside of that it’s a small jump for many people to equate ‘wealth’ and ‘success’ with an abundance of technology and point out that it doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference.

For myself, I would certainly argue that hardship can indeed be very good for us. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that hard work, the process of being life making us think and act for ourselves on critical matters, is invaluable to the development of a healthy human being. This isn’t a wild thought – there is plenty of research to back these things up.

But lets say all this is true. What, exactly, are we to do with this information? The author says ‘not all want to go towards the future laid out before us.’ Okay then, which future do you want?

There aren’t very many solutions to the ‘technology can be bad for us’ dilemma – which, by the way, we are inferring from the ‘we need hardship’ argument that is being made. You can strip technology out of your life, or the life of society, or your community, or whatever permutation your vision takes you to, sure. I wouldn’t really argue against that path, honestly. Living in a cabin in the woods can be pretty great, I can vouch for it. Of course, if you’re using an axe you’re using technology, just technology you are very, very used to. We won’t even get into how advanced having a book or two might be. There was a time when people were getting as worked up over that (or more) as they were over Facebook.

But how do you have that axe? Where did that steel come from? How do you come to live in a country or area where roving bands of Vikings don’t swoop down and pillage your utopian farm? And if your child is bleeding out on the ground from an accident, would you like a hospital with medicine to take him to, or say, a helicopter to medivac them out? What price would you put on technology in that moment.

There, you see, is the proverbial rub. The world we live in that lets us have esoteric arguments about technology exists thanks to technology. Precious few of us would actually be willing to follow through with the full ramifications stripping technology from society, and if we are, it will involve some difficult choices. You don’t have to know Microsoft Word or basic computing to be happy, but your employability opportunities shrink profoundly. So you either become happy with a very specific set of lifestyles, or you aren’t actually opting for the no tech path. And let me tell you, if you want to choose the no tech path and are wringing your hands about it on Facebook, then in the wise words of the internet You Are Doing It Wrong.

This brings us to scenario two, The Luddites Nightmare:

Accept responsibility for the technology you have in your life.

Look, if you aren’t going to strip technology out of you’re life, and if society isn’t going to (spoiler alert: it’s not), then we are left being cursed with this terrible life of ease that geniuses warn us of on the Wall Street Journal. If that is our greatest challenge, if we live in times when we must challenge ourselves instead of waiting for random chance or fate to do it, then we need to accept that challenge instead of avoiding it. If technology is disempowering you, it’s because you are capitulating. If looking up answers on wikipedia takes the mystery out of life, I submit that you have a frightful lack of inquisitiveness. If you are annoyed by your phone beeping too much, you are perhaps too lazy to find out how to stop it. As human beings and as a society, it is our responsibility to take the technology we have and own it, and any discussion about our lack of freedom in response to an ‘intelligent’ trashcan indicates you’re simply looking for a way to avoid that.

Remember our earlier conversation about living that life in the cabin? In actuality, that isn’t so much a choice to eliminate technology as a choice to simplify. What that means is that ultimately, the answer to the dilemma our society faces is we need to find balance between using technology and keeping our lives simple so that we can enjoy them. In a delightful and perverse twist, that’s actually what technology is supposed to be for. An axe is there to expedite your fuel preparation (among other things) so you can move on to other things. Wikipedia is there to tell you how to sharpen the axe, care for the axe, and how to best store the wood so you know, you don’t have to spend years figuring it out by trial and error.

And that is my fundamental problem with that and similar articles. Rather than finding solutions to the problems we’ve imposed on ourselves – Too much tweeting! Too stressed out! Computers are complicated! Everything is buzzing! I’m too distracted! – they simply suggest we should be concerned about the inevitable advances that The Scientists are bringing our way. In the end, this line of thought takes away choice, and increase our perception of powerlessness.

The author might argue that by raising awareness, he’s encouraging better choices. But you know, at this point, we have an awful lot of awareness. I know very few people are who aren’t frustrated by their gadgetry every day, and I don’t blame them. What we, as a society, have a dearth of is conversation or research about fundamental ways we should be using computing tools in our life to

A) Simplify our days
B) Increase our free time
C) Utilize that free time in ways we will be happy about in the long run.

There’s a fair bit of conversation about the latter, but most of the first two are mostly reduced to – use technology less!

It’s counterproductive in the worst way.

I believe our conversation should be about how no, your device does not control you. You have total control over it, and over your life. I believe that if there are areas in your life that are frustrating to you, you should actively seek help in coping with it, whether it’s by relegating the task or learning the necessary skills yourself. I believe that if we, as a society, acknowledge we are blessed with the potential for one of the most ‘friction free’ societies in human history, then this is an opportunity to come together and innovate what to do now.