The world is changing at lightspeed as technology takes us from analog to digital, from wetware (read: your brain) to software, from natural to super-biological. Change has always been the one constant, but we’ve never experienced exponential change like we’re now experiencing, at such a pace, and on so many fronts. In every field exposed to technology — from energy, to healthcare, to transportation, and many others, we’re seeing major alterations in our experience of life like never before.
As consumers, we’ve been happy, for the most part, to go along for the ride. But as a society, we need to pay much more attention to where this road is leading.
People worldwide now enjoy ubiquitous connectivity from smartphones. They have access to nearly all the world’s information and a growing list of services with a swipe of the finger. It’s addictive. A recent study found that we humans touch our phones an average of 2,617 times a day.
The latest in voice-activated personal assistants are taking on chores from firing up a playlist to securing the home. Yet arecent report reveals that people now depend on their system for knowledge, advice — and even emotional support.
As new technology rolls out every day, it’s imperative that we play a more active role in managing it. We, as consumers, need to step in and ensure that the benefits outweigh the risks.
In assessing whether new technologies can ultimately add value to society, consider these three important questions:
- Does it have the potential to benefit everyone equally?The top 1 percent shouldn’t be the only ones to reap the rewards of new technology. Conveniences and access to knowledge will have more impact if they serve all of society and address antiquated systems.
Take online education. Today, no one is totally satisfied with our country’s education system. We continue to treat education as an industrial good, served up in a one-size-fits-all box. The promise of online education hasn’t yet lived up to the hype — mostly because the people taking advantage of it are those who need it the least (upper-middle-class professionals). That may soon change. New technologies will allow more evenly distributed high-speed Internet connection and provide connected learning through digitization and personalization that promises to radically improve the learning process. With the help of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and avatars, students will largely be able to teach themselves, learning what they specifically need in the way they learn best.
Teachers will serve as coaches and will no longer be burdened with preparing lesson plans and administrative tasks. Education technology has the potential to quickly spread down the economic pyramid, providing access to a top-notch education to all.
- What are the risks and what are the rewards?Let’s consider the growing field of telemedicine. It may help us prevent and control lifestyle diseases, such as diabetes and cardiovascular illness. Patients can self-administer regular tests in the comfort of their homes and upload data to shared servers and a smartly designed user interface then provides their personal results. This technology has the potential to dramatically increase the quality and lower the cost of healthcare, for all. But few limits are placed on how this data is used in its aggregate and where it can be shared.
Another risk in telemedicine is that consumers may receive information they don’t fully understand. Without doctors serving as a filter to interpret the information and present it in a comprehensive way, they could misinterpret the data and make poor decisions.
- Does the technology promote autonomy?The driverless car presents a perfect metaphor for our anxiety over where technology is headed. It challenges many of our assumptions about human superiority to machines.
Driving requires judgment and adaptation to extremely variable conditions. But as self-driving cars enter the mainstream, already logging millions of miles on the roads, they’ve caused one fatal accident to date (a driver died while driving a Tesla in auto-pilot mode). Conversely, human error has been determined to cause 92.6 percent of car accidents.
Within the coming decade, we’ll soon have access to fleets of driverless cars, and the world as we know it will change drastically. From time savings to cost savings to safety to infrastructure, the net result could be a massive increase in our autonomy. These gains must be weighed against devastating losses of employment reaching vastly across the channels of the transportation sector. Society must find ways to soften the blow.
