Is Technology Making You Feel Less Human?
Over the last couple of years I’ve been a big fan of Tristan Harris’ work in his Time Well Spent movement over in California. They’ve been lobbying the big tech companies to ask them to design their apps so they are more time giving than time sucking.
And it looks like companies like Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Google etc are starting to take notice. We’ve seen “Screentime” appear on Apple devices, Grayscale (not the Game of Thrones type!) modes on Android, along with some minor changes by Facebook and YouTube.
For Tristan and his team and followers to raise their game further they’ve had a rebrand and a launch event which I watched yesterday evening.
They gathered 300 key people, some from big tech companies in an auditorium in San Francisco for the launch. They called it Humane: A New Agenda for Tech. The presentation lasted just over an hour, and here are some of my key takeaways from it.
What is the tech doing to us?
The used a great example of Origami to explain what’s happening. Saying that you can only fold us humans a certain amount of ways, and if the technology doesn’t fold us the way we should go, it hurts.
Tech takes the things about us that are most brilliant, and makes us better….or so it should. They used an example of a musical instrument, and how playing this “tech” makes us better humans
Social media is playing with people’s cognitive biases. We get rewarded for looking different from who we actually are. This might be a Facebook Like or a snapchat photo. This in turn overwhelms who we actually are.
Apps can tilt you from “Calm” to “Crazy town", and it’s then hard to tilt yourself back again. They used a YouTube example where if you started watching 911 videos, the recommendations would eventually lead you to conspiracy theory videos. Another example was dieting videos leading you to anorexia videos. The good news is YouTube have started to dial this down.
Are we people or machines?
They are calling this new economy the Extractive Attention Economy. The machines are being upgraded but we are downgrading humanity. Tech companies were just hijacking people’s minds but now are completely overpowering human nature.
After the event I was listening to my new record by U2 which had a live track on it where they overlaid the speech by Charlie Chaplin in the film The Great Dictator. I thought the following bit of the speech was quite fitting to what I had just watched….
“Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts!”
To find out for about the Center for Humane Technology, check out their website at https://humanetech.com