Is Technology Moving too fast for Humanity?
Humans have lived with and adopted technologies for nearly 4 million years. But it isn’t until the last half century that the pace of technology development sped up so significantly. We often hear about how long it took for radio, then television and then computers to reach mass acceptability by society. As digital technologies such as Big Data analytics, Artificial Intelligence and mobile devices came into being, we’ve seen rapid development of all kinds of other technologies.
A technology comes into being when humans find a way to harness a phenomenon, such as the steam engine harnessing energy from wood and then coal. The combustion engine harnessing the energy from oil and the airplane harnessing lift and thrust. Once a technology comes into being, advances are made by combining existing technologies in new ways. The smartphone is a prime example. It is a combination of multiple technologies such as GPS, cellular, cameras, software, chips etc. Artificial Intelligence is an umbrella term for multiple technologies such as Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. The more we combine technologies, the more they advance.
Consumers have adopted smartphones into their daily lives and even into our cultures. Research has shown that rarely is a smartphone more than 3 feet from our body. Admittedly, I often forget where I put mine in my house and so my most used feature on my Apple Watch is to find my phone.
We are combining technologies across all industries and aspects of society today, at an increasingly rapid pace. New materials such as medical devices, material advances in airplane wings, hybrid battery and combustion engines. But it may well be digital technologies that are having the most significant impact on our global cultures and societies. The pace of change driven by these technologies has become so fast that in different ways, we are asking if technology is moving too fast for humans to keep up.
One of the hottest topics in management and leadership in business is change management. Many digital transformations fail because of a lack of change management. Governments are struggling to keep up with the impact of technology on society, human rights and free agency. When is it overt censorship and when is it for the social good? It’s taken a decade or more for people to come to realize just how digital technologies and platforms such as Facebook and Google are using our personal data. Most of us still can’t quite fathom it. Now, the EU brought in GDPR regulations to manage privacy and Canada is set to significantly update its privacy laws. America? Crickets.
There are signs that broader society and consumers are pushing back on adopting emerging technologies. Such is the case with Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). Both technologies offer exciting new opportunities but are struggling to gain any significant market traction with consumers. They’re both finding market opportunities, but in niche cases only.
Cryptocurrencies are another example, along with blockchain, that are struggling to hit mainstream consumer acceptance. The majority of people don’t understand cryptocurrency or blockchain and when humans don’t understand a technology, they don’t adopt it. El Salvador recently made cryptocurrency legal tender, then this week China banned it as a form of legal tender.
Then there’s gene editing technologies such as CRISPR and advances in nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, robotics, drones and on it goes. While we will adopt these technologies, the difference between technologies today and past technologies is that there are a larger number of technologies competing for attention and business adoption all at the same time. Historically, new technologies came along at a slower pace, giving societies and cultures time to adopt them and adapt.
Because we’ve become so good at combining existing technologies to create new solutions to problems and we can communicate globally so fast, it has created a problem for the adoption of new technologies. Essentially, technology overload.
Humans need time to adapt to new technologies. To figure out not just how they fit into our own lives, but our societies and cultures. We’re just at the starting phase with social media tools in terms of fitting them into society and culture. The first decade of social media was exploratory. Now, we are seeing the benefits, but we are also seeing the negatives. Especially with the pandemic. How anti-vaxxers are creating conspiracy theories on the fly, organising to protest at hospitals and acting increasingly selfishly, ignoring the benefits of vaccines not just to themselves, but to society as a whole. Then there’s politics and social media.
Arguably and of course, with only anecdotal evidence, it would seem that technologies are evolving so rapidly today that humans are struggling. How do we and when do we regulate them? To what degree? How do we encourage free speech, while protecting human rights? When does gene editing go too far in terms of medical ethics? Does the individual have a right to determine how companies use their personal data? What does privacy mean in the 21st century? Do employees have a right not to answer emails after work hours?
These are complex questions and there are more. Global systems from supply chains to the rules of order, political ideologies and systems are changing due to the pressures of communications technologies. Monetary systems and the infrastructure of global finances are struggling to understand the implications of digital and cryptocurrencies. Authoritarian regimes like China, Russia and Belarus are heedless of human rights and care nothing about the implications of using robotics and artificial intelligence as weapons. While democracies debate their use, dictatorships like China and Russia press on and we’ve no idea how they’re weaponising these technologies.
Throughout history, whenever humanity has had a breakthrough in communications technologies, conflict on a global or significantly large regional scale, has always broken out. We are marking 25 years of the internet reaching a global scale. Perhaps we are due? Perhaps it will be different than before? At the same time we face the climate crisis. growing income inequality and the rise of populism and authoritarianism along with the last gasp of desperation from far-right conservatism fuelled largely by angry old white men.
There is an ancient and appropriate Chinese saying; “may you live in interesting times.” Indeed, we do. Humans have always co-evolved with technology. How we emerge from this heady time, will be interesting. History shows we always progress in the end. Political systems such as dictatorships may have their time, but they eventually die. They exist only for the egos of the dictator at the time. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are still human, they will eventually be gone, dust to dust….unless they download their brains and rule from cyberspace? There’s a comforting thought to close on. Thank-you for indulging me.
