Number one concern as it relates to technology

In our Management Information Systems course, we were posed with a number of prompts. My favorite one was "What is your number one concern as it relates to technology? And why?" Aside from any unintended consequence, generally speaking, the top two that come to mind were:

  1. User manipulation through data and algorithms
  2. Mental health or technology addiction

What gets me the most concerned about technology today is how data is being tracked and used to manipulate us through the use of algorithms. This does include manipulation at a micro-level but also  a macro- or systemic level. I point to the many examples laid out in the book Weapons of Math Destruction where algorithms are already having impact on the information we are presented with to who gets into which school. Algorithms make it convenient to create a justification around a decision, but often such models (as all models) are oversimplified or simply riddled with untested assumptions. Worst yet, and this is the overall issue with data and in business today, such algorithms are often proprietary and therfore never disclosed.

I would also like to make honorable mention of mental health or technology addiction. The well-being of people is perhaps the largest issues. What is fascinating is how we misjudged how this would play out. At the time the iPhone was introduced, and thereafter, many believed these devices would bring value to only those wealthy enough to own such a device and those economically disadvantaged people, especially children, would grow up without access to these enabling technologies. In fact, what we have seen is heavy adoption aided by lower cost devices, but more importantly such devices and services—like YouTube, Netflix—are used by parents to essentially keep their kids occupied. This unsupervised time is showing to be very dangerous—not to mention things like Momo. But back to the trend, where we thought the wealthy would benefit from kids with access to such techology, what we see is the wealthy actually going the extra mile to keep their kids away from such technology use, reducing their time spent on devices for example. The benefits of wealth isn't in the access to technology, but in the management of it. It will be interesting, and possiblly devastating to see how this plays out over the next couple decades. The initial thought was you didn't exist unless you had an iPhone, but it seems the real luxury is being able to exist in spite of it. (That is not to say lack of access is an issue for certain segments of our society, but it is to say we are seeing this play out differently and while it was thought economically disadvantaged people would be, well, disadvantaged, it may be in an entirely different way.)

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