"Progress" has become a matter of what's possible

(First published in The Dominion Post, July 28.)

Some people fret about the threat posed to humanity by climate change. I fret about the threat posed to humanity by technology.

A couple of weeks ago, I used my smartphone to get directions to a motel that I’d booked in Auckland. I only wanted to know how to get there from Queen Street, but of course my phone interpreted the request literally.

Within moments it had mapped out a route all the way from my home in Masterton. It had plotted every turn along the way, precisely calculated the distance (602.2 km), estimated the travel time (7 hours and 25 minutes) and advised me how to avoid the Manawatu Gorge road closure.

This is very impressive. It’s also a bit scary. When a tiny, cheap phone packs more power than the computer that enabled men to land on the moon, I wonder what the limits might be – or indeed, whether there are any limits at all.

Am I a Luddite? I don’t think so. I depend on technology for my livelihood. But that doesn’t stop me worrying about its potential for bad as well as good.

By good, I mean stuff like having instant access to information and services on a scale and at a speed never before envisioned.

By bad I mean stuff like the Dark Web, the epidemic of internet porn, the exploitation of social media by terrorist groups, the rampant hijacking of personal privacy by digital giants such as Facebook, the rich opportunities created for online fraudsters via scams, hacking and ransomware attacks, the venom spread by malicious Internet trolls and the victimisation of vulnerable kids by text bullies.

And that’s just what we know about. Even more disconcerting is the stuff that hasn’t come to pass yet.

I worry about a world in which we’re at the mercy of algorithms which most of us don’t understand. I worry about a world in which we’re given no choice but to join the technological revolution, whether we want to or not. We are all sucked into its vortex.

Humanity, at least in the developed world, has surrendered its fate to technology whose power is advancing at such speed that it threatens to far outstrip our ability to control it or ensure it’s used wisely.

The digital revolution has placed enormous power in the hands of people who are beyond the reach of outdated accountability mechanisms – people for whom technological advance is often an end in itself, to be pursued with little regard for its effect on society. “Progress” has become a matter of what’s possible rather than what’s good.

At the most everyday level, the digital revolution has adversely affected how we relate to each other. In a park during the school holidays, everywhere I looked I saw young mums whose attention wasn’t on their kids but on their phones.

What, I wondered, could have been on their “devices” that was more important than spending quality time with their kids?

And don’t get me started on the business sector, which has eagerly embraced digital technology as a means of placing barriers between companies and the customers they supposedly serve.

The digital revolution has spawned a new language too. When I read articles about technology and its latest applications, I recognise most of the words, yet the meaning is indecipherable. They might as well be written in Sanskrit.

Does this matter? After all, doctors, scientists and lawyers communicate in their own exclusive jargon. But the difference is that digital technology reaches into virtually every corner of our lives, and will do so increasingly. We need to be able understand it, because how can we control what we don’t understand?

Most of all, I fret at the thought of what might still be coming. In a recent BBC radio documentary, computer scientists talked excitedly about the next great leap forward. It’s called quantum computing and it promises to take us to places we don’t even know about.

You could picture the gleam in these technicians’ eyes as they talked about potential “killer” applications. But they didn’t yet know what purposes quantum computing might be used for. It didn’t seem to matter that the problems it might solve are ones that haven’t yet been thought of.

There’s also talk of something called “the singularity” – the point at which computers will be capable of continual self-improvement; of designing and building machines far cleverer than us.

All this greatly excites the bright-eyed evangelists for the digital revolution, but it scares the hell out of me. 

The new mantra: if it's technologically possible, it must be done

(First published in The Dominion Post, July 8.)

It’s true then. The world really has gone barking mad.

A recent Washington Post article, republished in the Dominion Post, described the writer's habit of watching films and television shows in fast-forward.

“This has become increasingly easy to do with computers and the time savings are enormous,” Jeff Gao wrote. “Four episodes of a show can fit into an hour.”

He did this, he explained, to make his life more efficient.

At first I thought it must be a spoof – a clever satire on the craze for new ways to “consume” online content.  But reading on, I realised Gao was serious.

He hailed the idea of playing videos at twice the intended speed as an example of “technology-changing story telling”.

Here the obsession with doing whatever’s technologically feasible parts company with reason. People like Gao appear to be afflicted by a strange new personality disorder for which psychiatrists have yet to coin a name.

Watching a good film or TV programme in fast-forward would be like eating your favourite food via a stomach tube that bypasses the taste buds. To put it another way, what’s the bloody point?

But Gao is just one small pointer to where the digital revolution seems to be leading us.

I see the future every week in this paper’s technology page, and I don’t mind admitting it scares the hell out of me. The pace of change is increasing at an exponential rate and no one knows where it will end.

The future of civilisation appears to be in the hands of an industry that’s obsessed with innovation and technological advance for its own sake.

Its mantra seems to be that if something is technologically possible, then it must be done. The men leading us into this brave new world (they’re almost always men) don’t appear to waste too much time thinking about the human consequences of what they do and the type of society that might be created as a result.

Technology writers continue to promote the fallacy that it’s all about making our lives easier. This collides head-on with the day-to-day reality experienced by many technology users who tear their hair out navigating unfriendly websites, familiarising themselves with ever-changing nomenclature, keeping track of a steadily expanding number of passwords (always longer and more complex than the last ones, to protect themselves from the opportunist criminals who infest the online world) and fuming helplessly over “upgrades” that they didn’t ask for and don’t want.

One of the least surprising news items of the year so far was a recent “state of the nation” survey by the Roy Morgan research company which found that 67 per cent of New Zealanders feel so overwhelmed by technology that they complain there are not enough hours in the day.

The solution’s simple, you might think. All they need do is cut back the amount of time they waste on Facebook and Twitter or watching videos on You Tube (I plead guilty to that last one).

But this works only up to a point, because even for those who scorn Facebook and Twitter, there’s no escaping the demands of the digital revolution. There’s no opt-out clause.

For all those people who thrive on newness and innovation, and who love nothing more than fiddling with a new device to find out what it can do, there are others for whom the pressure to constantly adapt to new ways of doing things becomes oppressive.

Trouble is, they’re given little choice. The world is so driven by technology that we’re all expected to fall into line.

Increasingly, people who are not computer-savvy are shut out of access to vital services, including those provided by the government. A computer-shy friend recently received a letter from the Inland Revenue Department querying her tax code and advising her to check on the department’s website – a suggestion that was about as realistic as asking her to recite the Koran from memory in the original Arabic.

The so-called digital divide, which was once merely disadvantageous to non-computer users, now threatens to marginalise and isolate them completely. This is the new reality.

Arguably the most powerful people in today’s world are those who control the giant technology companies. They have more impact on our daily lives than any politician, but unlike politicians they are not accountable to us.

We don’t get to vote for them and have no control over them. We just have to hope like hell that their vision of the future doesn’t turn out to be a dystopian nightmare.