Why Technology Is A Proper Mess. For Now.
It may seem like a proper mess with all these technologies. For now, it is. But we will figure it out. History shows us this. But when and how?
Getting anything done with apps, on websites, in the workplace, buying things online, from insurance to a pair of boots, figuring out how to schedule a meeting, contacting customer service, booking a hotel or a flight is a bit messy right now. It was supposed to have been wonderfully simple, quick and slick. Instead, it’s more complicated than ever. And in some ways getting worse. Why? Will it get better?
In the long run, yes, it all will likely get better. Not in some ideal utopian way. Technologies, like culture, are ever changing, improving, becoming obsolete, converging, compounding, evolving and devolving. This is because they come from our imaginations and that in itself is quite amazing.
To some it may seem that we are overwhelmed by and with so many technologies coming at us all at once. Sort of. Not entirely.
As I’ve written before, we are in a period where we have more revolutionary technologies pushing on the fabric of our sociocultural systems than ever before in human history. And despite the fact that the only constant in life is change, these technologies all at once mean they are placing significant pressures for sociocultural changes at the same time.
Applying for a job today means navigating through AI software before a resumé gets anywhere near a human. This is a dilemma for organisations given the huge volumes of applications they receive. A human would struggle to filter them all. AI helps. But it is also not very good. Yet. eventually, it will be. Organisations are very much trying to fix this.
Automakers are another example of this messiness. While there exists CarPlay by Apple and Google has Android Auto, Tesla, Ford, Mazda and all the other brands each have their own UIs (User Interface.) Buy a new car today and you spend more time learning the UI than how to drive the car.
Consumers don’t like these screens in cars. That probably has more to do with how messy it all is rather than disliking the screens themselves. Pressing four “buttons” just to find the reverse gear is a bit silly. Turns out we like actual twisty and pushy things sometimes.
Throughout history we’ve often had a fair bit of time and space to figure out technologies and how we want them to fit into our sociocultural systems. Agriculture was rejected by many cultures over thousands of years. It actually took quite a while to stick.
Some cultures rejected writing. The Celts as one example. They existed alongside the Roman empire, but unlike the Romans, preferred oral traditions. The Druids only known writing was the Ogham (Oh-ham), a series of runes used similarly to Tarot cards. All we know about the Druids was what the Romans wrote down. There exist today cultures that don’t use writing.
Interestingly, anthropologists have suggested that societies that don’t use writing tend to be more egalitarian. Not dissimilar to what we call today the digital divide.
How These Technologies Will Get Better
What’s different today is that we have a number of revolutionary technologies coming at us all at at roughly the same time. Most of these enabled by sand. What we call the microchip, made with silicon. And other rare earth materials.
Harnessing sand and other minerals lead to significant compounding of technologies to create ever more complex technologies. The device you are reading this article on, or listening to, is a conglomeration of a whole bunch of technologies.
When revolutionary technologies come along, they change our cultures. Eventually, as culture figures out the good and bad, we then change the technology. Usually this is one or two at a time, not a whole bunch.
What’s also unique about these digital technologies today is that they can commingle with others. If we can stick a sensor in something and get it to have a chinwag with something else, we will. That’s the Internet-of-Things. Today, many software products are built to integrate, to varying degrees, with other software products. Think Microsoft Office being usable on a Mac.
The economic interests of some companies mean they will also limit the ways in which their technologies work with competitors and other tools. This is a huge issue in the agricultural sector where major equipment manufacturers such as Johne Deere and Case are locking out third party attachments from working with their farm equipment. Hence the battle for the right to repair.
Software today, interconnecting hardware and the ubiquity of the internet via satellites, 5G, WiFi and such communications infrastructure means we can make a lot of things very fast, very cheap.
While it’s all messy, confusing, intimidating at times and seemingly overwhelming at others, we have a history of figuring this stuff out. Cars and planes are safer than ever because we developed systems to govern them. The same with electricity and plumbing in our buildings.
We’re still in the early days of figuring out many of these digital technologies. We are beginning to make changes to some. Incoming laws on privacy, management of personal data and rules around social media platforms are examples.
So in a way we are overwhelmed, it is messy because we love technology and we can do some really amazing things with these digital tools. we will make mistakes and already have, but that is because we are humans and how we figure things out, using culture, is always a bit messy.