Is IT making us stupid?
The exact same question is often asked about TV, and perhaps the answer for IT is equally nuanced.
Thanks to IT, we can -
- access all kinds of information and knowledge easily
- make connections and get analytical in ways that were completely impossible not long ago
- tell complex stories that are profoundly interactive (e.g. gaming, mass conversations)
- simulate what we think we know (and imagine new things) which helps us
- get better answers to things
- ask much better questions, possibly sometimes identify what we don't know yet (imagine the power of that!)
However, the reality can lag far behind -
- in the information deluge, our Information diets are in some ways more impoverished, not less
- we do crazy things, like replace the excellent analysis we could be doing with appeals for popular support
- the technology itself is like space rockets stuck in a traffic jam, hugely complicating simple tasks, interrupting and slowing down thought - e.g. the way updates quickly throttle your computer or an 8GB phone has barely enough memory to take a photo
- rather than open things up, control and influence has massively concentrated
- our fears over loss of privacy and bad people doing bad things contradict and feed off each other (cf. Cognitive bias).
- all this sharing has closed down vistas, restricting people and thought into Filter bubbles and tribal allegiances
- ultimately, IT keeps people busier than ever achieving less, often seeming like a net reduction in the quality of peoples' experience
Clearly, something is not quite right. At least, not yet.
What's going wrong?
There's obviously a political dimension to this. The technology, for example, is there to serve its own commercial purposes first. IT is still exploding like lawless goldrushes in the Wild West, with fortunes being made and lost. This happens to coincide with populations all over the developed world rapidly ageing and topping out, who are not digital natives and are increasingly preoccupied with control and resistant to change.
Perhaps it's a natural phase in IT's development too. Positive feedbacks give way to self-limiting conditions before things find some kind of complex sustainable equilibrium. For example, my movie recommender is convinced that I should be watching Star Wars or the Shawshank Redemption and as a result I watch fewer movies than ever. Similarly, the phone is now so occupied with calls from "BT Technical Department" that we rarely bother answering it. These things find their levels.
In the end, IT's job is to find a balance between -
- passive consumption of material clamouring for attention
In Lanzarote there are long strips of beachside developments accessed by a road with shops. Those shops are mostly bars and restaurants, and what's striking is that they go All Day Breakfast, Chinese, Irish Theme Pub, Indian, Pizza, Tapas and then the sequence repeats again. For miles. In the cut-throat world of bucket tourism, people don't like exploring and this is what works best. - active bottom-up creation of material
- part communication and access to facilities
- part pointless but entertaining "look at me" stuff - e.g. lolcats and Instagram
- but also part "developing knowledge" in exciting new directions - e.g. thinking differently, Artificial Intelligence etc
In the privacy of our brains, these things feed off each other and make "intelligence" happen together. So maybe the best way to approach optimising IT is to be relatively unconstrained, experimental and dynamic about it. To try things out, let them develop, see what works and move forward incrementally.
As Douglas Adams famously put it;
"Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet."
or
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
