People often wax-poetic
about the past, about the era when people spent more time chatting in
person than on the phone and sent letters rather than email, justifying
bygone habits and approaches and ignoring the fact that technological
progress is, in many cases, an antidote and consequence of our past
failures. Maybe it’s time we took a hard look at ourselves before
indicting technology as a scourge on humanity?
We Scapegoat Technology for our Mistakes
The
common reprisals against technological innovation are that it
dehumanizes and disconnects us, or that it stupefies us. People will
harp on any occurrence to prove their point, like the first fatal crash
involving a self-driving Tesla car. Instantly the headlines swarmed with
triumph as Luddites pointed fingers and reveled in their prophecy
fulfilled.
To their chagrin, a closer inspection revealed how human error was the cause of the accident rather than technology. In fact, 90% of road accidents are the result of human error.
Human error also accounts for many online blunders.
Earlier
this year, Microsoft launched an artificial intelligence chatbot on
Twitter named Tay. Tay was created to speak like a teenage girl who
learns from real-world conversations, picking up slang and updates from
trending topics. Tay demonstrated an impressive capability to mimic
human language and produce meaningful phrases.
Evidently,
Tay was a little too human for our taste. She quickly put a fateful
mirror to our online behavior. In merely 24 hours, Tay
had learned a colorful array of racist, offensive and hurtful tweets
from its human friends. Tay was not a villain: she was a vessel. She
collected all that we are, and showed us more than we could bear.
At yet another online tribunal, Facebook was accused of left-wing bias
in their Trending section. Apparently, Trending’s human editors
admitted to suppressing conservative news stories. To eliminate this
issue entirely, the social media giant replaced the human editors with an algorithm that objectively curates articles based on unbiased variables, such as shares, likes, and comments.
This
set Luddites on a funeral march, lamenting the loss of yet another
human job and proclaiming our submission to the technological overlord,
they rejected Facebook’s decision. What these detractors fail to realize
is how technology picks up where we leave off and protects us against
our inborn biases.
Technology Is an Antidote to our Deepest Flaws
Just
imagine curating 1.7 billion Facebook articles on a near daily basis.
Those editors must have been stressed, exhausted, and overwhelmed by
default. Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologist have demonstrated
that mental exhaustion hinders our brains’ ability to suppress bias and
prejudice. In a state of cognitive fatigue we often opt for what we
accept and ignore what we reject. It’s simply easier to agree than to
disagree
Believe
it or not, holding opposing views in the mind is measurably
uncomfortable. In an effort to avoid discomfort, we tend to self-select
for content we already agree with. Readers do the same. This, however,
is a dangerous habit with far-reaching repercussions for discourse,
politics, social harmony, and much more.
Corporate Practices May Deepen Our Biases
The
broader question there is about the push toward personalization. To
increase profits and enhance the customer experience, companies across
the board are striving to give customers exactly what we want, a
dangerous proposition when you consider how biased our preferences are,
and how they sustain rifts, differences, and blind us to new ways of
thinking. In that way, by not allowing technology to take the reins on
certain inherently biased tasks, we may be sowing the seeds of our own
discord and prejudice.
In Sum
The
common sense view on technology isn’t zero-sum; we don’t have to choose
between rocks and robots. Man and machine complement each other. And in
those cases when machine supersedes man, we should self-analyze to
determine whether an unbiased, objective, and untiring tool is
preferable to all the flaws that it precludes.
Please share your thoughts and comments on this story to challenge all of our thought processes
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