I Have a Love-Hate Relationship With Tech
When it’s good it’s very, very good — but when it’s bad, it’s horrid
Editorial rights purchased from iStock. Image by ConceptCafe.
I’ve worked in tech for many years — first biotech, then hi-tech. I used to think tech was the answer to everything. It never occurred to me that the more advanced our technology became the more we would be trapped by it.
Instead of freeing us to do what we love we have to work that much harder to afford what we need.
We’ve come to rely so much on gadgets like smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, flat-screen TVs, cars with built-in GPS, game consoles, etc., that we need an absurd amount of money just to survive.
You never just buy something — you buy something for hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars then you need to pay monthly fees just to use it.
Even things that aren’t really “tech” in the usual sense are tied to it. I recently signed up for free in-home COVID tests from the government. I thought I’d help my 80+-year-old mother by sending her some. Unfortunately, the instructions require the user to download an app on a smartphone.
I wonder about the logic of a program ostensibly designed to help poor people get free COVID tests when those same people won’t be able to use them unless they already bought a smartphone. COVID tests can run anywhere from $20-$140, and most insurance covers them. Smartphones cost $500 and up. So, in the end, the “free” COVID tests are not exactly free, are they?
My mom doesn’t have a smartphone. She doesn’t want one. She has a phone to call people. But for the free COVID test, she needed a smartphone. So, for her, the tests were free — they were also useless.
Another problem with technology is obsolescence. My mom has an old flip phone, which she uses for emergencies when she’s away from home. In December of this year, she will no longer be able to use her phone because technology has “progressed” to the 5G Network.
In a matter of months, her perfectly good phone will be rendered useless, and she will be forced to buy a new phone — one that will force her to struggle with technology that is foreign to her simply to make a phone call — something her flip phone does beautifully without the stress of learning to navigate a new user interface or the added expense of paying for a data plan.
It’s one thing to make improvements, it’s another to make everything that came before them obsolete.
My mother’s generation did not grow up with technology. She’s very smart, but the difference between downloading vs opening a file, or storing information in “the cloud” vs on the laptop, is alien to her. When I first taught her to use the mouse she thought she had to circumnavigate the globe with it to move from one paragraph to the next.
Since then, she’s become quite proficient. But now that she is older, it’s getting more difficult to keep up with the ever-changing interfaces she is constantly barraged with whenever she tries to use her computer.
She also gets a lot of spam, much of it telling her to click on a link or she’ll no longer be able to use her computer, or she’ll lose her Medicare benefits or some other nonsense. Some of it even says it’s from Microsoft and includes their well-known logo.
All of it is designed to fool her into doing something that would be damaging to her.
More people are focused on using technology to take advantage of others than are focused on developing the technology to protect them.
It would be fine if people could simply choose not to use computers or smartphones. But we are way past that. If a person chooses not to (or can’t afford to) become proficient using both a smartphone and a computer, they are no longer allowed to participate fully in society, or frankly, in life.
Every company has a website, and every company has an outgoing phone message telling you to use its website. Wait times on telephone helplines have gone from a few minutes to several hours — across the board.
When I call Xfinity to report an internet outage — meaning, I can’t get online — their outgoing message tells me to report it online.
My partner and I recently went to a restaurant that didn’t have printed menus. Instead, there was a card with a barcode on the table. If we wanted to eat, we had to scan the barcode with a smartphone to see the menu.
I understand the concept of a hands-free menu during COVID, but in practice, it was a joke. Their hands brought us our food and our hands touched the plates their hands would take back to the kitchen. They also touched the table and the chairs we sat on, and at no point did I see anybody wipe down the table or chairs before we sat down or after we left.
I found myself wondering what a 70- or 80-year-old person might think if they attempted to eat at this restaurant. I suspect they would have left hungry and confused. I also suspect they would have felt that the world had changed so much that they no longer belonged there. Frankly, I found myself wondering if I belonged there — and I had a career in tech.
Granted, an electronic menu is fairly innocuous. Other uses of tech are not. Using drones to kill people, for example. This brings me to a bigger issue: our failure to address the moral implications of using tech in war.
The biggest problem with tech is that we know what it can do but we haven’t put nearly enough attention into figuring out what it should do.
It’s not just that killing people is bad — I think that’s a given — at least I hope it is. The problem with drones in warfare is twofold. The first is that they aren’t as reliable as they should be for such a consequential task. In a recent article in the Washington Post, I read that drones missed their targets 8 out of 10 times.
But there is another problem with drone warfare — it wreaks psychological havoc on the people who control them.
Imagine monitoring a village in Afghanistan for several weeks or months. You see the same people going to and from their homes to the village marketplace, or to the local mosque. You get to know their faces, their families, and their daily routines. Then one day you’re asked to use a drone to kill one of them. You aren’t risking your life — you’re simply taking theirs. And given the documented inaccuracy of such actions, a bunch of other innocent people will probably die as well.
I’ve never believed in the “glory of war,” but I can say definitively that there is no glory for anyone — even the most committed soldier — in killing someone with the push of a button while sitting in a safe, secure location, watching the war on a monitor.
I’m not saying all tech is bad. Spotify is awesome. Word and Excel have changed my life. But there is one huge limitation to tech and one I’ve not heard nearly enough discussion about. It is also one I doubt we will ever overcome:
We will never be able to program empathy.
In the end, if we insist on continuing to use tech in circumstances where empathy is needed, we will find ourselves, like Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey — at the mercy of our own invention.
And like Dave, we may not survive it. That’s something to think about.
Resources:
https://dronecenter.bard.edu/burdens-war-crews-drone-aircraft/