Introduction
Whether we like it or not, a significant amount of the technology we use is exploitative to some degree. Humane tech is an idea that aims to shift the focus to creating socially-responsible technology that doesn’t exploit the user. It’s a noble idea, and one that becomes more important as our dependence on various forms of tech increases.
The Center for Humane Technology
The Center for Humane Technology (CHT) was co-founded by Tristan Harris (you may know him from the Netflix show The Social Dilemma), who previously pushed the ‘Time Well Spent’ movement after originally working for Google, where he produced an internal presentation in 2013 entitled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention”. Along with Google, he namechecked Apple and Facebook, highlighting their responsibilities to their users.
While the CHT freely admits that benefits do derive from social media and mobile tech to some degree, they also bring up various issues that have begun to affect society on a wider scale. These include:
Digital Addiction: Many people are addicted to technology, with digital slot machines compounding the issue.
Mental Health: Digital addiction and increased social media use can have a negative impact on mental health.
Breakdown of Truth: It’s becoming harder to tell what’s real and what isn’t, especially if spending a lot of time online.
Polarisation: Has it become more difficult to co-operate with others due to polarising online ideologies?
Political Manipulation: This is caused either by creating rifts and sowing seeds of doubt, or by people directly impacting elections themselves.
Superficiality: By focusing on looks and likes, have we become more superficial?
These issues indicate a “mismatch between our natural human sensitivities and the exponentially growing power of technology”, a problem likely to escalate in future.
The CHT provide a free, self-paced online course for professionals that are shaping tomorrow's technology. This course can be be found here , and I would highly recommend that you check it out for yourself.
Instead of exploiting our vulnerabilities, there are endless ways in which tech could be used to improve society, as well as our overall quality of life. It’s still a small movement, but hopefully humane tech will continue to grow!
Top comments (0)