Mindful Technology Design: Thinking About Social Scalability In The Digital Era

Karan Magu
Aug 25, 2017 · 5 min read

This piece by Nick Szabo (overall Renaissance man and inventor of Smart Contracts) has been one of my inspirations on the journey of thinking about a new design ideal called Mindful Technology Design. Szabo talks about social scalability as a key human-centered principles for thinking about technology, and looks at the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency to explain the concept. I highly recommend reading it if you want to understand message of my article.

Read : http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/money-blockchains-and-social-scalability.html

The year is 2017. The digital age is entering its puberty. As with any adolescent, it still lives in its own solitary world, confined somewhere in the confused space between the zest of a revolution waiting to happen and the fragile bubble of optimism waiting to burst, appearing from its black box only every now and then to reveal to wary prognosticators a glimpse of its nature. Truth be told, there is barely any refuge remaining to the last bastions of techno-pessimism and digital resistance, and if Elon Musk has his way, even Mars will seem like an unlikely place for the luddites of this world to outdistance themselves from the viral, radial spread of technological innovation taking over the planet. In some parts of New York, you can’t walk one block without hearing the word Blockchain. ArtificiaI Intelligence is becoming a real deal, our machines are learning even as half our kids don’t get to attend school, and series rounds are burning to keep the wantrepreneurs warm on the runways of startup glory. In other news, Silicon Valley may soon be changing its name to Carbon Nanotube Valley (or perhaps upload its entire infrastructure to the cloud- the Chief Evangelists and the Innovation Oracles and Head Dreamers at the Departments of TechnoEthics have spoken!

On a more serious note….

One thing is clear. The rise of technology into the mainstream in the last decade is a complex phenomena, and inasmuch as our information and communication technologies are designed by humans and manifest as interfaces between human minds and computing machines, this rise is also a human phenomenon. Humans are social animals, and to add to the drama, they prove to be no less complex. In our all too human ways, we as a society are collectively only beginning to understand the implications and intricacies of the digital age we find ourselves in. We the policymakers, the consumers, the employers and the employed are only beginning to grapple with how the technological interacts with the humane and how this interaction informs the relationship between the digital and the human in our individual and collective lives and our social systems.

Given the exponential nature of some of our most transformational technologies like the world wide web, the emergence or AI, Data Science breakthroughs, robotics, virtual worlds, genome editing and cryptocurrencies (to name but a few), we can certainly expect the emergence of some very unexpected modalities for human-machine interactions, and the proliferation of equally unprecedented avenues for digital innovation in what was previously a largely analog, all-too-human arena.

Right now terms like social entrepreneurship and impact funds litter the darker corners of the digital landscape, understood only by a few. In the near, near future (and you can already see this happening, if you observe in the right places) whether they publicly deny this or do not, all technological ventures will inherently be ‘social enterprises’, and all venture investing by VCs in these ‘social entrepreneurs’ will be termed impact investing. For, given the scale and virality of digital applications, and their ability to transcend borders, industries and regulations to touch human lives in one way or the other, the indelible and lasting human impact (Social, political, behavioral..the list continues) of digital technology has become unavoidable, appearing to be almost an inevitable prerequisite for the evolution of digital technologies.

Our machines, our algorithms and our Artificial Intelligences will have to be designed with an understanding of the human condition, till the time when they will be able to replicate it, and soon there will be a singularity between the minds of men and man-made machines. Today we are teaching our machines to think like us, but soon, ceteris paribus given faster leaps in processing power, our machines will be teaching us how to think like them, to emulate them. Technology and human will continue to interact in newer, closer ways, on their inevitable path to convergence. Technology will become social, asymptotically or perhaps even completely human. What would this mean for the creators of technology? Would they be the demigods of the 21st or 22nd century?

The spread and evolution of the technological ideal is thus predicated on the idea of technology continuing to provide society with optimal productivity at scale, while maintaining minimal scaling costs, low barriers for entries for user groups onto new digital platforms, and low switching costs between applications and older versions/models. Technology will only be a part of our societies till it continues to serve us and augment us, or at the very least some of us (think of the short term replacement of workers via automation and you get the point). That combined with the increasing affordability and ubiquity of computing within the fabric of our daily lives creates a situation where disruption of analog human systems by technology (and the continuing disruption of technology by itself) has subtly crept up over the last decade to become the new norm, and the impact of this is only going to become more visible to the everyday person.

Given the emergence of such a cybernetic society, the least we can do is to attempt to understand what is going on- to make sense of the intersection of minds and machines, human and digital. For those amongst us who design these digital interfaces of the future, it becomes ever more necessary to question how we can create and design more human-augmenting, conscious and empathetic forms of technology. The questions I have been asking myself for sometime now have led me to delve into a new discipline of design thinking that I like to call Mindful Technology Design. I don’t know if this term is already in use, or if I am infringing someone’s buzzword. As far as I know, I came up with the term in Israel in January 2017 while grappling with the idea of creating technologies that blend fundamental trends in digital design with insights we can gain from the study of humanistic philosophy, neuroscience, social systems, persuasive computing and the principles of behavioral psychology amongst other human disciplines. The idea is to create a new multidisciplinary, multi-perspective design ideal suited for the age of interaction between human beings and our digital technology. An age of increasing social scalability of technological innovation calls for a rethinking of the ethics and foundations of design. Where we are heading, traditional expertise fails, and the digital revolution calls for a new breed of multidisciplinary, mindful designers.

To this end, I created a pamphlet titled Mindful Technology Design in January this year, which I haven’t published just yet. If you would like to further discuss the idea of Mindful Technology Design and how I look at it, please don’t hesitate and reach out. I’m always happy to have a conversation and collect your feedback.

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Pushing the Edge. At the confluence of Philosophy, Psychology and Tech.

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