Stranger Things: Technology & Human Interactions

Shashank Aggarwal
Sep 8, 2018 · 3 min read

Recently, Facebook lost $120 bn MCap & was all over in the news. Now, since the dust has settled & sentiment investors (speculators) plus technical analysts have gotten busy again with other stocks, let us make some sense of what just happened.

Facebook announced that it has been actively removing fake accounts & is tightening it's security for which it was receiving much flak. The company also announced an additional recruitment of 20,000 people for these purposes & that their overall hiring grew by 47% which led to a deceleration in the June'18 quarter numbers with a hint that this trend will continue in the next one. All of the above was happening when Facebook's platform was being publicly scrutinized for data utility that could manipulate human behavior & decision making by catering strategically to certain section of human behavioral patters bringing more ‘Eternal Sunshine Of A Spotless Mind’ moments.

But what about others? Was this standalone or has this been lurking around? In recent times, Twitter too has been eradicating fake accounts. WhatsApp & several other digital content platforms have been actively working on security & things like Fake News. You may very well have noticed some blockchain-tech like 'forwarded' messages on Whatsapp & may very soon be able to see the original creator of the message as cases of defamation, misuse, lynching, political & religious vendetta become more apparent & grave.

In another example, Tristan Harris, an ex Google Design Ethicist mentions that when an email is noticed & opened by a person it disrupts a persons work & takes 27 mins for the person to get back to the original task which is why the Inbox has been filtered over the years. He goes on to say that it was his responsibility to decide the duration of time taken to buffer Gmail inbox messages when a user pulls/scrolls down the Gmail app. Longer buffering time would mean greater adrenaline rush. It could be a fine place to hook users but there has been a moral call which has been voluntarily taken thus making the time taken seem normal. One would have also seen the notification of 'congrats! You have no mail..have a good day:)'. Classic case of Self regulation!

Yuval Noah Harari, a scientific researcher in his speeches about his new book 'Homo Deus' mentions that in future the product managers working of Self-Drive cars will have certain moral challenges. These cars may be100% accident free due to their operating system being run on data & algorithms & will have to decide for themselves whether to self-destruct or crash in case a human comes in front of it by error. Will they do that or will they not? And at what cost? We don't know. At this point, it is an interesting discussion that has opened up.

Satellites being sent to the outer universe too will have robots/ machines go there which will help save human lives in case of any unfortunate events.

The bottomline here is that war has been around. The war between technology, its human interaction, its utility & misuse. And it is far more visible today than other times. It continues to mushroom & can be seen across more platforms today. It comes as an update very smoothly, stays amidst our daily tech interaction, grows timidly as technology addresses problems of measurability & accountability & one day it shows it shows us the devil side with a caution that you are hooked to me & all you can do is to use me at your own discretion.

Well, definitely the question of self regulation vs external regulation comes in here when such things began to surface. In some recent cases, the intervention of the Government has definitely sent a strong message to all that 'when technology shows its murky side, they are around as a regulator to stop it & mend it.' And it is a good sign as these fake accounts/news lead to manipulation, defamation, deceit & also have on-ground repercussions & political implications much more today than anytime else.

And hence it is good news for users as the ones in power are the making the new power houses become more responsible from within.

Disclaimer:

This article is to not be published without prior permission from the author on shashankh5@gmail.com and it first appeared on www.editorialissues.blogspot.com