Tech vs Ethics — Would you be ok with a machine controlling humans?
The short film, Sight, was extremely intriguing. It sent chills down my spine the first time I saw it, and the second time I saw it, and the third time, when I paused after almost every second to understand what the hidden meanings were between the frames and the dialogs. The film was also very thought-provoking. The thought that it provoked for me was, has the technology advanced so much that we are on the brink of letting technology explicitly control humans. The question that was not much of a head-scratcher was, will humans misuse it. The short film captures not only the futuristic view of the usage of technology but shines a spotlight on what will happen when the people with power misuse it. Patrick being a powerful admin of the Sight technology did not even hesitate before reading Daphne’s personal information or hacking into her system to control her actions. This film reminded me of an old Will Smith movie, I Robot. The robots were created as household help, but they soon developed consciousness and tried to overtake the world.
The video begins with a positive note on how this type of technology can help someone exercise and cook by gamifying it. But that raised a few questions, what if he was not alone? Would this kind of technology create distances between people? We already are super dependent on our phones and other types of technology, would this create a higher level of dependency? Also, would we always have the time and patience to gamify everything in our lives, even when we want to finish our work quick? And lastly, would people be comfortable in having something in their eyes that always shows something to them? However, this would definitely create a solace out of the loneliness most people feel in their daily life. It would also fill in the empty apartments and empty spaces in our lives like it do for Patrick.
Although technology can be extremely informative and delightful to use, like picking out something from the fridge,
it can be stretched to provide information which might not always be morally correct to have or depend on.
From an ethical standpoint, it is unethical to manipulate someone’s emotions and actions. However, we see that technology influences the actors’ actions in the entire film and in the end gain complete control over Daphne’s actions and emotions.
Using Friedman and Kahn’s thoughts on ethics, we can further analyze the film,
- Trust:
According to me, the trust factor has three outlooks. First, as a user, the actor trusts the technology blindly and hence becomes extremely dependent on it. Daphne mentions that she lost her way back home because Sight tech crashed and seemed terrified by that. Second, the technology provides analyzed and unbiased information extracted from all databases. This makes the information and technology trustworthy and dependable, even though its unethical. Lastly, since the information is unethical, it creates a fear in people about technology creating a breach in their privacy. The ease with which Patrick got her current ‘like’ percentage created a big privacy breach which gave rise to trust issues. These trust issues will only magnify once the world finds out that powerful men like Patrick can not only gather someone’s entire information, but he can even gain control over their mind and actions.
- Privacy and Informed Consent:
This technology reads data off of social media sites, and/or analyzes facial and body language. That creates a breach of privacy, and especially doing it without the consent and the other person’s knowledge makes it unethical.
- Ownership and property:
Information and intellectual property of a person are also considered their property. With technology such as Sight, where a user is always online and has a technology gathering their minute updates, keeping this data always private will be tough. Hence, this ethic can’t be always followed.
- Autonomy:
This technology can reach the max point of being unethical when it takes complete control of Daphne in the last scene by just simple commands issued by Patrick.
From an HCI point of view, the data on the screen was too obtrusive for me. It creates multiple focus points in the user’s sight and the user might not be able to judge what to concentrate on. In the following image, there are 6–7 focus points other than Daphne, which are updating quickly and demand immediate focus.
The attention will get divided and hence the user can feel overwhelmed, not to mention that the information on the screen might not always be ethical and might be causing a breach of privacy.
In today’s world, we are so dependent on our mobile phones that, that is the first thing we see in the morning. Mobiles already influence our behavior. Having this trustworthy technology will make us more dependent on technology as Daphne was when Sight crashed and she couldn’t find her way back home. This would make you want to keep this technology updated and close to you on a minute basis. This data would be stored somewhere which can’t always be deleted but can always be hacked. That can lead to even worse scenarios other than such dating scenarios. When such data would exist, I feel ethics would take a back seat.
- Friedman, B. & Kahn, P. H. (1992). Human agency and responsible computing: Implications for computer system design. Journal of Systems and Software, 17(1), 7–14.
- Friedman, B. & Kahn, P. H. (2003). Human values, ethics, and design. In J. A. Jacko & A. Sears (Eds.), The human-computer interaction handbook (pp. 1177–1201). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Proctor, R. W. & Van Zandt, T. (2008). Human factors: In simple and complex systems. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. (Chapter 4, 9–11)
- Turkle, S. (2007). Authenticity in the age of digital companions. Interaction Studies, 8(3), 501–517.
