The Invisible Hand: Hidden Forces of Technology
At Social Media Week, we have an obligation to help you understand technology’s role in our future, what it means for your business, and for our globally connected society.
Through engaging, entertaining, educational and diverse content and conversations, we will once again explore how technology, social media and mobile devices helps us work smarter and live more productive lives.
In 2016 we will focus on a theme that has quickly become central to everything we think about in technology:
The Invisible Hand: Hidden Forces of Technology (and How We Can Harness it for Good)
The Invisible Hand has four attributes:
- Smart devices: Mobile phones, and networks including Bluetooth, NFC, WiFi, 4G, etc., that operate interactively and autonomously
- Networked connectivity: The means by which these devices and networks are able to connect to each other
- Data: Including the capture, analysis, curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, and visualization of information
- Machine learning: The construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data
When combined, these attributes change everything. Whether it’s the way we consume media, engage with brands, access healthcare, vote, travel, choose restaurants, commute to work, collaborate on projects, or how we go about choosing a date, technology’s invisible hand plays a crucial role in decision-making, or the way in which we experience the world around us.
“The Invisible Hand” represents the intangible, under-valued processes driving our technology, and ultimately, our decisions, forward. As we become more efficient, dynamic, and diverse human-beings, we have the responsibility to understand the present and future potential of these hidden forces all around us.
The Origins of “The Invisible Hand”
In the 18th century, Adam Smith came up with “The Invisible Hand,” a metaphor that describes “unintended social benefits resulting from individual actions.”
This phrase relates to the idea that society may benefit more from one individual’s pursuit of passion or interest than if that individual set out to impact his or her entire community or culture from the start. In a networked society we can look at “The Invisible Hand” metaphor in a slightly different way. Today, our individual actions cannot be isolated in regards to how we use technology.
When you request an Uber ride, recommend a book on Amazon, share a BuzzFeed article, watch a movie on Netflix, or ask Siri for directions, your actions are part of a collective set of actions that contribute to new outcomes. These new outcomes do not just impact you. They also help improve the products, services, and technologies around us, as well as overall life of everyone connected online to each other.
Two Sides of “The Invisible Hand” Conversation
However these outcomes are not always positive, and so if we are to remain vigilant as technology progresses, then we need to facilitate a dialogue that explores the various sides and perspectives of this ever-changing movement.
There are two sides to the Invisible Hand however, positive outcomes and negative drawbacks, each of which must be explored. As technology takes over more of our decision making there are moral and ethical implications to consider and we feel strongly that as a global community we are well positioned to host an open and constructive dialogue that looks at both sides.
Join us in 2016 as we host this discussion on six continents.
Next year’s Social Media Week conferences will take place February 22–26, June 6–10, September 12–16, and November 14–18. If you’d like to get in touch with us regarding Social Media Week in 2016, you can follow us on Twitter and “Like” us on Facebook, and reach out to us there with your questions, ideas, feedback, and interests.