Is Tech Taking Over Our Lives?

Technology is everywhere. It’s helping us make better choices in life and giving us a voice. Through social media platforms, politics is becoming more transparent. Patients are receiving better medication in a timely manner thanks to drone-delivered drugs in places like Rwanda.

There are fears, however, that technology has become too much a part of our lives. If it’s not the dangers of genetically modified foods, then it is how much time teenagers are spending on social media. The effect of the latter, especially, can include depression and anxiety among younger audiences.

Technology is Indeed Making our Lives Better

Tech is cool. It is helping us understand and even visualise what life looked like hundreds of years ago. Technology is empowering us to tell our stories using digital media, demand better from our leaders by congregating on social media, and helping us make better decisions using artificial intelligence. Businesses are booming through technology as digital marketing continues to make a better claim against traditional marketing. 3D technology is helping to create cheaper prosthetics for amputees and accident victims. And there is more.

We Are On The Move, Always

In 1955, a 5MB hard drive weighed a ton and costed $35,000. Today, you can start a whole business with a laptop that costs less than $1000 right from your bedroom. On that computer you can create a mobile application that will be downloaded hundreds of thousands of times because more than two billion people now have smartphones. Mobile is the new internet.

Mobile technology puts the world’s largest inventions into our hands. From medical devices and applications to IoT-enabled gadgets like Nike Adapt BB self-lacing shoe, mobile keeps us in control of the most important aspects of out lives. Mobile is also promoting financial inclusion in Africa and beyond where Fintechs are leveraging the power of hand-held devices to extend financial services to the under-served. Additionally, with the proliferation of cloud technology, businesses are more agile in taking advantage of business opportunities on the go.

DIY Economy

Perhaps the most visible effects of technology in our lives is in the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) economy. Where previously only big media corporations got marketing jobs, for example, independent contractors are making big strides. Not only marketers, but realtors, programmers, etc., are all leveraging on the power of technology to not only sell themselves to prospective clients, but to actually solve problems.

Entire departments can now be easily out-sourced because there are better communication channels and milestone-measuring applications. Fashion blogs are upending fashion trends by leveraging on new media, for example. HR departments can now manage the recruitment process with the use of modern Applicant Tracking Systems like gRecruit.

Social Media – The Double-Edged Sword

The loudest criticism of the effect of technology in our lives has come against social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and their likes. Instant gratifications and predatory antics of influencers have led to calls for the regulation of these tech spaces. Nonetheless, social media scores massive pluses in the way it is benefiting individuals and businesses.

Social media makes it possible to amplify issues in ways that was impossible only a decade ago. Viral marketing is possible because of the structures underpinning platforms like Facebook and Twitter that make it easy to share and to be part of real-time conversations. Businesses have pounced on this and made billions – both for themselves and for the platforms that carry their messages.

Social media has had a tremendous effect on social issues. From resistance efforts in #arabspring and the Yellow Vest protests, to entertainment and celebrity-related stories. The rise of the challenge is a result of viral marketing, and in Africa, leaders like Museveni and Ghana’s Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, pastors like Alpha Lukau, have seen parodies of their own acts.

Smarter Services

From accessing data on the cloud at any time of the day to monitoring your blood sugar levels using the tiniest tech devices, smart technology is changing our lives. Precision agriculture is making it easy for city dwellers to monitor their farms miles away from where they live and work.

In healthcare, devices like the cardiopad have the potential of saving millions from heart-related deaths. Patients need not join long queues at hospitals; with smart technology, it is easy to monitor vital organs in the comfort of their homes using remote devices.

The Sins of Technology

There is always a yang to every ying, as they say. This is also true about the effects of technology in our lives. It’s easy to mention the positives, but there exist countless ways in which tech has been used to perpetuate negative externalities in our lives.

Anti-social media

The same tech systems that allow for amplification of gofundme accounts have also perpetuated the persecution of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. Everyday, there is a new story of how social media is promoting self harm, even on YouTube Kids, a supposedly child-safe version of the video-sharing platform.

Electoral malpractices by firms like Cambridge Analytica have underscored the need to internalise the cost of tech when speaking about promoting democracy. Social media also allows deviants to work under the shroud of anonymity to perpetuate their unscrupulous acts. Whether it’s hacking into legitimate computer systems or holding people ransom over their own private data, advancements in tech have made it easy to commit crime and get away with it.

Perhaps, more visceral are the sights of young men and women with their heads bent down as they browse their smartphones while sitting across each other in a restaurant. It is rather ironic that social media platforms have alienated us rather than bind us. Sure, people are connecting from different parts of the globe digitally. At the same time, though, social platforms give us so much to do at one instant that people seem to be forgetting what it means to have physical connections. We might send a thousand emojis on WhatsApp but act socially awkward when we meet in person.

Worse of all, these platforms seem to be hotspots for spreading not only fake news, but dangerous content as well. Technology giants like YouTube and Facebook have been somewhat handicapped in dealing with the glaring challenges that the democratization of content creation has caused. Young people are getting over-exposed and depressed. It is no wonder that the UK parliament is pondering over forcing or shutting down social media platforms completely in a bid to protect the vulnerable.

Surveillance

The rise of surveillance is a genuine fear among people. Facial recognition technology seems useful in securing the data on your smartphone, for instance. However, the same technology can easily be used to monitor people across cities and even countries. Data breaches across the US, Asia, and Europe show that the more personal data we give to tech companies, the more vulnerable we leave ourselves.

The recent debate over Huawei’s allegiance to the Chinese state informs a lot of the fears that people have about big tech. With an unprecedented level of integration into the global internet systems, it becomes even riskier for individual nations if another country can, with the switch of a button, collect data from sensitive industries. And so the questions to ask is this: do we have too much tech in our lives?

Should We Scale Back on Tech?

Technology is here to stay. It has been with us for millennia, but only recently started to advance at extraordinary paces. It is perhaps a testament to the state of our lives that we need more from technology. From developing cleaner fuels to better ways of accessing the internet, technology is moving not ahead of us, but in a bid to meet our own demands.

Social media evolved out of a need to stay in touch. Then it became a time-consuming, money-minting behemoth that is still doing a lot of good for society. E-commerce is making it easy for cattle farmers in Kenya to reach customers in the big cities. Blockchain seems energy inefficient but aside the digital coin industry, it has tremendous potential for ridding the financial systems of fraud through its verifiable, transparent data delivery process.

Technology evolves much quicker than the laws governing it, and regulators are only just now getting to terms with the potential implications of all the luxury and conveniences tech has allowed us to have. It is not easy for Facebook to vet millions of posts from hundreds of millions of users around the world. With billions by way of profits, however, it is necessary that such tech firms take relevant steps to do better. It is that, or tech firms will start seeing their fortunes decline with the enforcement of aggressive laws aimed at protecting the consumer. They could be banned, censored, or become the great social evil that everybody shuns.

With the amount of data sitting on hard drives in hundreds of data centres around the world, more needs to be done in educating the public, for technology will continue to push boundaries. You might get chipped anyway, and even if AI doesn’t take your job, an android might be the key to saving survivors in the heart of a disaster.

A recent decision by OpenAI researchers to not release a fake news-generating AI is an example of the responsibility needed among innovators. It behoves on tech giants and watchdogs to always be on the lookout for potential dangers and create active policies to curb and stop them.

Conclusion

Tech has hacked into our lives. Through machine learning and artificial intelligence, we are able to get the best out of our service providers. We are also getting better health care because it is easier to record, track, and analyse data through the Internet of Things. It is very likely that our lives will become more entrenched with tech and the digital world. However, it is necessary to build on ethics of the industry and demand better privacy laws to protect the vulnerable. Adopting technology should be a choice, and definitely not a chore.