The Two-Edged Sword

In 1926, electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla predicted1 that, “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole.”

While we may not have achieved Tesla’s vision just yet, what a long way we have come. Technology is the great enabler, perhaps the greatest we have seen in our history. As thresholds of cost and scale fall, and as we get better at using technology through the use of clever software and algorithms, so the world is getting noticeably smarter: already today, people can communicate and collaborate, perform and participate on a global basis, as if they are in the same room; and startups can form and grow, enabling them to compete with some of the world’s largest companies without having to create a product, or even own a building. Technology continues to transform healthcare, helping us to live longer; through mechanisms like micro-loans it helps people out of poverty and supports sustainable development; the transparency it has created has powered civil rights, has enabled the little guy to stand up against the big guy, has been instrumental in engaging the disenfranchised.

It all seems so, well, positive, but… and it’s a big but. Technology has powered revolutions, but at the same time riots and no small amount of criminality both from the ‘bad guys’ and indeed, from the authorities and corporations that are supposed to have our interests at heart. This is whether or not they are acting within the law — or indeed, are the law — given that this is still struggling to catch up. In many cases we only have our own morality to fall back upon, and what with the pace of change, even this can prove inadequate.

With every up, there is a down. Our abilities to influence each other have reached profound levels through social media tools, but in doing so we have created a hive mind, in which we react en masse, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Jon Ronson’s book2, “So You've Been Publicly Shamed,” which covers trolling on social media, is more than an illustration; it is a state of play. We are all complicit in what has become a global conversation, warts and all.

Traditional companies and start-ups are building upon increasingly powerful platforms of technology, lowering the barriers to business. But sometimes in doing so they sail close to the wind, exploiting weaknesses in national laws in terms of their tax affairs or the data protections they offer. Very often we go along with what is available, as we are not sure whether it is a blessing or a curse.

As technology improves. it enhances and challenges us in equal measure. Cameras, tracking devices and databases appear to confirm, in the words of Hari Seldon, psychohistorian3 and erstwhile hero of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, that “An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.” Psychohistory, from Asimov’s standpoint, concerned the ability to foresee the behaviours of huge numbers of people — simply put, when the numbers are large enough, behaviour is mathematical and therefore predictable. We are a long way from this, however: creating mountains of information, far more than we know what to do with, from our personal photo collections to the data feeds we can now get from personal heart rate monitors and home monitoring devices. That algorithms are not yet able to navigate all that data may be a good thing, as the ‘powers’ seem unable to look upon it with anything other than avarice. All that lovely personal data, they say. Now I can really start targeting people with marketing. Surely, we ask, there has to be more to it; but what it is, we do not know.

Despite these fundamental plusses and minuses, technology itself is indifferent to our opinions, progressing and evolving in its own way regardless of whether it causes good or ill. To repeat Kranzberg’s first law: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” As we have seen in ‘going viral’, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, often it is the collective actions of individuals that have the greatest impact: individual acts can be the straws that drive the camel over its threshold, millions of tiny actions that together lead to a global swing of opinion, an explosion of demand or a trend. In this, too, we are all culpable as our individual behaviours can be for the greater or lesser good. When someone says “I bought it from Canada, it was so much cheaper without tax,” can we really expect heads of companies to do any different?

The indifference of technology is more than just a glib remark: rather, it tells us something profound about the nature of what we are creating, and our relationship to it. In politics, in life, in the evolution of our race, so often what happens one year seems to be a backlash to what has gone before; as a consequence we re-tune, we rebalance, we re-establish ourselves in the ‘new world’. By this token, neither are we necessarily going to become 100% technology-centric— consider the resurgence of vinyl records, or the fact that wine growers are looking once again at their traditional approaches, or indeed the hipster movement, with its tendency towards beards and retro kitsch. Digital has failed to kill the physical shop, meanwhile: retail analysts report that the high street is becoming a social space, a place for people to meet and communicate; and that shops offering both keen pricing and good service are more likely to thrive, whether or not technology is in the mix (a great UK example is John Lewis, with its JLAB initiative). Perish the thought that the shops of the future will be the ones that balance the power of digital with traditional mechanisms for product and service delivery!

It’s not over yet, of course. Even as we speak, we are changing, or at least technology is changing beneath our feet, ripping up the rule book once again. We are on the threshold of a whole new wave of change, so if we want to understand how we should cope, we need to know a bit more about where it is taking us next.

Welcome to the age of the super-hero.