Disturbing Smartness
Evgeny Morozov has to be applauded to peirce some holes into the hot air balloon of contemporary tech-enthusiasm. His dissection of Silicon Valley's dearest technological development of the last years – smart technology – into good smart products and not so good smart stuff can be appreciated in more than an analytical way. Morozov in his recent WSJ Article shows how product engineering becomes tacitly and faster than we might recognize social engineering in disguise. "Many smart technologies are heading in another, more disturbing direction. A number of thinkers in Silicon Valley see these technologies as a way not just to give consumers new products that they want but to push them to behave better. Sometimes this will be a nudge; sometimes it will be a shove. But the central idea is clear: social engineering disguised as product engineering." (E. Morozov, Is smart making us dumb?)
Pushing useful feedback to behavioural oppression is one of the disturbing ideas that should force us to stop and think about our new smart devices. Morozov agrees that "there is reason to worry about this approaching revolution. As smart technologies become more intrusive, they risk undermining our autonomy by suppressing behaviors that someone somewhere has deemed undesirable."
Thinking critical about contemporary digital and technological design decisions, Morozov is not the only enfant terrible of the intellectual elite that tries to finger-point at some troubling blind spots of Silicon-Valley-style enthusiasm and thinking. Jaron Lanier is an equally strong voice that describes how easily technological lock-ins can happen and when they happen, that they are far more important to our daily life than we may realize. But it's not the developers to blame exclusively. As Lanier remarks in You are not a Gadget, "software presents what often feels like an unfair level of responsibility to technologists. Because computers are growing more powerful at an exponential rate, the designers and programmers of technology must be extremely careful when they make design choices. The consequences of tiny, initially inconsequential decisions often are amplified to become defining, unchangeable rules of our lives." (Jaron Lanier, You are not a gadget, Chap. 1)
The same holds probably for our smart technologies that Morozov has in mind. The could create intellectual lock-ins due to their design, self-reinforcing behaviouristic feedback loops, that remove ideas that do fit into the digital representation schemes of the pre-programmed devises, that cut away creative and unconventional ways of problem-solving or simple life decisions and therefore fail to deal with the complexity of human nature. "The problem with many smart technologies is that their designers, in the quest to root out the imperfections of the human condition, seldom stop to ask how much frustration, failure and regret is required for happiness and achievement to retain any meaning. It's great when the things around us run smoothly, but it's even better when they don't do so by default. That, after all, is how we gain the space to make decisions-many of them undoubtedly wrongheaded-and, through trial and error, to mature into responsible adults, tolerant of compromise and complexity." (E. Morozov, Is smart making us dumb?)
Maybe our smart devices will make us smart in a different way, that is helping us to start thinking again about our relation to technology and what parts of thinking and life we like to see conquered by technological devices, devilish smart algorithms or all observing sensors, and what parts we would like to keep under our creative and maybe suboptimal power and control.