In the advertising sector we are “early adopters” by nature when it comes to embracing and adapting the latest technologies. The metaverse arrives, there we launch ourselves. Artificial intelligence arrives, here we go. Chat GPT arrives, here we are the first… and so I could make a long list of the new technologies that are coming into our lives. We marvel at how new it smells. And we jump into the pool without knowing many times if there will be water or we will get a good one when we reach the bottom. Do you remember the “hype” of Clubhouse? And where is he now?
But I don’t want to focus this article on that graveyard of large, more or less ephemeral “hypes”. I would like to talk about how the eagerness to adopt the latest technology makes us forget to deeply study and analyse the impact they can have on our society and on people’s lives.
Can you imagine that before being able to use the wonders that artificial intelligence or other technology offers you, you had to go through a study by experts: sociologists, psychologists, etc. to measure the social impact before it can be used? As if it were a medicine that has to pass its controls before reaching people. And when it reaches society, it offers itself with some recommendations and guidelines for use. Imagine that before being able to use, for example, Chat GPT, they gave you its user manual, recommendations, warnings or even the environmental impact that it has when using it.
Has anyone told you the enormous amount of fresh water consumed by Chat GPT servers? And so it happens with everything, a new technology arrives and we welcome it without further ado without knowing the consequences that may be behind it.
Would it be crazy to think that if it had been done at the time with mobile phones and social networks, for example, today it wouldn’t be causing so many problems for many people? When a few months ago I started giving talks in schools to children from third to sixth grade about the abuse of screens, the algorithms of social networks and influencers, the response was very good. They even asked me to give it to the parents. That led me to see the great knowledge gap that exists around the misuse of technology by people.
In my opinion there should be a greater concern for the social impact that each new technology has before opening the door wide to our lives. Wouldn’t it be causing so many problems for many people today? When a few months ago I started giving talks in schools to children from third to sixth grade about the abuse of screens, the algorithms of social networks and influencers, the response was very good. They even asked me to give it to the parents.
That led me to see the great knowledge gap that exists around the misuse of technology by people. In my opinion there should be a greater concern for the social impact that each new technology has before opening the door wide to our lives. Wouldn’t it be causing so many problems for many people today? When a few months ago I started giving talks in schools to children from third to sixth grade about the abuse of screens, the algorithms of social networks and influencers, the response was very good.
They even asked me to give it to the parents. That led me to see the great knowledge gap that exists around the misuse of technology by people. In my opinion, there should be a greater concern for the social impact that each new technology has before opening the door wide to our lives. That led me to see the great knowledge gap that exists around the misuse of technology by people. In my opinion, there should be a greater concern for the social impact that each new technology has before opening the door wide to our lives.
That led me to see the great knowledge gap that exists around the misuse of technology by people. In my opinion there should be a greater concern for the social impact that each new technology has before opening the door wide to our lives.
I do not want to say with this that I do not like new technologies, in fact, it offers a series of very positive benefits for society:
- Reduced effort in many jobs.
- Opens up new jobs and employment opportunities.
- Improves the economy.
- Creation of machinery that streamlines productivity.
- Connects people from all over the world.
But like all things, it also has a B-side, a darker side:
- It encourages a certain inactivity, since people increasingly need to make less effort to achieve things.
- The difficulty of adapting to the accelerated advances of technology. Not everyone adapts to new technologies at the same speed and this can cause frustration.
- Replacement of personal relationships by electronic devices, each time decreasing person-to-person contact. In the era with more options to communicate, it turns out that there are more and more people who live alone. Relationships become more ephemeral.
- The merit of people depends more on success in, for example: social networks than in real life. Who has more friends, who has more followers, etc.).
- Environmental pollution grows remarkably. Replacing paper with digital may seem more ecological, however, the electricity and water consumption consumed by servers from the time a simple email is sent to making artificial intelligence developments. Perhaps with this information the next time you answer the fifth “Ok, thanks” in a work email chain, you will think twice.
The development of artificial intelligence (AI) is an important area deserving of careful reflection. Increasingly, AI is being used to do jobs that humans can already do. This means that we have to think about how to develop a society with less need for human labour, but one that captures the benefits of productivity and passes them on to people – perhaps through some universal basic income model – in a way that satisfies their need for feel purpose. This will be a very difficult challenge that will have to be addressed in the very near future.
Some experts believe that the development of super-intelligent machines, significantly more intelligent than humans, is imminent. What will that mean for the future of humanity? Will these super-intelligent machines decide that they are better off without us? How will it affect agencies that base their service on creative talent? We are faced with many questions on the way to this new technological future. And that is why the adoption of ethics and morality is increasingly necessary for me to know the impact on people and on the society we want. Not the one we can (technologically speaking) but the one we want to live.
Would we be able to give up the siren songs of technology if we knew that our work and social lives would improve?
