The Case Against Technology

Technology has dominated the 21st Century. It has changed the business landscape, disrupted industries, fundamentally altered our society, workplaces and the way we work. Nearly every aspect of our lives is different from what it used to be 10 years ago because of the widespread proliferation of technology in our daily lives. 

Today, the most valuable companies in the largest economy on the planet are technology companies. Globally, tech companies dominate the list of most valuable companies by market cap with 7 of the 10 belonging to the tech landscape. These companies have created new industries, media channels, and global distribution networks that reach end consumers directly on their smartphones. 

The dominance of technology seems to be unquestioned, but what did technology look like in the ages past?

Long before the FAANG sunk their teeth firmly into the social fabric of humanity, technology looked more like two flint rocks struck together to create fire. This act allowed us to harness and control a form of energy, an achievement no other creature can lay claim to. 

Fire allowed humans to cook food. The process of cooking helps in breaking down nutrients, allowing better digestion and delivering greater number of calories to the body. This improved quality of nutrition helped power brains of early humans, the single most important organ responsible for placing humans on top of the food chain. 

Because it was a source of both heat and light, fire also allowed human beings to be more productive during the day-night cycle. Human activity became possible during colder and darker hours of the evening, directly increasing our productivity.

Similarly, the ability to create a source of heat allowed humans to disperse to colder perviously uninhabitable geographies. This allowed greater geographical dispersion, and access to natural resources.

Finally, it allowed humans to create more durable tools, and develop methods for metal working. These innovations allowed humans to develop more effective hunting tactics, improve farming yields and establish long term settlements where society and civilisation could find root. It, therefore, had an impact on societal and cultural development. 

Thus, technology improved human lives because it had utility to humans at the time. Can we make a similar case for technology and tech innovations today?

Consider the more well known, common uses of technology in the work environment that most workers in the modern corporation are likely to be familiar with : email, instant messaging, collaborative productivity tools, sleek laptops with great battery life and smartphones.

What changes have these developments in technology engineered?

Email revolutionised business communication. A few clicks on a keyboard, a send button on a browser and you have near instant communication with the farthest reaches of your organisation. What used to take days to communicate can now be done easily and reliably enough in a few minutes. 

Once businesses discovered electronic communication, they became addicted. We now have Gmail inboxes armed with machine learning algorithms that segregate the daily deluge of emails into something that resembles order, however poorly they may work. 

‘Inbox Zero’ is a dream many professionals have, but one that seems farther and farther away with the daily barrage of emails. A few years ago, it seemed best to give up on that notion, however successful startups have taken that bull by the horns. It seems to be holding, for the moment.

Not satisfied with the near instant communication email made possible, the tech junta came up with instant messaging. This was a true revolution. 

I belong to the era of people familiar with the pager. It seemed incredulous at the time that one could get in touch, in times of great need, by paging someone. That person would then rush to the nearest telephone and call back the original pager. 

Instant messaging and modern telecommunication did one better. They created a mode of communication that could deliver a message in real time. The pager was obsolete even before it really became a mass market communication device. The tech savants had created the SMS. 

Of course, the SMS wasn’t good enough : the telecom companies were charging too much for it, it seemed. Why pay 20p for an SMS pack when the internet allowed you to message someone for free.

The next revolution in communication was driven by the web messenger followed by the IM app. Both made possible now by the increasing proliferation of smartphones. We live in the era of WhatsApp, Slack and Signal. 

Once WhatsApp became common enough that everyone you knew was likely on it, it seemed redundant to use any other mode of communication to reach out. After all, it was instant, free and came with an interface a child could use.

The impact on business communication is here for all of us to see. How many WhatsApp groups are you a part of? How many of them are for work? How many times have you cursed a colleague for putting out some random ‘achievement’ on a work group after 10 at night?

The social and cultural changes aside, the pace of change of technology has left a large part of business managers feeling lost and confused. 

It seems like yesterday when the world was coming to grips with social networks, social media, digital influencers, search engine marketing and digital in general. There were companies creating billion dollar ‘digital’ businesses where others seemed to be standing still. 

Media companies in particular, felt the pain acutely with digital creating new media and content delivery channels. The hot shot marketeer seemed to be running around looking frazzled trying to figure out this new beast. The creative and agency ecosystem was similarly exasperated. Digital, whether you liked it or not, was here to stay. 

Just when it seemed like the marketing and strategy departments had started to get a hold on ‘digital’ in creating ‘digital first’ organisations, there comes along the widespread hype and adoption of artificial intelligence. The buzz words these days have moved on from SEO, SEM, and CPM to AI, ML, Deep Learning, and IOT. 

The already confused business executive now has something else to scratch his or her head about. In coming to terms with these new technologies, however, the business executive seems to have lost sight of what technology once provided : utility. 

Technology has been the driving force in innovation, industrial development and organisational productivity. However, recent research on productivity growth in developed economies has been less encouraging.

Data suggests productivity growth has not increased with adoption of technology in recent times. While there are noted economists who argue that the real increase in productivity comes from the improvements in quality delivered at the same real cost and the efficiencies it drives, there are many who question the impact of technology on productivity. 

The most common arguments point out that by the time society at large come to term with a technology change, there’s already a new one on the horizon. Executives spend more time figuring out technology than effectively using technology to drive productivity gains. 

Smartphones and addictive behaviours encouraged by internet technologies have been strongly correlated to learning disorders in the youth. Video games have been partly able to account for the decline in labour supply in men between 21 and 30. Laptops in classrooms have been linked to decreased student learning, and smartphone usage has been linked to an increase in traffic accidents. 

In the midst of all this chaos, business executives have to figure out what the most pressing business problem is, work out likely solutions, execute them and iterate on the process. The energy and resources spent in adapting to technology and the changes it drives in our work environments take focus away from more pressing problems plaguing business. 

How many online trackers, random excel sheets and ‘critical’ data inputs have you shared with your organisation recently? How many of them have been used to drive meaningful change and impact on our daily work lives. 

Finally, how much time do business executives spend working out strategy, understanding market and competitive forces or paying attention to people and culture? 

Multiple studies have shown that business leaders feel strategy is an important part of their job descriptions and they wish they had more time for it. 

Do you wish you had more time to think and act for the medium to long term betterment of your firm? Ironically, immersed as we are in technology and instant communication, shouldn’t we have more time for things like strategy, culture, and innovation? 

Technology, it seems, has crippled us and our ability to lead our teams and organisations to success. 

The average business executive is overloaded with over 300,000 communication inputs in a year. This executive is expected to understand, contextualise, evaluate and respond to a significant number of those inputs. How much time and energy does this executive have to make those decisions?

We need to consciously think a more about how we want to use technology than the latest hype on the possibilities of technology. Technology, after all, was meant to be a tool that adds value and utility to our lives. However, it seems to have led us to confused distraction. 

Perhaps it’s time we took back the reigns?