How technology is altering humans: food for thoughts ??

The debate about whether technology and automation are good or evil for humanity has probably been going on since the rise of those phenomena. The piece of writing you are reading now is an attempt to grapple with this question and collect factual information, which could serve as food for thoughts.

Before moving on to discussing the topic, let's have some fun and answer a popular quiz question, which sounds as follows: What do a revolutionary Benjamin Franklin, the sociologist Karl Marx and the philosopher Hannah Arendt have in common? It is not so simple to guess on the spot. It turns out that each of the named persons believed that the best term describing a human being is not Homo sapiens, but Homo faber, which in Latin means 'the toolmaker'. Technology, including automation, is also a man-made tool. But how is this tool altering humans?

Automation & Mobility

As it was just mentioned, automation is a technology, allowing humans to make minimal efforts when doing any job or not participate in it at all. For the first time, the notion of automation was used by Henry Ford. In the 1930s he established the Automation Department at his machinery plant. This was the start of the Automobile Age.

Everyone knows that automobiles make us faster, but mankind pays a high price for being mobile. Most modern gasoline cars are guilty of air pollution. Poor ecology has harmed health. Realizing the potential damage to the resources of our beautiful planet, vehicle developers created a new technology in machinery - they adapted cars to alternative types of fuel, enabling people to stay healthy without running out of steam and not going back to the rudiments.

Robotization vs. Wildness

Do you remember scaring fantastic movie scenes showing the onrush of robot technology? The plot is always the same: humanity creates smart machines to facilitate daily routines, and then it turns out that artificial intelligence refuses to work for the benefit of its creator and tries to enslave a human being.

Any new technology is undergoing a stage of suspicion and resistance. After that, there comes a period of adaptation and adoption. Everyone knows how hard it is for the older generation to accept any innovations. If you offer an elderly lady to choose between an iPhone and a simple push-button phone, then she will choose the latter. The reason is not the price, but the reluctance to learn new things.

Take another example, also with a phone. Imagine the interior of a house owned by a 70-year-old man. His adult children gave him a cell phone and even taught him how to use it. Nevertheless, on the bedside table an old landline phone is still gathering dust. Communication is paid monthly, although no one has been calling it for a long time. These examples indicate that the human psyche is initially biased towards technology, especially when it comes to something large-scale.

What do we mean, when feeling positive about the past and how it was before us?

Answering this question, Dr. Aleksandr Bondarenko, a leading Ukrainian practicing psychologist and a visiting professor at London University, says that saving a human’s personality within the robotized world without going back to the outskirts of technological and social progress is a crucially significant idea. The scientist believes that not robots, but an inhuman way of life kills a person. Therefore, the propaganda of wildness as a blessing with further adoption of returning to nature in the meaning of living in the forest without the use of PCs, phones and other civilized devices has nothing in common with the enhancement of human abilities or rescuing society. ‘Although nowadays this idea has captivated the media, the archaization of life is not a return to freedom; on the contrary, it is a return to the ultimate lack of freedom in humans’, Dr. Bondarenko stresses.

In this respect, the best that might be done is focusing on personality. There are new ways of learning and influence on people. Anyway, this is the objective reality. It seems to be childish to escape from Google, dishwashing machines or GPS only for the reason that they are something related to technology. Even the most useful device can turn into a harmful one, if you use it mindlessly. 

Folk Wisdom Beating Devices 

On the other hand, Nicholas Carr, who is an acclaimed American writer investigating technology, economics, and culture, sincerely doubts that humans can avoid addiction to artificial intelligence systems. The author admits that youngsters may lose the ability to think critically because machines relieve people the need in this.

In his book ‘The Glass Cage’ he underlines that relying on computers and automized systems, humans stop interacting with the world in diverse ways. Sometimes we are unable to cope with circumstances about the use of computers and automation not in a city or a kind of Western country but up in the Arctic Circle. Do you think it is shielded from computers and automation? Not really.

As an example, Mr. Carr turns to real facts from life of the Inuits. They have been living on the bewildering island of Igloolik with the average winter temperature 20 degrees below zero for 4,000 years. Local hunters have developed excellent tracking skills without maps, compasses, or other navigation tools. Their only technology was the observation of wind directions, animal behavior, and stars position. 

The modern Inuits swapped the dog sleds for snowmobiles, they use GPS devices and Google maps to get around. When young Inuits stopped relying on their perception and learning from the experience of elder people, and started fully trust automated technologies, the accidents during hunts started to occur very often.

This is the reason why we should take care of shaping critical thinking in kids. This is the main task of education. In the elementary school of Ukraine, children are still given the task to study as many folk superstitions as possible. For example, any eight-year-old can predict weather judging by nature. For example, if at sunset the sky plays with red and pink colors, then tomorrow there will be frost.

What if I ask you to predict the weather without the help of the weather forecast program, installed on your smartphone? Would you be able to do it on your own?

Nicholas Carr analyzed various areas in which software helps people, starting from medical diagnostics and ending with modeling programs for architects. ‘We are already held captive by cars, but we don’t notice it, the absence of bars in our digital prison creates an illusion of freedom in us’, Mr. Carr is sure.

Healthcare: Pro & Con Arguments

When it comes to medical aid, technology becomes really significant. Many complex operations would not have been possible without modern medical equipment. Every year, devices become more accurate and more perfect, thanks to which patients can worry less.

Predicting Epileptic Seizure

According to the World Health Organization, 50 million people worldwide suffer from this disease. The biggest harm is that you never know when the next seizure is going to occur. But for all its cunning, patients with an epileptic syndrome have already got one advantage. Recently scientists have implemented a specific testing system, which analyzes brain activity. The prognostic artificial intelligence model allows preparing to the uncontrolled condition. 

With the assistance of artificial intelligence, an epileptic seizure can be foreseen an hour before it. It is very helpful when driving a car, for example. The automated system recognizes the upcoming seizure with an accuracy of up to 99.6%. Therefore, taking that into account, the driver will stop the car and take medications preventing an accident. 

Digital habits and addictions

There is the other side of that coin. Mr. Carr, whom we turned to earlier in this article, pays attention to the fact that we cannot underlay the ability of technology to cause addictions, which hurts mental health.

This is very simple to track with people in the subway train. If you look at them, you will notice that most passengers are concentrated on their devices, usually smartphones and tablets. In the past century, people were addicted to reading books but this was pretty good for brain development. Technological progress has led to digital addiction, which has altered the course of human life, having brought more diseases.

At present, about 4 billion people use the Web. This is 40% of the world’s population! Most of the kids and teens are enthusiastic about the Internet and videogames because they accept technology as entertainment. The typical problems caused by digital addictions in children are the following:

• A short attention span
• The syndrome of a delayed life
• Inability to make decisions and interact with other people out of social networks
• Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
• Computer Vision Syndrome
• Musculoskeletal problems
• Sleep disorders

Nevertheless, when dosing screen time, digital technologies can be a good change.

Solutions for Business

Investment Management

As business owners readily admit, the transition to rational automation of the economic activity of enterprises enhances the quality of workflows such as the following:

• Performance enhancement
• Risk management
• Supervisory of quality
• Management of financial tools
• Investments accounting
• Work with clients

 Entrepreneurs are sure that management software for the investment industry is a requirement of the time. That is why the most successful investment corporations worldwide are ruled by assisting automated software such as SimCorp Dimension and similar ones. 

Talking in the context of SimCorp Dimension software, the buy-side company gets a unique kit of integrated tools giving a real-time overview of the entire business processes. It manages current business flows within the front-, middle-, and back-office automatically without a waste of time, anxiety and headaches.

Thanks to technological know-how, companies increase incomes, reduce operational risks, and can easily give the customers and stakeholders clear explanations of why the established goals have been or have not been reached. The smart software for a business purpose has been already applied on all continents, so that you can imagine the globalization of workflows automation, particularly within investment businesses.

Simplifying Personal & Commercial Relations

In terms of the commercial of one mobile communication provider, modern devices connect people. It is hard not to agree with this statement. With phones, Skype, WhatsApp and other wonders of our everyday life, we can be connected to anybody independently on location.

We can go shopping online without leaving home and do banking transactions without waiting in line. It is possible to have consultations via Skype, so you do not have to waste time getting somewhere physically. From this very point of view, modern technologies are overkill comfy and do simplify things! 

Due to well-applied technology, lots of new employment variants have appeared. Such usual for updated people phenomena as a freelance and self-employment in Internet projects (vlogs, blogs, youtube channels, etc.) were nonsense several decades ago. An interesting fact is that more than 570 new websites are created every minute. The pace of tech development is evident, and each of us is involved in this process.

Concluding...

Do inventions make life easier? Is living in an automized world more complicated? Probably yes, in some way. The idea that a person and the tools used by humans influence each other is not new. People have been talking about this for two thousand years. But now this problem has acquired a completely different scale.

 Humans change the world permanently. Changing the surrounding reality interface, the toolmakers are eager with an idea to build a paradise on the Earth. On the other hand, lots of people are strongly convinced that we have already got the ideal world because the most precious resource is human.

 What do you think? 

Best regards,

Sergii Oliinyk

?? SimCorp Dimension Business Analyst & Project Manager