Is technology the end of happiness? —A request for your input.

As Alex Salkever and I were writing The Driver in the Driverless Car we kept coming back to questions we were having about how technology is impacting our happiness and our well-being. We know that technology will reduce the costs of nearly all of our material needs and is already doing so, rather quickly. But we became troubled by personal observations and observations of friends. We noticed that rather than us using technology to become happier and healthier, technology seemed to actually be telling us what to do and inducing us to make choices that may have scratched an immediate itch but at the cost of our longer-term well-being. We felt that technology was reducing our ability to choose and that the forces arrayed against the user to alter their behavior—the smartest PhDs, the latest AI algorithms, the ability to personalize offerings down to the zip code and even the household—was an unfair arrangement.

So we decided to write our next book on this topic. "Your Happiness Was Hacked" takes a balanced look at how technology has pulled us in and absorbed more and more of our lives by tapping into deep-set evolutionary and psychological features of the human brain and using those to grab our attention. 

But rather than just write another book bashing technology and warning about its evils, we wanted to be part of the solution rather than just complainers. We both realize we are not going to give away our smart phones and renounce our email accounts. But we do believe there must be a healthier way to interact with technology - and a healthier way for technology companies to develop technology. So the last section of the book will cover strategies to make technology healthier for us all. 

And we need your help. We want all of your suggestions on how both we as individuals can build healthier relationships with our technology and how the companies that make technology products—software and hardware—can redesign their offerings to factor in the longer term happiness of the users by, above all, giving users more ability to choose. We will be looking over all the suggestions and including some of them in the book.

Please post your ideas below. And thanks very much in advance!