Taming the Technology

Our Future of Work consortium is proving to be a delight. It’s really gained momentum, we have almost 170 topics (or threads in the open source jargon) under discussion with 200 people from 30 countries. So I guess we can really say this is a world-wide conversation.

We are holding a virtual conference on Monday morning so I’ve been looking closely at what we have all been talking about. More than 40% of the threads are about how technology will change the way we work. Sometimes the threads are really positive – it will be great to work more from home, or on a mountain, or at the beach. We anticipate holograms that take us around the world with no carbon footprint. Or full- scale video conferencing which allows a bunch of people to meet without leaving their breakfast tables.

So I guess collectively we are pretty chipper about technology. But behind these rather upbeat feelings there lurks a dark shadow. OK, we love technology, but we don’t like everything we imagine. Here are some aspects of the future, which seem to keep us collectively awake at night:

Isolation: We work from home and never leave the breakfast table – but is there anyone else around? With more people living on their own in urban sprawls, the spectre of isolation is never far away. And with isolation comes loneliness. Will technology leave us lonely and isolated – rarely seeing those we work with or care about?

Fragmentation: A couple of weeks ago I started to work with three pieces of technology in front of me (OK, I admit I’m writing this in bed on a tiny laptop – but it is Saturday morning). I write on an old but trusted Dell, I have a big expensive Mac open so I can look at attachments, and my i Phone because I love the way I can breeze through e-mails with it. I mentioned this to Marzia (who does our amazing graphics) and she looked at me blankly – ‘of course’. So I am not the only one with a fragmented life. About five years ago a group of psychologists followed managers around and watched how long they worked uninterrupted. What do you imagine they found – 10 minutes perhaps – or maybe 5 minutes of uninterrupted work? No – the average was 3 minutes; and the really spooky part is that even if they are not interrupted in 3 minutes they interrupt themselves (that’s where the three machines come in). Will technology fragment our world into one minute chunks?

Addiction:  I remember a few years ago one of my most glamorous friends – who also happens to be an eminent professor – telling me that every time her blackberry sounds an incoming email she gets a visceral response. Her mouth starts to water. Well, she and I know enough about psychology to trace that straight back to Pavlov’s dogs. She’d become addicted to the constant bling of the blackberry – I guess it’s not called a ‘crack berry’ for nothing. Will we become ever more addicted to being constantly connected?

I’d been mulling this over when I read a really interesting article in the newly launched UK version of Wired magazine. In it Kevin Kelly – US WIRED’s ‘senior maverick’ has concluded that technology is an unruly child ‘There’s no bad children, just bad friends. So it’s about training the technology, rearing it as if it were children’.

You can see his video on www.tedxamsterdam.nl or visit him at his web-site www.kk.org  ‘Technology’s a complex adaptive system that’s more like an organism than a gadget, and it has its own agenda’ he says ‘The technium – this system – can deliver tremendous benefits to us, but the downside is that it’s selfish. So that we have to discover what it wants to best maximise its benefits to us.- every new discovery in technology challenges our notion of what it is to be human and constantly shifts our identities –so we interact with it by evaluating it through action and then constant monitoring’

Hum – well not sure how to evaluate it – and he tells us nothing about how to train this unruly child. But being the mother of a couple of unruly children I have no problems starting the conversation about how we could treat technology as if it were a smart but unruly two year old.

Remember that you are in control; they are the child – you are the parent.

Set them clear parameters about what is expected of them – and stick with them.

Let them blossom and grow – but don’t let them destroy your own peace of mind or compromise your own preferred way of living.

Create a small set of rules about what is absolutely unacceptable, and stick with it.

Watch them carefully and monitor how it’s going.

Be prepared to create sanctions for misdemeanours.

So with this in mind I’ve put the old Dell, the smart Mac (which the kids insisted I buy) and my trusted iPhone on the naughty step. I wonder how long they will stay there?