I’m not quite sure when this happened but at some point we began relying more on technology to make decisions for us and less on people. How many times have we been faced with a situation were a customer service representative tells us, “I’m sorry the system won’t let us do that.” Oftentimes there is a logical reason for why you need something done or changed and the system just doesn’t allow that to happen so you end up trying to find a workaround which ends up causing more problems in the end. Most of us experience this daily in one way or another; whether we are dealing with flight upgrades, purchasing a product at a store, or going to the gym. Technology ultimately drives virtually everything we do.
We rely on technology to tell us how to deal with and how to interact with people which can become a problem. What’s a bigger problem is the fact that people are designing these systems to make sure that the technology keeps us from coloring outside of the lines.
Eventually this will lead to the death of human decision making altogether. Technology exists to help support human decision making, to provide alternative options, to help analyze decisions, and to help guide the decision making process; not to take it over entirely. It’s actually a bit scary because if we continue to go down this path it’s hard to not imagine a future where we ultimately just act out the behaviors or actions that technology tells us to. In other words technology and computers will really take over the world and we won’t even realize it.
It’s not that technology will eventually become so smart that it takes over the world, it’s that humans will become so absorbed and reliant on technology that we will just become pawns moved by the invisible hand of technology.
