Is information technology a solution or a new problem?

Dear all,

Reading the IEEE Spectrum report entitled “The view from the top” allows a quick assessment of how much a breakthrough is the Internet. This report presents the result of a survey made with 40 technology experts (among business top executive, academic institution’s managers and researchers, and others) regarding technological advances of the past, present and future. When questioned about the most important technology of the last 40 years, 9 interviewers directly mentioned the Internet, and 4 others made indirect reference to it, providing answers such as “information technology” and “global communication networks”. Moreover, these experts predict even more impact coming from telecommunication and information technology in the near future, since these are considered by 16 of the interviewers as the most important technology for the coming decade.

Assessing the results of these technological impacts makes it difficult to ignore the ‘gains vs. losses’ dichotomy that emerged from the latest advances. On the one hand, technology has presented society with new and more efficient ways to address important problems in people’s daily life. But on the other hand, it has also brought about some serious challenges. Most of these challenges have to do with coping with an incredible amount of information that people are expected to process in their work and life in general. For example, one may say that electronic mail technology has changed the way people communicate for the best. Email is often considered as a very effective way to communicate, since it is fast (i.e. the message arrives at its destiny very soon after being sent), asynchronous (i.e. the contacted person does not need to be there at the time the message comes, such as in a phone call) and relatively reliable (i.e. messages rarely get lost, and quick replies are generally issued if there is a problem with the receiver’s address). However, email has also caused some time and effort overhead on one’s routine, since one is expected to read his/her email box at least once everyday, and replies are generally expected to be soon (at most one or two days after the message arrived). If one of the above does not happen, the message receiver might become socially known as inconsiderate, lazy and/or unreliable. So the big question is: has the emergence of email resulted in a solution or in a problem? And the attempted answer here is: it has resulted in a little bit of both.

In human history, while trying to solve a problem, human kind has always caused others as collateral effects. This is the case with industrialization leading to deforestation and pollution, with long use of antibiotics for acute skin infections causing stomach pain, and why not, with technology making peoples’ living more comfortable in one side, and more tiring and difficult on the other. It seems that this is inevitable simply because humans are not able to predict all problems a solution might bring, and it seems people usually learn more by making mistakes than by doing the right thing at the first try. Thus, the best approach is to build over existing technology, generally improving the support. Still taking email as an example, the systems of today are much more flexible than those of 10 years ago, enabling people to provide automatic answers if they are not available, ranking messages by importance while filtering spam, and even attempting to provide answers to incoming messages.

In any way, this is a reminder that we shouldn't take for granted that technology is always good... collateral effects may be dangerous in various situations.

Kind regards,
Renata