If you’re thinking biohacking and becoming cyborgs, that would make sense. It’s often how we look at technology and it’s role alongside human evolution. A new technology is coming, get ready for it. It’s going to change everything we are told. Sometimes is does. But this is not the next trend when it comes to technology.
The next trend is less about the technology and more about actually being human and doing human things. This is not a rejection of technology. It is culture reacting to the sociocultural changes brought about by so many digital technologies.
Perhaps counterintuitively, when culture starts to push back against technology is when technology becomes more interesting and exciting opportunities arise for those who figure out how to leverage the changes.
When a revolutionary or sometimes even just an advancement in an existing technology comes along, it tends to change our sociocultural systems. Much as the internet and the technologies that leverage and rely on it have.
At first we tend to react fearfully. Think of the recent arrival of Generative A.I. (GAI) and how suddenly it was disaster for humanity looming on the horizon. There were the proponents too. As always. When the internet started to take off in the late 90’s it was often called a fad and the dangers were everywhere.
Today, the internet is everywhere. We know the dangers and we’re working towards sorting them out. It is similar with GAI and AI as a whole. It is the same with genetic engineering and other digital technologies.
We are moving towards a tipping point where all these digital technologies that have changed culture are leading to the point where culture starts to push back and begins to change the technology. No technology in the world can last against the forces of culture. This is why technology improves.
The first iterations of revolutionary technologies tend to result in economic changes such as business models. Think of how consumer buying is shifting to online, but even now, over 80% of retail buying remains physical, not digital. eCommerce has yet to live up to the hype.
GAI is now coming for your email. Automated sales pitches, the ability to use a GAI tool to help you write or entirely write, emails. It is likely these GAI tools will only be adopted to a certain degree. Email remains a highly personal communication tool.
Governments around the world are moving faster on regulating AI than they did with social media and other internet driven technologies. Largely because bureaucrats and politicians better understand the risks to society than they did social media. This is good.
Many businesses large and small, are dealing with massive technology debt. Implementing AI tools is messy and more often an experiment than anything else. You might think that companies are very clever with their data and have sophisticated, well managed, very orderly data. They do not.
One of the biggest challenges for industry today is their data. And the more data they’re collecting, the harder it is to manage. The data storage, management and analysis industry is massive for a reason. We’re just not that good with data as we like to think we are or as marketers would have us believe.
Our broader behaviours on social media are changing as well. We share differently than we used to. We know that what friends may share on social media is often not the reality. Increasingly, there are tools to block ads and we are more willing to pay to not have ads thrown at us in a deluge.
There is a growing push by civil liberties groups, online privacy advocates and other civil society organisations to establish some form of identity management. As the saying goes, no one on the internet knows you’re a dog. Biometrics are touted as a solution, but they are a band-aid. They don’t prove “who” someone is. Digital identity is becoming critical.
In a large way, we are beginning to transfer the real world social behaviours, norms and traditions of our real-world societies into the digital world. We are starting to set boundaries on digital technologies and make them conform to our evolving sociocultural systems.
This doesn’t happen overnight. It’s also a rather messy process as most things human societies do is messy and non-linear.
Really good technologies work best when they become invisible. When they merge into the background and have become adapted to the changes that have happened in sociocultural systems and those systems in turn, have changed the technologies.
In this way, technologies start to become more useful and beneficial to society. The technologies that don’t serve our economies, industries and societies well, are shoved aside. In part, these are market forces at play. In other parts, they are sociocultural systems at work. This is being human.