Opinion - The benefits, risks and challenges of modern technologies |28 June 2022

This is one topic where no introduction is really necessary. Almost every reader will possess some kind of mobile communication device and will, in most cases, have experienced unprecedented change during his or her lifetime within the context of technological development, innovation and application.

On one level we benefit from internet services, generic and specific information technology, rapid and increasingly sophisticated telecommunications, new power sources and biotech developments, enhanced AI and robotics on our production lines, and the prospect of a golden era of increased leisure and shortened working weeks. However, every socio-economic development has what economists would refer to as positive and negative externalities. In other words new technology poses risks to the individual as well as the collective, while continuing to take centre stage in all aspects of our virtual communication. The trick is to manage technology so that benefits are expanded while negative side effects are sustainably controlled. But this is easier said than done, which is why the dystopian aspects of technology have, for many decades, been a staple element of science fiction literature and cinema.

We can begin by clarifying the main areas of technological impact.

1. Societal

New technologies have shaped and redefined our behaviours and inform every aspect of our daily lives – including how well we sleep. We employ technological devices to communicate, to shop, to educate ourselves and others, to produce and work, to entertain, to lobby and to demonstrate the perpetual reality of ourselves through social media platforms.

And yet we are increasingly aware of the risks; mental health degradation, general stress, anti-social behaviour, lack of physical exercise and a general sense of malady are commonly experienced by human beings who have elected to distance themselves from what we might call ‘real’ interaction with other people and the world.

2. Economic

The technological revolution differs from the previous events – agricultural and energy/machine-based which have previously transformed the way people work and live. The difference is a matter of speed of change. The world economy has been totally transformed in just half a century. The first personal computer was developed in 1971. The internet was invented in 1989. The first ‘smart’ telephone was sold in 1994.

It would be an error of Luddite proportions to claim that modern technology is a dark art, however the pace of its development and the rapid insertion of technological devices into every nook and cranny of modern life does raise concerns – chiefly about how we have adapted to so much that is new in such a short time.

New tech has created opportunities for democratising the world through the fast and broad sharing of information and knowledge, albeit largely within an unregulated system. But humans have been forced to keep up with the programme and assimilate constant change. Younger people have found this more palatable perhaps, but the attendant risks related to the use of digital communication systems (for example cyber-crime, loss of privacy, misinformation and deception) increase exponentially and constantly.

3. Environmental

With less travelling and more renewable energy (through new technologies) the world has a chance to improve its environmental footprint and to make great strides towards a circular economy with less pollution. Thus new technology can reduce consumption and pollution and can contribute towards cleaner air, soil and water. The risks centre around the considerable amounts of energy required to enable new technology. E-waste is increasingly becoming an issue, along with higher radiation levels.

4. Political

Governments can now choose to operate in faster, easier and more transparent ways. People are better equipped with access to information, whether for administrational purpose or for opinion making. However, misinformation either accidental or deliberately contrived by misleading (but in some cases influential) agencies, can pose a threat to a free, fair and functioning democratic pluralism and exchange of information. At one extreme social media can motivate radical political change – reference the ‘Arab Spring’ for example. At another it can simply overwhelm the consumer with contradictory ideology and ‘facts’ which cancel each other.

The impacts of the spread of the internet

While accepting that the term ‘new technology’ is extensive, it is appropriate to focus at this point upon internet usage – or rather the impact of this. Why? Because while robotic surgery or AI ‘companions’ for the elderly might one day assist people in Seychelles the numbers will remain demand-driven and therefore relatively small. Use of the internet however is extensive across the islands, through computers, tablets and – increasingly – mobile phones. The internet is in schools, in homes, in cars – in fact anywhere where a signal is present and we have the hardware to access it. There is a related health issue here, for there is no long-term data on the impact of 4G and 5G radiation constantly passing through our bodies. ISP companies will assure us that all is well, but the fact is that nobody knows the effect of this new permeation over a period of, say, 40 years.

However, when it comes to the effects of the internet upon the work and leisure of societies we are on safer ground, with more reliable data. There was a study conducted in the United States in the 1990s, when the internet arrived – was ‘rolled out’ - state by state. A correlation across internet availability and usage, crime statistics, usage of restaurants, cinemas, theatres etc reveals some interesting material. When the internet arrived in each of the states, sex related crimes went down. One thesis that was suggested was that people who would have gone out to commit these violent acts were potentially at home watching representations of them online. Research also indicates that for the first time in 100 years teenagers less sexually active; the suggestion is that virtual sexual activity has to an extent mitigated the need for direct physical activity – and indeed the time needed to do it. A study in Ireland concluded that boys who had internet access expected their partners to indulge in sexual practices learned from online sex sites. If we direct our attention to terrorism we encounter a number of problems – indoctrination – ‘grooming’ – as well as detailed instructions for the creation of weapons and explosive devices. However there is a counter argument that suggests that people (mostly men) who potentially could have committed violent and real acts have found online computer games where they can satiate that need.This highlights a delicate and complex interpolate between technology and human behaviour, with the internet having potentially distracted people from doing things that otherwise would have been perpetrated in the ‘real’ world.

Questions for the future:

1. Where do the major risks of “new technologies” lie?

There is increasing evidence of social media and ‘smart’ ‘phone usage having negative impacts upon emotional health, mental equilibrium and physical wellbeing. However we need to remember that the term ‘new technologies’ extends far beyond its everyday usage by ordinary people. The temptation is to focus on this because it is the most evident as we live our daily lives, within family structures which have changed radically in the light of new technology. Take meal times for example; the dinner table represents social fabric, something which holds together the family, where you off-load and share and converse.

If we observe a family of four seated at a restaurant not talking to each other, but rather each engaged with their personal communication device then it is hard not to see this as indicative of a deterioration of family life and direct human interaction. But if we extend our vision to include the radical advances being made in medicine (surgery being carried out by robots for example), artificial intelligence (AI), renewable and sustainable energy systems and space travel and exploration it would be difficult to categorise such elements as negative, even though many of them (the advance of AI being an example) come with attendant risks (think of dystopian Sci Fi movies where the machines take over…)

Perhaps the main risk in generic terms is that the dehumanisation of the species will continue and accelerate and that people will no longer draw upon personal experience and interaction with others when forming their social and professional behavioural templates but will instead develop positions based upon virtual experiences.

The idea that we can control our virtual dependency is naïve. During the Covid-19 pandemic we have realised that psychologically it is detrimental to socially distance yourself. One can say that within the virus context we had no choice. But as we emerge from the pandemic restrictions it will be tragic if distancing continues on a voluntary basis through the isolating effect of internet dependency. This dependency is so powerful that we tend not to question it or ourselves.

To close with two alarming Council member anecdotes: “I recently saw a young couple with a baby in a pram and there was a screen attached to the push chair”. And “I observed a two-year-old child with a book. He seemed to be stroking the pages. Then I realised that he was swiping an illustration in order to move on to the next one…”

2. What solutions can be proposed for a more balanced, reasonable, and controlled use of technology?

Of course, legislation can be brought to bear which seeks to control the nature and application of new technologies and in the recent past big tech companies have been fined by governments for anti-competitive monopolistic practices, control of dangerous content and tax evasion. However, when we examine the most radical shut-downs of entire platforms such actions are invariably linked to state censorship, as is the case in China and other authoritarian states.

The internet is a lost cause in terms of regulation of content simply because it is unregulated as a mechanism. A government can remove Facebook from most of its population and ban online content which in any way contradicts or compromises that government’s ‘truth’, but globally the internet is a virtual bun fight – a maze which the online consumer negotiates in most cases without training or preparation.

One reasonable response is to consolidate and extend the efforts made in schools to teach young people about the benefits and dangers of new technology. This would be within the obvious context that every lesson taught will to an extent be out of date, with curricula unable to keep up with the latest developments, some of which will be, in any case, in the shadows of R & R.

One of the former leaders of Microsoft has said that we need an internet driver’s license, meaning that children are educated about the dangers as well as the benefits of the internet. Having effective firewall systems in our schools is all very well, but if the child goes home to unlimited and unsupervised internet access then they will need to regulate their own actions. In some homes the computer has replaced the television, the baby sitter and parental care and quality time. As with driving on roads, where one needs to understand traffic signs, traffic limits, the way to behave, the technology behind it and so forth, so the internet license would prioritise safety – but in this case mental and emotional safety rather than the physical wellbeing of the driver and others. To conclude the analogy; a car can take you from A to B very quickly but the same car can also become a lethal weapon if mishandled. The internet is the same thing, it allows you to go from A to B very quickly, but needs to be ‘driven’ with an awareness and a knowledge of its potential, capacity and risk.

Support for individual people (often young people) who succumb to addiction to virtual activities such as gaming or social media posting needs to be increased; the links between such addictions and the degrading of mental and emotional health is well researched and documented. One expert commented that the biggest growth industry in the wake of increasingly sophisticated Virtual Reality access will be psychiatry.

In Seychelles we might feel less vulnerable than people in other, larger nations, with faster and cheaper connectivity. Internet provision remains extremely expensive here, which in itself is some discouragement to over-use and over-dependence, however, as with drugs, those who need to fund extensive access will find a way to do so.

In common with so many other positions adopted by the Mahé Council this issue will be most effectively addressed in Seychelles through the modification of the school curricula.

Perhaps one solution to the negative side of social media and the erosion of ‘family time’ would, ironically, be to use technology to regulate itself through the development of an app which uses algorithms to measure how much time is spent with the family v/s the time spent online.

The danger is that many people – with the young being especially vulnerable here – get their need for love and connection met through social media rather than through interacting with other human beings. And social media platforms have been created not to provide opportunity for users to enlighten themselves or grow emotionally. They have been developed to make huge sums of money through the marketing of highly addictive packages. A responsible parent would not give a child the key to the drinks cabinet and say “here you go just help yourself”, and in a way busy parents who allow their children to self-determine their social media use at the expense of family interaction are doing pretty much the same thing. An app would work like stabilising wheels on the back wheel of a two wheeler cycle – it would support good habits and prevent accidents.

3. How do we integrate new policies and regulation to be effective and beneficial, with the aim to protect societies and the environment from harm and degradation?

We need to be careful not to adopt a ‘Big Brother’ position here. History is littered with examples of politicians and their technicians who have sought to determine what their populations should and should not access ‘for their own good’.

We can with some justification agree on strategies which protect the environment, or those which enhance the health of our people (the recent vaccination programme against Covid-19 for example). There are many and varied positives in the new tech landscape; machine learning and speech recognition, medical diagnosis, predictive analytics, extraction and statistical arbitrage, smart home security systems, autonomous farming equipment, wearable health monitors, smart factory equipment, wireless inventory hackers, biometric cybersecurity scanners and so on. Information technology that can gather its own data will prove to be increasingly valuable in the domain of personal health.

These things can deliver better outcomes and experiences for people at lower costs.

But it is much harder to agree on which ideologies, images and reportage are ‘harmful’. How do we decide if a narrative is anti-social or damaging? And who decides this? The danger is that such a road invariably leads to censorship, a position which is essentially anti-democratic.

So a template is required; one which is rooted more perhaps in the practical than the ethical. We can, as a small society, probably reach agreement quickly and comfortably on the benefits of, say, enhanced medical care technologies, or ‘smarter’ traffic control systems, or algorithms which help us to better monitor and protect our fish stocks. But when it comes to ‘protecting’ societies from, say, online content, we have to accept that if we do this, society (or more likely governments) will appoint arbiters of taste – people who decide on what should and what shouldn’t be available for people to consume, consider and evaluate. This is dangerous territory; far better that we educate people to be able to discriminate ethically, intellectually and morally between what is right for them and what is not.We really need to educate young children on how to channel, how to focus, how to be in tune with themselves, engage in reflection and deep thinking. We need to help them to recognise the short comings and possible threats of the internet from a very early age.  

Contributed by the Mahé Council Think Tank

Disclaimer:

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Seychelles NATION newspaper