The User Experience Revolution and its impact on Human Society – TechNick
By CoperNick
Renato Cortesini
November 23, 2018
Since the onset of civilization, humans have ceaselessly visualized and built tools — such as wheelbarrows, hammers, the printing press, or tractor-trailers — to solve problems and spur their own evolution. These disruptive innovations have consistently led to major economic, cultural, social, and political breakthroughs. Humanity is now on the brink of another world-altering shift; ever-expanding computer technology is leading us to remarkable changes and raising thought-provoking questions about our future.
We have come a long way to reach this point. Around 350,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens developed a uniquely-structured, powerful tool that facilitated communication and social cooperation: language. In fact, alone among animals, we humans wrestle with both the future perfect tense and imaginative abilities.
Subsequently, the domestication of animals — which occurred around 10,000 years ago — begot the Agrarian Revolution, a remarkable transition from foraging to farming. Gradually, novel cooking techniques improved food production, spurring population growth and enabling community settlements and urbanization.
Agricultural Revolution. Graziano Ottini
This tipping point was subsequently followed by a series of industrial revolutions that augmented human production and marked the shift from “muscle power,” to “mechanical power,” and, ultimately, to “cognitive power.”
The construction of railroads and the invention of the steam engine ushered in mechanical production (1760-1840), while the discovery of electricity and the invention of the assembly line, commonly associated with the Taylor-Ford model, fostered the development of mass production systems during the 19th and the 20th centuries.
In the 1960s, the computer, an empowering thinking machine, gave rise to the Information Age and the Digital Revolution, bringing about the current sweeping changes to our society we witness today.
Industrial Revolution. Di Cristiano Antognotti
The latter 20th century accelerated these far-reaching changes. The widespread development of semiconductors, personal computing (1970s and 1980s) and the World Wide Web (1990s) has enabled a worldwide democratization of knowledge, which has primarily benefited citizens from economically developed countries (in terms of Gross Domestic Product per capita). The downside to this has been exacerbated economic inequality between the rich and the poor from developing countries, due to a dearth of ample technological resources and global connectivity.
However, despite some of the negative side effects, information has become an invaluable commodity in the modern global economy, allowing individuals and organizations with access to certain forms of specialized knowledge to capitalize on significant opportunities.
Computer advancements have also altered what determines power in society. John Kenneth Galbraith, arguably the most influential economist in the post-World-War-II era, directly addressed the effects of technology on power dynamics in his seminal work, A History of Economics (1987): “Money is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge.” As we can see, information has itself become a commodity.
Technological Revolution. From Pixabay
But not all information leads to power. In his highly-acclaimed book, Post-Capitalist Society (1993), Peter Drucker, a leading 20th-century scholar in sociology and management, shed light on the symbiotic relationship between knowledge and efficiency: “An adequate information system must lead its users to ask the right questions, not just feed them with information.”
On one hand, since their advent, these “smart tools” have been employed to enhance our performance on cognitive tasks. They compound our understanding by ingesting and processing an extensive trove of data to identify patterns, which would otherwise have been unfeasible.
On the other hand, the user, incapable of winnowing out profitless data, has increasingly become overwhelmed by the immense flow of information available at his fingertips.
Thus, we have learned that we need to harness information in a meaningful way to make it work for us.
To this end, the ‘User Experience’ (or “UX,” a term coined by Don Norman in the 1990s) has been reframed to pave the way for more manageable, intelligent, and interconnected systems that are designed to predict more accurately not only what we are likely to buy, but also how we are likely to behave and what we value in life.
For instance, Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the largest hedge-fund company in the world, developed a software drawn upon extensive neuroscientific researches to map an employee’s skills and thinking abilities and then match him to the right role within the company.
Information sharing. From Pixabay
With this exponential computing power, integrated machines are now being primed to communicate with one another and to be used not only for information-gathering, but also for decision-making processes. New technologies will enable users to connect to an intelligent but decentralized user-to-user system in which they might input the issue they are dealing with and have exchanges directly with the highest-rated thinkers in the world. This model will give way to an even more intelligent UX economy.
Following this trend, some ethical questions will need to be unraveled: will humans be able to share not only information but also multi-sensory experiences, involving all the five senses? Will consciousness be a shared experience? And, what future tools will we be creating?
It is an exciting time for pondering humanity’s future, as well as a necessary time to reflect on future precautions.
