1. Alone together: “The more connected we are, the more isolated we are.” –Kristen Lamb, author
2. The more young people communicate with tech, the less social skills they have.
3. The more tech fosters unity, the more it empowers fragmentation.
4. The more knowledge there is, the less we know of it.
5. We are in a state of information overload and information deficit.
6. The greater the amount of information available, the smaller the devices it goes through. Someday all knowledge will be available, but the device for accessing it will be too small to see.
7. Tech was going to lead to paperless offices, but it generates more paper faster than any preceding technology.
8. Tech generates more information than ever, but it’s more fragile than ever.
9. The more tech empowers business, the more it disrupts it.
10. However much good tech does, its potential for evil will always be greater.
11. The more powerful tech is, the less anyone controls it, and the greater the potential for corruption.
12. Costs of free services include privacy, and the use of and profits from our information. As the consumers, the producers, and the content, we sell ourselves to ourselves.
13. Costs of free services include privacy, and the use of and profits from our information. In Utopia is Creepy, Nicholas Carr reports that Google’s goal is “no longer to read the web, it’s to read us.” We’ve become the consumers, the producers, and the content. We’re selling ourselves to ourselves.
14. The Internet was created to help protect us, but more the tech we have, the more vulnerable it and individuals, institutions, businesses and governments are. The Internet of Everything will make everything smarter but more vulnerable.
15. The more tech serves us, the more we must meet its needs.
16. The more tech empowers commerce, creativity, communication, collaboration, and community, the greater its potential to lessen freedom.
17. Technology breeds frenemies; Amazon can be your best customer and your worst enemy.
18. The more tech increases productivity, the fewer workers can buy what is produced.
19. The faster tech evolves, the less possible it is to establish ethical ways to use it. Can overwhelms should.
20. The more timesaving devices we have, the less time we have. Someday, we won’t have to do anything, but we won’t have the time to do it.
Cutting the Power Cord That Binds Us
Tech is a relentless, implacable, and accelerating force we can’t understand, predict or control. We embrace tech’s benefits unaware of their individual or combined consequences by themselves or with climate change and globalization.
The idealism that may inspire techies is undermined by ego, profit, fear of disruption, competition, ambition, the need to grow and satisfy stakeholders, and an innovate-or-die pressure that forces values to yield to interests. Companies become more concerned about profit than people and the planet, the essential sources of sustainability.
A cartoon show two Native Americans standing on a mountain looking at another mountain in the distance from which puffs of smoke are rising. One says: “Makes you wonder how we ever lived without it.” Like puffs of smoke, Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft will be disrupted. But they have more power than is good for them or the human family.
Yet despite its dangers, technology gives writers more power than ever, not just to make a living but to make a difference.
Author:
Michael Larsen Author Coaching
michaellarsenauthorcoaching.com
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