Technology did more good than harm this decade
A look back at the decade's uneasy verdict on technology: a tool that solved real problems while creating new ones around isolation and polarization.
Here is how most people think technology works: You have a problem you need to solve or a task you need to accomplish, and then you use technology to do it. Technology, in other words, is a tool. In the era of social media and the smartphone, people had needs — to connect with others, to find out information, to entertain themselves — and tech provided a solution.
The trouble, we now know, is that in providing solutions to some problems, technology created a whole host of others. Having the world's information at your fingertips lets you slip into a bubble of your own reality; finding like-minded people across the globe can give hatred a home; and having a social feed with all sorts of people can lead to rancour and polarization.
So as the decade draws to a close, instead of the celebratory tone people used in the 2000s when discussing technology, the conversation is laced with skepticism. Is this truly the "decade when tech lost its way"?
Source: TheWeek.com, by Navneet Alang, December 23, 2019.