By: Jack Weiman
This week, I continued to participate in course modules for “Foundations of Humane Technology”. After completing four of the eight modules last week, I was very excited to finish the other half. This course in general has made me see a lot of things differently than how I once viewed them and I think that it’s really important to incorporate some of these lessons into my everyday life and future.
Module 3 starts off by introducing us to externalities and the role that humane technologists play in identifying them and accounting for them. Externalities are unaccounted side effects from new technologies that are introduced to human communities. They are called externalities, emphasizing the “external” because companies that introduce these new technologies don’t pay the costs for them. We learn that there are positive and negative externalities and that before building and releasing technology, humane technologists need to understand what these externalities might be. In today’s society, people at these companies who cause externalities often ignore them because they are financially incentivized to do so. In return, people with the least amount of power often have to pay for them. Companies not caring about their customers and only caring about income is becoming a pretty normal thing that I feel is starting to become more and more recognized. To put this in simpler terms, the module gives an example that I have modified. Let’s take a company like Amazon, who ships out packages with prime delivery with very fast shipping. Some externalities from something like this would include harmful emissions from their vehicles and immense amounts of waste from packaging products. Externalities like this are caused all the time by companies who care only about financial growth, even if it comes at the expense of others.
In Module 6, they discuss democracies and checks and balances. We learn about technological solutionism, which is the temptation of the digital age to fix everything by using technology to track behavior. While wanting to solve social problems is encouraged, it cannot just be one person or group coming up with solutions to problems that aren’t solutions to others. Here in the module is where we start to learn about checks and balances in democracy. We are then taught that in democracy, when one group has decision-making power, another group needs to be there to keep them in check, balancing out the power. However, for these large technological companies, there is no other group to keep them in check. Companies often like having a low number of engineers in relation to a large number of consumers or customers because it means more profit for them. This module continues to discuss how sometimes there is a difference in what certain communities need. Technologists for one community might create something that works for them, thinking that it works for other communities as well, when in reality they might not have experience with that other community and have no idea what is really right for them. Technologists may have good intentions, but just might not be educated enough on other communities when they think they are.
In Module 7, we learn about what the ultimate goal of a humane technologist is. The module states that the answer is to support the thriving of life. One of the main objectives of this module is to approach and understand the concept of thriving. It starts off by giving us some examples of what thriving is not. Thriving is not something we deliver to users, distracted downtime, short-term pleasure, or absence of pain. Rather, thriving can be a lot of other things. Thriving can be grouped into balance, acceptance, care, intimate relationships, and minimizing regret. Along with these, it can also be finding pleasure and meaning. Personally, thriving to me means enjoying life and growing as a person.
Module 8 is essentially a conclusion to the whole course. It discusses all that we have went over in previous modules and allows you to reflect on your experience. There are several key takeaways that I found very important, with one of them being that in order to solve our largest global issues, we cannot allow technology to distract us or separate us, rather it should be building us up and strengthening our weaknesses. Another very important lesson that I remembered was how companies claim to be giving users what they want, when in reality they are only giving users things that they can’t help themselves from looking at. These large companies focus on interaction and user attention rather than what the user actually wants to see.
Overall, I would say that this course was great. I found it really interesting and I am really glad that in broadened my knowledge in this field. I feel like this course discussed a lot of things that I had already somewhat known about, but nothing to the extent of the depth that it provided. For anyone that hasn’t taken this course yet, I would strongly recommend it.
Citations:
Center for Humane Technology. (2022). Foundations of Humane Technology . Participate. Retrieved October 9, 2022,
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