【1990 Archives】

990 Archivesheadlines are everywhere.

Social media makes us narcissists. Screen time atrophies the brain. Work is inescapable. We sleep less, weigh more, and report higher levels of depression … all thanks to the onslaught of tech.

On the other hand, many of technology’s benefits are undeniable: longer life spans, reduced poverty, and the democratization of both knowledge and opportunity.

The question is: Can we bring humanity and tech into harmony?

To find an answer, I connected with some of tech’s biggest names — executives at places like Dropbox, Deloitte, Canon, Polycom, and more — as well as a few of tech’s lesser-known stars. Their answers point toward hope in our work, commerce, and connections.

Humanizing the tech we work with

Workplace communication is often lamented as the very antithesis of humanity.

Memo-driven hierarchies, reply-all email chains, and “new cover sheets on your TPS reports” are partly to blame. But the real disease lies deeper: namely, control, our desire to solidify tools and processes from the top down.

Ironically, the antidote comes from a relationship to tech that unshackles tools and processes, instead, from the bottom up.

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Dropbox CTO Aditya Agarwal:  

“Technology should work for people, not the other way around. It succeeds when it fits seamlessly into our lives and solves real problems. Too often, it forces us to change our behavior to fit its own limitations. Think about how painful it can be to file an expense report compared to how easy it is to pay a friend with Venmo.” 

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Polycom Executive Vice President, WW Engineering Michael Frendo:  

“The future of work will be driven by technology, but technology — at home and at work — is and always will be bound by the desires, wants, passions, and needs of human beings. In enterprises, it’s a trend known as the ‘consumerization of IT.’ More and more, the tools we use at work are being driven by consumers, instead of management. The professional rise of text and video, for instance, is a direct reflection of that same rise in our day to day lives.” 

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Deloitte Chief Innovation Officer Ragu Gurumurthy:  

“Technology should be viewed as a way to better connect, rather than divide, human interactions. For example, AV/VR technologies combined with ubiquitous, broadband capabilities could enhance the collaborations of workers in remote locations.” 

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CEO of Quip, a Salesforce Company, Bret Taylor:  

“At its core, work is about communication. It's about people sharing work, ideas, and opinions. Productivity suites were built to facilitate this — but that was a long time ago. The way we communicate has shifted dramatically since then, and we need not a better but an entirely new way to work together.” 

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Making commerce relevant and inclusive

To say the Internet fundamentally changed commerce is an understatement. However, the gulf between physical and digital products — as well as the gulf between the haves and have-nots — has been a bane since its inception.

For consumers, more automation often means less individuality. Especially when it comes to irrelevant marketing and the disenfranchised. Can technology bridge these worlds? 

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Shopify Plus VP & General Manager Loren Padelford  

“The lines between ecommerce and commerce are blurring as more and more brands look to experiment with traditional retail models. Pop-up shops for product drops and digital showrooms where people can co-create through VR, AR, and 3D are just two examples.” 

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Hubspot Co-Founder & CTO Dharmesh Shah  

“Paradoxically, I think machines are going to help us make our relationships with our customers more human.” 

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Convince & Convert President Jay Baer  

“The key is to remember that technology — even AI and cognitive — serves at the pleasure of the people. It’s easy to be seduced by the multitude of magic wands at our disposal, but it's always about the wizard.” 

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Tala CEO & Founder Shivani Siroya  

“There’s a misunderstanding that technology is somehow neutral or unbiased, which is simply not true: anything made by humans is going to be biased, so we need to have a bias for inclusion."

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Fostering connections that don’t add to the noise

Perhaps the most daunting challenge is how tech affects relationships. Study after study not only documents the increasing time we spend behind screens but also their interpersonal dark side.

Of course, how we use technology is far more important than what and when. Setting aside its abuses — and, in some cases, combating them — means leveraging our new-found interconnectedness for “the good.” 

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Canon Director of Internal & External Communications Melissa Dara Moritz 

“We need to remember why technology is evolving in the first place: it solves real problems and connects people.” 

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Buffer Director of Engineering Niel de la Rouviere  

“We released a feature called Content Suggestions in 2014, and there was a substantial bump in platform use. Many users loved it. However, we noticed that some were sharing identical posts without reading them.” 

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Xandra Co-founder & Head of Product Jess Thoms  

“With the rise of chatbots and voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home, talking to computers is becoming the norm. The challenge at this point is how to personalize interactions, and connect humans and computers on a more intimate level.” 

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BITNATION Founder Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof

“Technology has the ability to connect people across the artificial lines in the sand we call nation-state borders. At BITNATION we're using the blockchain technology to help people create their own nations, based on their beliefs and desires, rather than on where they were arbitrarily born.” 

Make “technology about people and not about technology”

Writing about the patron saint of innovation, columnist Jason Hiner explained, “Steve Jobs’s most important contribution will be that he made technology about people and not about technology.”  

Is there hope for the future of humanity and tech? Certainly. This doesn’t mean the pitfalls are easy to avoid, but it does mean they’re far from inevitable.

Tangible buying experiences, serving the underserved, the “consumerization of IT,” and crossing traditional borders all point to the power of tech to reinforce our humanity rather than undercut it.

After all, humans aren’t merely dominated by tech. We are its creators and hope lies in the image of ourselves we stamp upon it.

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Aaron Orendorff is the founder of iconiContent and a regular contributor at Entrepreneur, Lifehacker, Fast Company, Business Insider and more. Connect with him about content marketing (and bunnies) on Facebook or Twitter.

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