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June 1, 2010 By Chad Vander Veen
Children born this year will grow up in a much different America than the one you or I knew in our youth. I believe people born in the 1800s bore witness to more social and technological change than any generation in history. Imagine coming into an America where phones, electricity, automobiles, airplanes, TV, oil, suffrage, civil rights and social security were largely nonexistent, and leaving it with these things becoming commonplace.
But the next generation of Americans may experience even greater upheaval. As my 2-year-old son grows, it's likely he won't be educated the way children have been taught for centuries. There really is no longer a need to memorize facts and dates. These, of course, can all be Googled. He may never have to lug a heavy backpack around school because electronic readers may soon replace textbooks. There's also a good chance he will never know a dependence on oil as renewable energy technology flourishes.
Much of the emerging technology that will change our world is created with the idea of offering greater convenience. Search engines, smart phones, Netflix, social media - these are just a few relatively new developments that have made modern American life easier than it has ever been. But can too much convenience become a bad thing?
In this issue, we feature several stories that tell the tale of still more technologies designed to make policy, governance and even punishment more convenient. Across the nation, analytics technology is being deployed that will alert us to traffic buildups, energy demands and to infrastructure that's on the verge of failure, all before anything actually happens. Even policing the streets is becoming more a matter of ones and zeroes because of maps and software that predict where crime will occur.
All of it is enough to make one wonder if face-to-face communication and other human interactions will soon slip suddenly into relic, having yielded to the onslaught of technological convenience.
In the Disney-Pixar movie Wall-E, a vision of the future is depicted in which humans exist only to fill hovering chairs that glide their obese bodies between the mall and the pool, all while being served by robots delivering lunch in a cup. Characters communicate with each other via video screens, oblivious to others and their environment.
Wall-E, of course, is science fiction. But as so many headlines have read, science fiction often becomes science fact.
You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.govtech.com/public-safety/Does-Technology-Make-Our-World-Too.html
Collaborative Justice: Transforming Criminal Justice Services Through Unified Collaboration
Cloud-Based Services Accelerate Public Sector Adoption of Video Collaboration
In a word, "Yes"! I'm trying to instill in my kids (both under the age of 16) that convenience should be close to the bottom of the list of choices when it comes to solving problems.
You mentioned being able to Google any information someone might need. What if "the Internet" is down? What if there's a major power outage and on-line information isn't accessible? Perhaps more importantly, reliance on Google (and all other search engines), I believe, can lead to the mind set of "I found it on Google, so it must be true." That to me is very dangerous. As the infamous leader of Germany during WWII said, "keep telling people lies long enough, and they will (begin to) believe them." I view technology as a tool, a complement to the number of choices I have in trying to arrive at a solution to a problem. One Spring Break, my family went to the East Coast. We stopped by the original Jamestown (VA). In the gift shop, there was a bumper sticker that pointed out that when Jamestown was founded, survival was more than just a game. I believe an over-reliance on technology can lead us back to a similar survival-based way of life. Last comment. You mentioned the movie Wall-E. I think a more telling movie is 2012. The people who are saved are those who bought their way onto the Arks. At the end of the movie, the world is dramatically reshaped, and the wealth of the survivors is non-existent. I would have saved farmers, miners, electricians, plumbers, masons, construction workers - people who could literally rebuild the world.I think that we should not confuse convenience with efficiency and productivity. What you are describing is the natural progression of the human race- to improve the overall quality of life by doing things faster, better, and with more accuracy than previous generations. If anything, human interactions are climbing exponentially- albeit in ways and means that our forefathers never dreamed of. I also submit that the quality of conversations has improved- with technology serving as a massive melting pot that has brought together the unique viewpoints, values, and ideas of various cultures and walks of life from around the globe.
As far as analytics are concerned, it is important to remember that their use is but a natural extension of our human capacity. As the amount of captured data increases dramatically, our inate ability to process and make sense of that data is stretched to it's limits. We should not waste nor fear this information- we should embrace it and utilize it to augment, but not replace, our decision making ability. In particluar, this is how government organizations around the globe will be able to streamline and improve their operations - thereby improving citizen outcomes - during the global economic reboot that we are now experiencing. As you can tell, I am a big fan of the application of analytics in government- for more of my take (and others) on the subject, please visit our blog at: http://blogs.sas.com/statelocalgov/index.php