Mamma Mia (a hand gesture of frustration). How penetrating technology is in every facet of our life during the Covid pandemic! In China, the rapid change of digital lifestyle is invasive. Without a smartphone, you probably feel like a lost soul in a Chinese city. If the pandemic continues in full force due to the uneven vaccine roll-out around the world, China’s color-based “health code” system that relies on mobile technology and big data may be a tradeoff for global citizens to return to pre-pandemic overseas travel. As I learn to coexist with Covid, will I see the cabin crew created by artificial intelligence in the near future? In fact, the other day when I was using Google Maps, it suddenly occurred to me if I still knew how to read a physical map. Will I be rejected if I enter a store in the U.S. like I have experienced in China because I don’t have a mobile application to pay? Will my American e-lifestyle gradually follow suit?
I see more Amazon Prime trucks than ever on our highways this year. I actually welcome Amazon’s practice to reward its members if they opt for package and delivery consolidation. I’m also thrilled to learn that DHL Express buys 12 electric cargo planes for sustainable aviation. Why doesn’t Uber Eats do the same to encourage returned customers for the same restaurant to recycle takeout plastic containers? Why shouldn’t local governments customize plastic bag taxes to reward constituents and merchants who have reduced the use of plastic bags and impose extra fees on those who refuse to cut back on individual plastic pollution?
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
—Socrates
“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” (「知之為知之，不知為不知，是知也。」)
—Confucius (孔子)
Thanks to Socrates and Confucius, I have to admit my ignorance of the large electricity consumption of the data centers. A data center stores and shares applications and data. The pandemic is benefiting many hyperscale data center operators as demand for cloud and digital services has skyrocketed. I read an old article about data center electricity use from Nature, a British scientific journal, and listened to its audio report (see below).
My takeaway is while we’re doing what we can to lower the carbon footprint of many businesses, shall we also encourage large data companies to source their electricity from renewable energy? Energy efficiency and energy conservation should go hand in hand. Likewise, climate adaptation and climate mitigation also should go hand in hand.
There are many floods and droughts with great intensity around the world this summer. They provide many case studies for scientists but no lessons learned for ignorant people of different socioeconomic status. What I take heed of is not how advanced our technology is but how limited resources are when disasters hit us. The recent flood in Zhengzhou, China led to a citywide blackout. In a nearly cashless society seen in China where people turn to their mobile phones for e-payment, locals couldn’t do the simple transactions with cash in a convenience store. Perhaps in the face of the increase of extreme weather, we need to reconsider if the phase-out of the FM radio network, landline telephones, candles and matches and a cashless environment are wise, especially for the underprivileged and seniors who live alone, to deal with natural disasters. How long can batteries last to support the flashlight on the phone in a blackout?
I also remember the massive blackout in New York City during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. People scrambled to libraries and public shelters to charge their phones. Such unexpected blackout phenomenon is seen in flood-stricken Zhengzhou in 2021 as well as in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s latest movie “In the Heights (2021).” How prepared are we for a record-breaking heat wave and hurricane season?
Mamma Mia (a hand gesture of reconciliation). If I have to name at least one writer’s block, I’d blame my slow-processing brain for not being able to convey my immediate ideas about Mother Nature. Her health is declining faster than my pea brain can absorb the latest scientific findings. Exponential technologies enable us to monitor and measure data in a granular way. At times, I think elites and intellectuals are competing for the best, fastest and most accurate award for their scientific findings. In 2014 the science journal Nature reported that the number of scientific papers published has been doubling every nine years since the end of the Second World War. Has the human brain and its complexity grown as fast as new technologies? How can we keep up with the fast pace of scientific reports? Do scientists consider collaborating with engineers and application developers or perhaps with artists and filmmakers? Can media professionals become volunteer educators to guide the social media-addicted public to improve their well-being? I’ll share my view about the importance of humanity-centered design in the following paragraphs.
One of the most authoritative climate reports is from World Meteorological Organization. In its “State of the Global Climate 2020” report, scientists concluded that despite setbacks from the Covid pandemic, global greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2020. Just like what we expect to see in Tokyo Summer Olympics, human beings love record breaking. The last decade, 2011-2020, is also the warmest on record. No doubt. We are heading for an irreversible future. My parody of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic motto—Faster, Higher, Stronger and Together—to forecast Mother Nature’s declining health impacted by climate crisis is “Warmer, Dryer and Fewer.”
Take my recent case study of myself interacting with my smart phone for example. I always believe my phone is so much smarter than I that I often decline its software update notification. Why do I need to use the latest feature? Why can’t I stay happy with the application that I just grasped? Why does the MS Windows on my laptop update automatically and set “allowed” on services by default? I literally have to google “how to disable” this or that on my latest edition of Windows. Our machines—big or small—are recording our online behaviors and making decision for us without asking. Mamma Mia. Mamma Mia.
This is why our technology needs to evolve from human-centered design to humanity-centered design. If the user is required to keep up to date with the latest version of software willy-nilly, the psychological, social and political side effects will snowball, and eventually they will hurt not only the user but also the developer. The documentary-drama “The Social Dilemma (2020)” explores these side effects.
If you prefer fiction, I’d recommend an old Hollywood blockbuster “Demolition Man (1993)” starring Sylevester Stallone, Wesley Snipes and Sandra Bullock. Together with the documentary film “The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52 (2021),” I find resonance in both movies with respect to my theory of human beings as guardians and destroyers of their own species. If you think the 1993 film is futuristic nonsense, I’m sad for you. Just looking around how the techno-geopolitics is playing out around the world, young people and unborn human beings may not have a full grasp yet of how terrible we—their adult leaders and friends, parents and grandparents—have left a dangerous, non-negotiable world to them. Thanks to aggressive technological business practices, for instance, our minors would rather believe they’ve lived by watching Ryan, a popular young Youtuber, to play with his toys instead of playing with their own toys as part of a life experience. I’ve also seen parents are giving electronic devices to their kids in restaurants just to quiet them down. Is this the contemporary definition of “human connection” of parenthood?
The movie of “Demolition Man” also explores the subject of big corporation monopoly and artificial reproduction. No more spoilers. I’m not a sci-fi writer but I’m an open-minded thinker. Can you imagine that humans are evolving into a new shape because we don’t use some parts of our body anymore? For example, we think less and use our eyes more often to visualize all sorts of experience on the screen. So the future humans will have a small brain, big eyes, a smaller nose and mouth—simply because we live in a singleton society that rejects body contacts. Ironically, teleconferencing and steaming videos won’t allow me to have a writer’s block. There’ll be too many YouTubers dying for a writer to write about them.
Mamma Mia (a hand gesture of pleading). The global loss of biodiversity and extinctions may never be recovered. If you are a fish, you won’t realize you’re living in the water until one day the water that envelopes you—the fish—is all gone. I pray for world peace and I ponder:
What if learning to coexist with Mother Nature is a state of mind not a science?
If you’re interested in knowing why humanity-centered design is the key to designing the best solutions to complex global problems, check out this video (click here) by Don Norman. (Video transcript is available in the end of this article.)
I never question the wisdom of mankind but I do question how technology is amplifying the mistrust and fear of people. Without advanced technology, Socrates and Confucius were almost on the same wavelength of how ignorant they were. Both of them were known for imparting knowledge to their pupils through dialogue. Perhaps in-person teaching and learning cannot be replaced completely by Zoom classroom and online teaching.
If the world is pitch dark in a massive blackout, can we keep calm and help one another? Our global response to the Covid pandemic shed some light. Shall we have more in-person dialogue instead? Can we think about how to coexist with others including non-human species and machines? What about improving our well-being by strengthening a social safety net for all? It’s never too late for us to make a good decision that will benefit not only ourselves but our successors who are also the guardians of this planet.
Don Norman's VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: 00:00:00 --> 00:00:31 Hi, I'm Don Norman, and over the many, many decades that I've been alive, I've transformed myself from – well, in the beginning, a technology nerd, and all I cared about was the latest circuit design and the latest new device or the latest new technology. And I've changed to now where I'm worried more and more and more about the state of the world, 00:00:31 --> 00:01:03 about the many societal issues that we are facing. Some of them are political. Some of them are economic. Some of them have to do with education, hunger, food, pure water, sanitation – major issues. How do we address them? Design is a mechanism because designers do things. They go out and they change the world. But we have to move design from designing small, simple things to designing systems, to designing political systems, 00:01:03 --> 00:01:33 to designing solutions to clean water and education and healthcare. How do we do that? Well, over the years I've come to develop something which is now called *human-centered design*. But we're talking about these big problems. It goes beyond individual people. So, is it really human-centered? Well, I could argue that, yeah, it's human-centered because suppose we say we focus 00:01:33 --> 00:02:00 on the tasks or the activities or the community or the full needs, it's still all about people in the end but it's bigger than human-centered. So, lately, I've been entertaining the idea of letting HCD stand, not for human-centered design, but maybe *humanity-centered design*. Now, some people even criticize that, saying, "Well, shouldn't you be designing for the environment? 00:02:00 --> 00:02:33 And that's not part of humanity." You could kind of argue it is because the reason we have to worry about the environment is because humanity – humans have destroyed the environment. But, I don't know. We have to find a way that really tackles the most important problems, but it has to be small enough that we can manage to do something. There are other issues. One is, I'm concerned about the way that we do design where experts come in and study. And send out the anthropologists. Understand what's going on. 00:02:33 --> 00:03:01 And come back with proposals that we present to the people who live there. And I think that's the wrong way; that's a dictatorship. That's the privileged people coming in and helping the poor underprivileged people. On top of that, most of us, we live in a *monoculture*. We live in a highly educated, usually a Western technology, Western-based philosophy. And the "Western" includes, though, the developing nations in the East – in Asia, for example. 00:03:01 --> 00:03:31 But because we're all learning from the same universities and we're reading the same books and we're going to the same conferences and we're talking to each other, so we all tend to be a *monoculture*. We all think the same way, and that can be a danger. Any monoculture is bad. Planting the same plants all over is very efficient until a disease comes and wipes them all out at once; whereas if we had many, many different plants, one disease couldn't wipe them all out; monocultures are dangerous. 00:03:31 --> 00:04:04 If we all tend to think the same way, it's not working well. Or it's not very robust and resilient when something happens. Now, there are other problems, too. The economic systems of the world, I think, are in bad shape. Adam Smith wrote this wonderful book called "The Wealth of Nations," in which he talked about the invisible hand of the market that can lead to wonderful results, and just like when ants are all doing their little things, no ant is intelligent, 00:04:04 --> 00:04:31 but the combination of millions of ants are incredibly intelligent. And that's what Smith was talking about; except that gets corrupted, and, in fact, in his book he talked about the different ways that this could be corrupted by people colluding, trying to work the system to their own private benefit. And that's happened in the world now. Too much of our economic system is being diverted from the rich and wealthy 00:04:31 --> 00:05:01 to the rich and wealthy, as opposed to everybody else. And so, we have huge discrepancies in availability of resources between the very wealthy and the very deprived. The political systems are also damaged. And, you know, the internet today has become the internet of lies. How do we know what's true and what's not true? How do we do evidence-based thinking? Evidence-based decision-making? 00:05:01 --> 00:05:30 Too much of what we do is based on hearsay, anecdotes, folk tales, rumors, and downright lies where people are deliberately trying to misinform us so we might do something that is harmful for us and perhaps good for them. So, there are many, many different issues in this world, and I am concerned about all of them. But I obviously can't address all of them. But what I can do is to try to band together with other people who might be addressing these similar issues, 00:05:30 --> 00:06:03 because I believe that we must change many things in this world. We must change the economic model we're following. We must change the dependence upon a monoculture where we all tend to think similar ways and similar thoughts and we're ignoring a lot of the cultures that come from the non-Western technological traditions – cultures that are very valuable and could teach us a tremendous amount of things. So, that's what I worry about, that's what I lose sleep over, and that's what I hope to work on for the few decades remaining in my life.