Consequences<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nHumans have come to live in massive networks of operationally related technologies, which have come to form whole ecologies and infrastructures supporting every aspect of conscious experience. Ultimately, this new human reality constitutes a technological epoch with distinct material characteristics and societal dynamics.<\/p>\n
They argue that technologies are created with both values and material outcomes in mind. When technologies are brought into the world they create a future: material, social, psychological, and cultural.\u00a0 Changes to human behavior and value systems may play out over the long term as second- or third-order effects, but they are nevertheless part of the matrix of impacts in which technology innovation must place itself.<\/p>\n
They argue that the ecology of technologies surrounding the smartphone\u2014the smartphone technology ecosystem\u2014has resulted in an epoch-making shift in how humans relate to each other and the world around them. It has changed human behavior and psychology more profoundly in just two decades than perhaps any prior technology (religion, cultural movement, or empire) ever did in an equivalent timeframe.<\/p>\n
The scope of its impact on human society is difficult to estimate because of its far-reaching and intimate impacts on the very nature of human communication, thought, and social organization.<\/p>\n
The smartphone has become central to human existence because humans highly value communication and information. But an inevitable result of enabling communication at a distance is a change in how humans value face-to-face interaction. Instant messaging and \u201cFacetime\u201d have come to replace in-person contact as the default modalities of communication. Easy access to nearly unlimited information also inevitably changes the value we place on skills such as memorization, information recall, and the ability to study and learn from books. A GPS device on your phone is designed to get you where you need to go, and it does that. But it does much more – over time reducing your ability to navigate without it.Axiological (Values-based) Design Thinking<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nAccording to the Consilience Project, this is design that acknowledges that in addition to whatever its physical impacts, it is also affecting the behaviors and thus the psychology of the people using it (and with proliferation, the society as a whole). As such, technological innovations must have design goals and constraints related to the psychological and sociological effects as core elements of the design process.<\/p>\n
Instead of assuming technology is either good or bad by definition, technology should be understood as intrinsically value laden and value creating. As technologies take hold and proliferate, they should be understood also to have the potential for forming new, unknown, and unpredictable values. Technologies are both encoded forms of human values and at the same time encode potential and unknowable new values, for better and for worse.<\/p>\n
Technological Design Assumptions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n- Technology is created in pursuit of values, and results in the creation and transformation of values. Technologies change and augment existing systems, both determined and unintended<\/li>\n
- Technology requires the creation of more and different technology; multiple new technologies evolve together as functionally bound sets, forming evolving ecologies of technologies.<\/li>\n
- Technology comes to form a \u2018second nature\u2019 shaping our bodies and movements as a human-created habitat, and thus is deeply habit forming, both for individuals and societies. Cities and homes in the 21st century constitute a fundamentally new kind of environment within which humans are continually adjusting themselves. We are thus formed and forming, shaping the environment as it shapes us.<\/li>\n
- Technology changes the nature of power dynamics in unpredictable ways, creating an environment that advantages some humans over others, setting up selection pressures that force personal adaptation to and adoption of new technologies. As technology spreads there is a cascade of new social pressures that reconfigure existing personalities, worldviews, and value systems. Sometimes, adopting a new technology becomes basically obligatory. Technology creates a need for itself; it makes itself valuable.<\/li>\n
- Technology impacts the kinds of ideas we value, the quality of attention we pay, and our conceptions of self and world.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
The lessons of the last century have shown us that without a change to our fundamental approach, technology is likely to continue to damage the fabric of our minds, relationships, and cultures. Virtual reality could deepen society\u2019s problem of addiction and desensitize us to the pleasure of nature and offline life, or it could be a tool for immersive learning, allowing us to inhabit the experiences of others in previously impossible ways. Robotic automation could create technological unemployment and an unprecedented underclass, or it could help liberate humanity from drudgery and make positive changes to economic systems.<\/p>\n
Ecologies of technologies emerge in the context of existing social dynamics, such as inequality, conflict, and the usual games of power, money, and status. At one level certain technologies seem to favor the distribution of power and the freedom of users, yet at another these same technologies prove disproportionately useful for those who already have the resources and intelligence to take further advantage. While in principle everyone may have access to supercomputing via the cloud, in reality this \u201cdecentralized service\u201d tends to further advantage those already most advantaged. Multinational corporations and governments can use cloud capabilities to accomplish massive outcomes\u2014such as ubiquitous surveillance and the processing of big data\u2014whereas everyday people use it to store their photos and music.<\/p>\n
Existing ecologies of technologies and infrastructures must be judged by their effects on bodies, minds, families, cultures, and the environment. Future technologies must be designed according to methods that take human value and experience seriously enough to be constrained by their limits\u2014such as sanity, dignity, and justice.However<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nHowever this revolution in design thinking does not occur in a political vacuum.\u00a0 Rather just as we have seen the evolution of universities from institutions of higher learning and research into corporate institutions predominantly serving the needs of the political-economic system, the reality is that whatever the intentions of axiological designers, without a revolution in the fundamental epistemic basis of our society towards a REGENESIS framework and understanding, the continued story of PROGRESS and technological entrancement that has marked the modern and post-modern era, will continue to play out..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Roots of Our Crisis are Epistemic The Regenesis movement recognises that the roots of our crisis are epistemic. They are anchored in our deeply held worldview about the nature of reality and the privileging of humans over all other species and lifeforms. They are also anchored in the relationship between humans and technology, particularly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2918"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2918"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2927,"href":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2918\/revisions\/2927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regenesis.org.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}