Kip Currier; Question Technology
Ars Technica’s Timothy B. Lee’s 12/30/18 “The hype around driverless cars came crashing down in 2018” is a highly recommended overview of the annus horribilis the year that’s ending constituted for the self-driving vehicles industry. Lee references the Gartner consulting group’s "hype cycle" for new innovations and technology:
In the self-driving world, there's been a lot of discussion recently about the hype cycle, a model for new technologies that was developed by the Gartner consulting firm. In this model, new technologies reach a "peak of inflated expectations" (think the Internet circa 1999) before falling into a "trough of disillusionment." It's only after these initial overreactions—first too optimistic, then too pessimistic—that public perceptions start to line up with reality.
We’ve seen the hype cycle replayed over and over again throughout the World Wide Web age (and throughout recorded history), albeit with new players and new innovations. Sometimes the hype delivers. Sometimes it comes with an unexpected price tag and consequences. Social media was hyped by many through branding and slogans. It offers benefits; chief among them, expanded opportunities for communication and connection. But it also has significant weaknesses that can and have been exploited by actors foreign and domestic.
Since 2016, as example, we’ve acutely learned—and are still learning—how social media, such as Facebook, can be used to weaponize information, misinform citizenry, and subvert democracy. From Facebook’s “inflated expectations” Version 1.0 through multiple iterations of hype and rehype, to its 2018 “trough of disillusionment”--which may or may not represent its nadir--much of the public’s perceptions of Facebook appear to finally be aligning with a more realistic picture of the company’s technology, as well as its less than transparent and accountable leadership. Indeed, consider how many times this year, and in the preceding decade and a half, Planet Earth’s social media-using citizens have heard Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg essentially say some version of “Trust me. Trust Facebook. We’re going to fix this.” (See CNBC’s 12/19/18 well-documented “Mark Zuckerberg has been talking and apologizing about privacy since 2003 — here’s a reminder of what he’s said”) Only for the public, like Charlie Brown, to have the proverbial football once again yanked away with seemingly never-ending revelations of deliberate omissions by Facebook leadership concerning users’ data collection and use.
To better grasp the impacts and lessons we can learn from recognition of the hype cycle, it’s useful to remind ourselves of some other near-recent examples of highly-hyped technologies:
In the past decade, many talked about "the death of the print book"—supplanted by the ebook—and the extinction of independent (i.e. non-Amazon) booksellers. Now, print books are thriving again and independent bookstores are making a gradual comeback in some communities. See the 11/3/18 Observer article "Are E-Books Finally Over? The Publishing Industry Unexpectedly Tilts Back to Print" and Vox’s 12/18/18 piece, “Instagram is helping save the indie bookstore”.
More recently, Mass Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were touted as the game-changer that would have higher education quaking in its ivory tower-climbing boots. See Thomas L. Friedman's 2013 New York Times Opinion piece "Revolution Hits the Universities"; five years later, in 2018, a MOOCs-driven revolution seems less inevitable, or perhaps even less desirable, than postulated when MOOCs had become all the rage in some quarters. Even a few months before Friedman’s article, his New York Times employer had declared 2012 as “The Year of the MOOC”. In pertinent part from that article:
“I like to call this the year of disruption,” says Anant Agarwal, president of edX, “and the year is not over yet.”
MOOCs have been around for a few years as collaborative techie learning events, but this is the year everyone wants in. [Note to the author: you might just want to qualify and/or substantiate that hyperbolic assertion a bit about “everyone”!] Elite universities are partnering with Coursera at a furious pace. It now offers courses from 33 of the biggest names in postsecondary education, including Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Duke. In September, Google unleashed a MOOC-building online tool, and Stanford unveiled Class2Go with two courses.
Nick McKeown is teaching one of them, on computer networking, with Philip Levis (the one with a shock of magenta hair in the introductory video). Dr. McKeown sums up the energy of this grand experiment when he gushes, “We’re both very excited.”
But read on, to the very next two sentences in the piece:
Casually draped over auditorium seats, the professors also acknowledge that they are not exactly sure how this MOOC stuff works.
“We are just going to see how this goes over the next few weeks,” says Dr. McKeown.
Yes, you read that right:
“…they are not exactly sure how this MOOC stuff works.” And ““We are just going to see how this goes over the next few weeks,” says Dr. McKeown.”
Now, in 2018, who is even talking about MOOCs? Certainly, MOOCs are neither totally dead nor completely out of the education picture. But the fever pitch exhortations around the 1st Coming of the MOOC have ebbed, as hype machines—and change consultants—have inevitably moved on to “the next bright shiny object”.
Technology has many good points, as well as bad points, and, shall we say, aspects that cause legitimate concern. It’s here to stay. I get that. Appreciating the many positive aspects of technology in our lives does not mean that we can’t and shouldn’t still ask questions about the adoption and use of technology. As a mentor of mine often points out, society frequently pushes people to make binary choices, to select either X or Y, when we may, rather, select X and Y. The phrase Question Authority was popularized in the boundary-changing 1960’s. Its pedigree is murky and may actually trace back to ancient Greek society. That’s a topic for another piece by someone else. But the phrase, modified to Question Technology, can serve as an inspirational springboard for today.
Happily, 2018 also saw more and more calls for AI ethics, data ethics, ethics courses in computer science and other educational programs, and more permutations of ethics in technology. (And that’s not even getting at all the calls for ethics in government!) Arguably, 2018 was the year that ethics was writ large.
In sum, we need to remind ourselves to be wary of anyone or any entity touting that they know with absolute certainty what a new technology will or will not do today, a year from now, or 10+ years in the fast-moving future, particularly absent the provision of hard evidence to support such claims. Just because someone says it’s so doesn’t make it so. Or, that it should be so.
In this era of digitally-dispersed disinformation, misinformation, and “alternate facts”, we all need to remind ourselves to think critically, question pronouncements and projections, and verify the truthfulness of assertions with evidence-based analysis and bonafide facts.
