Techno-Sceptic Thoughts

We are being told every day that technology will solve all our problems. But will it also create more hazards?

- Rajeev Srinivasan

AS A TECHNOLOGY strategist, I am often faced with a dilemma: there are many new technologies that have compelling value propositions, and there is a natural tendency to be excited about them. In these pages, I too have written about new tech—Machine Learning, Blockchain and Genetic Engineering (May 2016)—and its potential impact. Indeed, I have recently been looking at how blockchains may make transactions friction-free and intermediary-free.

But I am impelled to also look at the other side of the picture—what might be the downside of rushing pell-mell into new technologies that may have big downsides that we are not aware of? The principle of unintended consequences, if you will. This makes me a technosceptic. Some even call me, cruelly, a neo-Luddite.

Perhaps I am, but maybe the sentiment is more akin to the views of Chinese essayist Lin Yutang in The Pleasures of a Non-conformist. There is value, and indeed pleasure, in being a sceptic and a non-conformist. It is only human to be seduced by the new stuff, because it is so full of promise, and we are, I suppose, programmed to be optimists, but someone has to question the emperor’s new clothes.

Often the hype gets far ahead of reality (the Gartner Group’s Hype Cycle is an attempt to fit irrational exuberance and the consequent trough of disillusionment into a pattern). The cognoscenti become evangelists, and they cannot stand it if anybody—even a relatively neutral person—questions their facile axioms. But questioned these axioms must be, and the insiders often become quite bigoted and nasty, perhaps because they are industry employees with an obvious axe to grind. I spent most of my career in the computer industry, much of that in Silicon Valley, but I don’t feel that industry is sacrosanct.