My 85 year old mum happily orders from Amazon, does her banking online, uses Facebook and streams BBC iPlayer, having never touched a computer until she was well into her seventies. My children use a multitude of connected devices with an expectation no different than turning a tap on and water flowing out of it. Their lives are entwined with technology from an early age at home and school.
Herein lies a problem, the last 20 years has seen technology move from the enthusiast and business world into the heart of our everyday lives at an incredible pace. The smartphone revolution must go down alongside the original mobile phone as one of the most significant, and rapid, adoptions in history. Its significance is not just the device itself but more over what it has enabled in the broader ecosystem, and we are only at the start of that road.
Increasingly we control and manage our lives from a phone, tablet or laptop – from the basics of email and social media through to our banking, purchasing, media and even home security & heating. Our cars are acquiring a level of automation and integration that is quite mind-boggling – do you ever stop to think just how amazing satellite navigation is? And now self-driving cars are a reality.
So what is the problem? The concern I have is that the focus on usability of technology, which has driven fantastic adoption, has a dangerous side effect: people no longer understand the products they use – they simply just work, most of the time. The modern generation of user-friendly operating systems and interfaces hide all that complicated technical stuff from the user, often making decisions on behalf of the user with little or no interaction.
Surely these friendly, easy to use devices are great? Well yes, they are, up to a point. We are increasingly trusting those devices to act on our behalf and as machine learning and the ‘internet of things’ takes hold we will perhaps unwittingly hand over more and more control to our binary based assistants.
In many ways this is great – taking the boring tasks away – but the risk is that if we do not understand (at least at a high level) what they are doing we have no way of knowing whether they are operating for or against us, and with every technology there will be unintentional consequences and, depressingly, people using it less scrupulously.
A simple example was when Apple changed iOS such that phones would switch back to a 3G/4G network if they thought a Wi-Fi connection was not good enough. This seemed harmless enough until people started getting massive data charges from their mobile operator because at home their phone had switched to what it thought was a better 3G/4G connection rather than use the slower home broadband connection.
Then we have people blindly following satellite navigation directions and driving into a harbour. Technology is a tool and to use tools successfully you need to understand how they work and what their limitations are.
I grew up in an age where to use a computer you had to understand it, not necessarily at the lowest silicon level but at least the principles and building blocks – processor, memory, operating system, software, floppy drive, etc. Understanding those fundamentals meant that you stood some chance of working out whether the large rudimentary box in front of you was doing what you hoped it was.
Those building blocks have evolved and grown in number but many of the same principles apply and without at least some knowledge of how they work together the smaller modern black box becomes ‘magic’ to the user, and that magic can be good or bad.
A few years ago not understanding how your television or PVR worked really didn’t matter, the worst calamity was probably not managing to record the final episode of Bake Off. Now a few ill-informed clicks on a connected smart-TV can end up with malware and Trojans quietly feeding all your banking details and passwords to the dark web.
Having your passwords distributed across the internet is bad enough but what about your car’s management system being compromised? You wouldn’t drive your car with a flat tyre but how do you know the technology inside is not going to refuse to apply the brakes? Every week there are new attacks and compromises of systems – cyber-attacks are not just the domain of teenagers trying to prove themselves, they are a big element of the organised criminal world, and even governments.
The rate of advance in sophistication of attacks both technically, and through data gathering, maintains pace with the advances in technology to protect against attacks, so as one exposure is closed a new one is found. It’s too easy to think of attacks being purely about desktop & laptop computers, some of the recent high-profile attacks have been against devices such as home broadband routers, smart televisions, car remotes and even baby monitors. Technology will not stop advancing, nor will its integration into our lives, and neither will the use of technology for criminal activity stop.
I’m not anti-technology, my career has been based around it, but I am concerned that society is at risk at not keeping up as we move into a period where change over the next 20 years will be even more significant than the last 20 years. Machine learning and robotics are taking incredible strides forward and add new dimensions to how we see and use technology.
With this in mind I think the education around technology needs to take a step up. The European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) is a great initiative but why isn’t it mandatory in schools? Its name was a purposeful play on the car driving licence and we don’t let people drive cars without a licence. Cars and technology have different risks today but over time the risks from not understanding technology may be as great, if not greater than those from cars today.
The ECDL doesn’t go far enough though, it is too focussed on usage rather than understanding and principles. I accept this is a big challenge, especially with the rate of change but I believe that technology needs to be given a weighting alongside subjects such as English & maths in schools otherwise we are going to create another division in society and expose people to a whole new world of risks.
Like it or not technology is moving centre stage and some degree of understanding of it is more important now than ever before, even though our interface to it may be more and more abstracted.