Life and work have looked very distinctive during the pandemic, and technology has taken on a more critical role. For many, socializing takes place through an app called Zoom. That goes for children in school, too. Family hangouts take place outdoors and six feet apart, or on a FaceTime call. Much of these drastic changes could be here for years, even after the Covid-19 vaccine is widely available. For modern humans living through “digital revolution,” new technology has helped usher in new forms of socialization through the internet. It allowed for the formation of online communities and helped enable rapid globalization. These technologically-abetted societal changes arose a slew of what could be called “Luddite reactions,” in that they’re reactions to technological progress. Harvard Business School’s Debora Spar says that’s not surprising.
Spar lays out three major technological revolutions that reshaped human sociability: Agricultural, Industrial, and Digital. She further goes on to say that technological advancements during these periods had, quite literally, revolutionary effects on how people lived their lives. To conclude, have a look at some thought-provoking words about our future.
- “Machines don’t have a morality. Technology doesn’t necessarily have a morality,” she says. “It’s up to us as humans to put the rules in place, to impose our morality on the machines that we create.”
- “Those of us who are living through the digital revolution have a moral obligation to try to bend this arc of history in a moral direction,” “Technology determines lots and lots of things, but we the humans still control the technology.”
- “We are approaching a period where the role of humans as producers is really going to be up for grabs… we have machines to do most of the things that have characterized our identity, kind of forever.”
