Reading Response 7

Principle 7.9 in Artful Design states, "Use technology to harness the power of human". In this part of the book we discuss crowdsourcing, and making use of abilities human have to complete certain tasks which are naturally easy for people but difficult for computers. This is exciting to me because I'm doing a project (unrelated to this class) which relates to mass storytelling and collective intelligence. I'm interested in how we can use the scalability of technology to foster human connection, understanding, and collaboration, and to magnify (instead of replace) human potential and intellectual discovery. The discussion of the Mechanical Turk, the original one, is an apt metaphor but also is, in my opinion, somewhat narrow-minded about what crowdsourcing is and can be (no offense, Ge). I think that too often we think of crowdsourcing as a method for solving a task (like winning at chess) or, as of late, collecting data to train a model with. What I'm interested in is not only the result of the crowdsourcing but the experiences of the crowd itself -- Mechanical Turkers don't know each other and, as far as I know, don't usually interact or collaborate, but what if they did?

It may feel trite, at this point, to say that technology has the power to connect us, because all social medias claim this. Social medias claim to be able to scale human connection, but when we look at some of the largest ones -- Facebook, Instagram, Twitter -- it is clear that this initial mission has become convoluted and in some cases entirely lost. Social medias are no longer about connection -- they are about performance, and curation, and profit, and social status. No platform, in my opinion, has yet succeeded in scaling human connection. In my opinion, the reason this is so is because tech companies are greedy, and since they have succeeded at amassing a crowd they are fixated on what to use the crowd for -- most often, to turn profit. In doing so, they have stopped seeing the crowd for what it really is -- a crowd of human beings, each a highly multidimensional individual person, with thoughts and feelings and relationships. In capitalizing on the human need to feel seen and be understood, they have skewed the user incentives towards gaining more followers, getting more likes, etc. But what if users were instead incentivized towards things which genuinely and sustainable fill their emotional needs, like being kind, helping others, and making genuine connections?

This long ramble is all to say: I understand Ge's sentiment in his statement "Use technology to harness the power of human". I know that he means "don't use technologies to do tasks in place of humans; use technologies to aid human ability". And I agree with this. But to me this statement still reflects a somewhat dehumanizing view of the humans involved in the crowdsourcing (the crowd being sourced, if you would), and I think we can do better -- humans are much more than just power to be harnessed.

Edit: I read the rest of the chapter and I realize now that Ge does go on to talk about how we can use games (and hence technologies) to connect people. Oops.