“We are paying an extremely high price—one we often seriously underestimate—relative to the benefits obtained and expected from technology, which are uncertain and often misguided. It is often difficult to restrict the application of certain technologies to charitable purposes.” This is what Diego Hidalgo Demeusois, author of the book “Anesthetized: Humanity Under the Empire buy phone number list of Technology,” speaks (or rather, writes) , with whom I recently spoke at the event “Technology: Ally or Enemy?” organized by esGlobal to mark the book’s launch.
During the meeting we put on the table issues such as :
How vulnerable are we to technological failure?
Are we unlearning more than we are learning because of technology? How can we rebalance that relationship?
Algorithms, artificial intelligence, big data: do they help going on a language trip for easter? why not! us make decisions or do they manipulate our will?
Is digital surveillance a new economic model? And if so, how can we stop it?
How to differentiate truth from falsehood in this digital environment?
To what extent do large technology platforms exert influence over the clean email economy, politics, society, and our lives… and how can we counter this power?
“Anestesiados” is an openly technocritical, though not technophobic, book. Hidalgo Demeusois defends the need to reflect on how technology has changed our way of thinking, making decisions, and relating to one another, to the point of becoming increasingly invasive and autonomous. Among his proposals are the following six:
1. The attention economy
“If the concept of the “attention economy” is often used, it’s because ally or enemy? many companies in the digital world have a business model in which revenue depends directly on the time users spend on their app, given that it generates data and advertising revenue. Today, the fundamental objective is to maximize consumption time . Hence, companies try to create a dependency relationship, as they compete with each other for user attention.”