Invasive (?) or beneficial technology

I was going to put this in an essay to publish, but I thought this blog would be a better forum.

On 24th November, 2008, I attended the launch of the newly named Information and Communication Technology Research Institute (ICTR), a research strength at the University of Wollongong (UOW). Dr Hugh Bradlow, a former academic of UOW, who is now the Chief Technology Officer of Telstra Australia, presented a 20 minute keynote entitled, ‘Innovation in the 21st Century – it is no longer about bits and bytes’.

He made a number of comments including stating that his generation had left the current generation with a lot of problems including climate change, the decline of fossil fuel, and an ageing population. He based the rest of his brief speech on the idea that new technologies and increased dependency on them will enable us to solve these problems.

Dr Bradlow stated that now we leave home with our wallet, keys and mobile phone, but that in 10 years time, we will only need to leave home with our mobile phone as our mobile will operate contextually in various ways including fulfilling the role of access to vehicles, access to our bank accounts, and the ability for inanimate objects and actual people to be able to assume and provide for our needs and wants.

Bradlow’s focus was on the ubiquitous mobile phone becoming ever more ubiquitous and invading our bathrooms, bedrooms, offices, commutes and menus in an ever-increasing fashion. He stated that our increased dependence on digital technologies will not only help our lives to be improved by “increasing the productivity and efficiency of society”.

Examples of these ‘personalized technologies’ that will know where you are at all times are:
• your house will sense when you are about to arrive home and so will turn on the air conditioning for you
• your bathroom will recognize you when you get up in the morning and display your calendar for the day on the bathroom mirror
• your coffee will be made by the barista just as you are arriving in the work carpark so that it is hot when you walk in the door
• you won’t need a screen to look at as you will be able to wear a pair of glasses that will project the ‘screen’ on to your eye’s retina

Why would we want to become more dependent on digital technologies? Why is this ‘good’? Why do most people accept and take up these new developments? Are they buying into the disputable concept that “we are what we have” (Johnson, 2009, p. 127)?

Currently, as I am unable to read the gamut my own emotions and anticipate my own needs and wants, I am unlikely to concur that a machine will be able to do it for me. I may just end up throwing it into the ocean off a very high cliff.

How will these new technologies not end up controlling us? Another statement he said was that the last 25 years of the 20th Century was about technologies being developed by humans, but the first 25 years of the 21st Century will be about technologies adapting to us. It seems that the next step we should take on the form of a cyborg, made possible in one way by having a microchip embedded in our body; our microchip will be our mobile phone and comprise our ability to communicate and function in post-post-modern society.