By Zach Weigel
Amid all the coverage of the looming presidential election and the historic World Series, I recently stumbled upon an article that chose not to predict who would win. Rather, the article I happened to read chose to predict what our future world may not contain. The article came from the business-oriented online media platform Kiplinger.
The article addresses how products and services are evolving as technology advances. Specifically, the article drew my attention because it was titled “10 things that may soon disappear forever.” Call it click-bait, but nonetheless the content of the article was quite thought-provoking.
After all, who doesn’t like to think about how the future could (or will, as the article argues) be different. While I won’t cover all 10 items the article featured, I will address three that stood out to me as particularly fascinating.
First, imagine a keyless world. Well, maybe it isn’t even that imaginary already. Key fobs, the little electronically scanable chips, and other forms of wireless technology have made the old key obsolete. From cars that start with the push of a button to the simple scanning of a university ID to enter a building, it seems that the question is not, will traditional keys really cease to exist, but rather, when will keys be gone altogether? Furthermore, what will we do to replace the iconic shaking of keys before the opening kick of football games?
Moving on to thing No. 2, fast-food workers might be nearing the end of the line as kiosks and mechanization replace their jobs. Chances are you’ve probably already experienced glimmers of phasing out fast-food workers. Take for example the popular app OrderUp. It enables people to have fast food delivered right to them instead of having to go to the restaurant, essentially cutting out customer service. Moreover, calls to raise the minimum wage and escalating employer health-care costs further incentivize businesses to look for ways trim the number of employees by opting to supplement labor with machines that prepare food and computer systems that take orders. Undoubtedly, there will still have to be workers who oversee operations and clean bathrooms (we haven’t yet figured out how to bypass this treacherous task), but it is probably safe to say the number of fast-food workers has reached its pinnacle.
Last, the most frightening thing the article mentioned is the devolution of privacy. Facilitated by analytics that track and predict your habits online, software exists (and is already widely used) that records what you do. The recorded information is then used to predict things that you will like. For instance, have you ever noticed that the ads you see online just so happen to be things that interest you? It isn’t simply chance. Algorithms recommend things based on your previous interests and tendencies online. Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and countless other platforms use this technology, professing that it enhances their users’ experience by catering to individual interests.
Yes, in theory it sounds good that technology can promote things that users will probably like, yet at the same time, it may be chipping away at a person’s freedom. Although predictive technology assists us in making decisions, in doing so, it influences our behavior. In a sense it seems that technology is telling us what to do via suggestions that curtail our free will.
Is it good or bad that technology tracks our behavior? I don’t know, because there are clearly pros and cons, but it is something to think about as we enter a keyless world with fewer fast-food workers.
