seed Design Responsibly
As newer, innovative forms of technology get into design, its easy to get amused and carried away by the magic of what we created and to get detached ourselves from the human side of it
A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all women, men, and children. We are biologically, cognitively, physically and spiritually wired to love, to be loved and to belong. – Dr Brene Brown
As newer, innovative forms of technology get into design, its easy to get amused and carried away by the magic of what we created and to get detached ourselves from the human side of it.
I was attending the Designup conference last week and Alysha Naples, previously Senior Director at Magic Leap Inc, spoke to us.
“We have to slow down, observe and think critically. We have to anticipate the unintended consequences. - Alysha Naples.”
As a designer, That invited my attention to the one below and took me further into understanding unintended consequences of design
Technology, a boon? or bane?
We, as a technocrat, shower a lot of praises over technology and its ability to overcome men in certain areas. However, There could be some unintentional consequences that would lead to catastrophic events.
Tay: Super Cool to Super Abusive in a day.
Microsoft are the parents of Tay, a super cool chat bot which (or should i say who) is built as an experiment towards conversational understanding.
“The more you chat with Tay, the smarter it gets, learning to engage people through casual and playful conversation” - Microsoft.
The conversations Tay had with people was astonishing and it did got smarter as the company claimed. But, the unintended consequences where yet to come. In less than 24 hours, Tay became a racist, abusive chatbot and Microsoft had to pull it off the internet.
Tay’s conversations are a joke, but it does raises lots of questions, like how are we going to teach Artificial Intelligence to use data without incorporating the worst traits of humans? how do we program AI in such a way that it would ignore the human trashes even though it is designed to feed on the data human’s provide?
This would question our entire assumptions towards designing the technology. Should we design to create a better experiences for the user or should we thrive to mesmerize users by the technical terms that we use in the product?