Stop the Future

Let’s Learn to Use Digital Tools Responsibly Before We Create Any More of Them

Published:September 26, 2005

On a lovely September weekend I attended Accelerating Change a conference devoted to empowering humanity with technology. The speakers, all brilliant and from all walks of life, were almost unanimously exuberant about a future where technology would be accelerating the rate of change faster than ever.

While I love technology as much as the next person, I think it’s the responsibility of those who believe they can architect the future to build incentives to do the right thing directly into the hardware and software.

eBay is a great example of this. People who are good, honorable sellers on eBay, are rewarded by other comments and ratings. Good sellers make more money than bad sellers. Imagine if we could reward children who didn’t resort to cyberbullying or downloading illegal movies and music, or plagiarism.

I called my talk the cautionary tale of what happens when you throw tools out to consumers (especially kids) without the prerequisite education about the issues. I pitch some radical solutions like a tithe that the digital industry would pay. The money would be used to create good curricula.

Unless we talk about good use of tools we’ll have more scandals like Jayson Blair, Rick Bragg, and Stephen Glass in journalism. We’ll have more corporate fiascos like Enron, Tyco and WorldCom. At their core, e-mail and poor research and communications habits played a part in the outcome.

The last slide in the presentation has a little quiz for you. How would you answer the questions we face in a digital world each day.

Take a look at my Powerpoint Presentation from the Accelerating Change 2005 event.