Technology has come a long way during my lifetime. I think back on my childhood nostalgically to a time when we were not attached to our devices. We went outside and climbed trees. We played sports with the neighborhood kids and communication was face to face. There were only four major TV stations and we had limits to how much we were allowed to watch. There was only one telephone in our house and two extensions. We had limits on how long we were allowed to talk on the phone. We watched movies in movie theaters some weekends and the movies were rated. You could not attend an R rated movie if you were under 18 years of age, unless accompanied by an adult.
The first computers available were very expensive. Our first computer was quite large and cost over $3,000, purchased by my dad in the late 1980s. It was a big machine, a big investment and took up a lot of space.
When cell phones were born, the first one’s were also big and clunky and extremely expensive. Only the very wealthy used them.
Douglas Adams and Gordon Moore were both futurists. Douglas Adams wrote a great science fiction story, (H2G2), about his thoughts, and Gordon Moore made a prediction in the scientific community which was corroborated many years later.
H2G2’s Babel fish was a fish used for the purpose of translation of foreign language. If you stuck a yellow Babel fish into your ear, you would be able to hear a translation of any foreign language being spoken. In 2018, Google came up with some Babel-fish earbuds called Pixel buds. They work with a Google translation app to provide a translation.
Tech companies are marketing products based on who their potential customers are. Google knew that H2G2 had a huge following and figured out that by using the Babel fish idea, they could gain a lot of interest. The power of persuasion that technology has is very serious.
Those of us who are in a position where we can influence others, must be careful so as not to unduly influence people for our own gain, ignoring the potential negative side effects it may have on them.
In 2018, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica were implicated in a massive data breach scheme affecting approximately 87 million Facebook users. The scheme improperly used data from a personality quiz on Facebook to profile and target a wider audience, by also harvesting information of all of the user’s friends. Cambridge Analytica harvested personal information on where users lived and what pages they liked. This helped build psychological profiles that analyzed characteristics and personality traits. The information they obtained was later deployed in political campaigns. A former employee stated, “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”
Obviously, not all of the data was obtained with consent, was stored by Facebook, and was sold to Cambridge Analytica in violation of terms of use.
This is an example where someone in a position to influence others used deceptive persuasion tactics and unethically obtained personal information from individuals.
As creators and designers, we have a responsibility to respect people’s rights, dignity and privacy. Ethics in persuasive design should take into consideration the disadvantages clients have in regards to interactive technology, and make an effort not to prey on those disadvantages.
Moore’s Law, named after Gordon Moore, former CEO and co-founder of Intel, is based on his prediction in 1965 that predicted the ability to pack twice as many transistors on the same sliver of silicon every two years for the next 10 years. His prediction held true for many years. Each year, technology has gotten smaller and smaller and cheaper and cheaper. Those big clunky computers that cost $3,000 in the 1980s now are much smaller, of superior quality, speed and affordable. Same with cell phones. Even children carry cell phones and computers today.
It is now believed that Moore’s Law no longer holds true. The physical limits to transistor scaling have been reached, although alternative approaches are being explored. It will be interesting to see what the future holds.