Daily Archives: August 9, 2021

Eon's operating system can enable many new uses for a garment.

Your smartphone has already made you familiar with whats called an Operating System. An operating system lets the apps to talk to the device. You know it as either Apple AAPL iOS or Android. Conceptually, an operating system is a simple idea: a series of rules that software uses to interact with other software and hardware.

Now the concept of operating systems is moving beyond software and being applied to physical things; thats called the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT allows previously separate objects, like your lights or air conditioning, to communicate with other devices. You have seen IoT when an Alexa device adjusts room lights or garage doors or temperature settings. Over time, there will be a lot more such interaction between devices and things; operating systems facilitate those interactions.

Inevitably, connections of software to physical things will extend to the fashion industry. Imagine scenes like these:

You may be saying all of this sounds good but its far off in the future. Maybe it is, but we are seeing critical steps being taken right now for all of it and for services yet to be imagined. A company called Eon Group has created an operating system that allows manufacturers, recyclers, resellers, consumers or anyone to access complete and correct information about a garment or consumer product as smoothly as your email app gets your messages and displays them on your smartphone. Randall of Waste Management says Eons system allows us to get more materials to the top of the pyramid, where they can be recycled and re-used.

Eons operating system is getting real traction:

Natasha Franck, Founder and CEO of Eon, says, the relationship between the brand and the customer ends the moment that product is sold. But its really just the beginning of the product life cycle and the brand experience. Being able to use communication to extend that cycle and experience improves opportunities for the brand and experiences for consumers.

Annie Gullingsrud, Chief Strategy Officer at Eon, said, Eon introduces a language for those connected products to speak. Franck of Eon says, Fundamentally what were doing is very simple. Were [allowing brands or retailers] to manage it across its life cycle. That includes knowing what a product is, where it came from, who made it and what happened to it over time.

Recycling, resale and outfitting are obvious uses of a fashion operating system. But like your smartphone, once the system is in place, inventors and entrepreneurs are likely to develop more innovative ways to use the information. Industry analysts assume this technology will improve supply chain efficiency, reduce out-of-stocks and enhance marketing performance. Given the scale of the fashion and accessory industries, it is likely that the impact of this kind of information will create opportunities that are impossible to foresee right now.

Data in a report recently published by Sharpend, an IoT advisor to PepsiCo PEP , Campari, Levis and other consumer companies, says 53% of consumers would pay more for a connected product. 78% of U.S. consumers have already used an on-package QR code to engage with the product and a majority say they expect to do that more often in the next year. More than three-quarters of U.S. consumers have used connected packaging to learn about recycling or disposing of the package or product.

Cameron Worth, the founder and CEO of Sharpend, believes the fashion industry is not developing this new technology in the most effective way. About Eon, Worth said, we're big fans of Eon's proposition to the market, we think ... they have the strongest brand out there for fashion designers who want to engage in the connected space. But he believes the technology is distracting to brands. He said brands have to place experience before technology and right now ... most people are placing technology before experience. Worth thinks more focus is required on identifying a consumer pain point or exploring a transformation of new business opportunities with connected products. But the consensus among leaders is well articulated by renowned Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, a leading business strategy thinker. He says that these smart, connected products are likely to be the biggest IT-driven transformation yet, creating more innovation, productivity gains and economic growth than previous developments in information technology.

When personal computers were first created, it was not known that the companies that make the operating systems for them would become more important, and more valuable than the makers of the actual hardware. Operating systems have proven to be the underpinning of communications and operating systems are poised to move beyond computers now. Today the garment, fashion and accessories industries are still making products that cant connect with its customers or makers. With an operating system for the industry, recycling can take off, resale will be much easier and reliable, supply chains will be more efficient and the table will be set for new and innovative services to be developed. Like Uber UBER /Airbnb/Doordash/Instacart, an operating system makes physical objects more accessible and usable. Its hard to foresee all the ways those services will work before they begin but the impact on how consumers access and use fashion products will be massive.

Read more from the original source:

This Technology Will Have A Profound Effect On The Fashion Industry - Forbes

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Im Ezra Klein, and this is The Ezra Klein Show.

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So before we get into it today, were going to be doing an ask me anything episode of the show. If youve got a question youd like to hear me answer, email it to ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Again, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

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Todays show is about technology. And I want to be upfront about this. I would be useless without technology. I mean, Im for the first part, functionally blind without glasses. I cant see anything. Im a writer, but I have this terrible, unreadable handwriting that makes it difficult for me to communicate using a pen both you cant read it, but also I cant think clearly while doing it. Im so distracted by the way it turns out.

I got rejected for my college newspaper. And so the path I took into journalism it was completely built on a narrow technological moment. I happened to have a lot of free time because I was in college at the exact moment blogging became a thing. And that is how I got into journalism. And so I think of myself fundamentally as a techno- optimist. I mean, I believe that technology can make our lives better, richer, more fulfilling.

A lot of the things I care about politically, ranging from climate change to animal suffering to the dignity people have at work, it seems to me we are going to need big technological advances to make the politics of those things easy enough to overcome. But partly because Im so taken by the power of what technology can do for us, I think we underestimate and actually worse, we ignore what technologies to actually do to us.

We do not just use these tools. We become them. We are reshaped by them. This was a big theme in 20th century media criticism. And if you read Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman, it is all over their work. And it is still true. One of the critics carrying these ideas into the modern era, into our modern technologies, is Michael Sacasas, or as his pen name is, L.M. Sacasas. I know his work because I follow his excellent newsletter, The Convivial Society, which I highly recommend. What he does in that newsletter is interesting. He brings theorists of the past into conversation with the technologies of the present. And he does so to look at todays technologies outside of their current narratives and business contexts, to treat their evolution not as inevitability, but a series of choices we made, all of which should revolve around the human character and experience. And certainly, the way we evaluate whether or not these tools are serving us should revolve around the human character and experience

Sacasas recently did a piece in which he posed 41 questions 41 we should ask of the technologies we use. And technologys defined here broadly. Its computers and artificial intelligence and Zoom, but its also tables and alarm clocks and ovens. And what I loved about these questions is theyre ways of not just thinking about technologies, but about ourselves, and how we act, and what we want. And what, in the end, we truly value. As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Michael Sacasas, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

So I want to begin with a technological experience many of us have had over the past year. Why is talking to someone on Zoom so much more exhausting than talking to them in person or even talking to them on the phone?

Yeah, so the way I began to think about this early in the pandemic last year is that were abstracting the body from the act of communication. And not entirely in fact, Zoom in some respects provides more of a view of the body than, say, a telephone call does. But the body is really essential to the work of meaning making in communication settings. Right, so we pick up on all sorts of cues from one another to register whether someones paying attention or theyre losing interest, or whether theyre tracking with what were having to say.

There are ways in which we use our body to generate meaning. We might point or gesture. Body language, again, conveys a lot of the sense of the interaction. And so when were on Zoom, there are a number of things that sort of distract us from that. For one thing, if we havent hidden self view, we have a tendency just to look at ourselves in these settings. We see ourselves there and we want to make sure that we dont look too foolish in our presentation. And our eye glances at that.

Theres no need to get personal.

[LAUGHS] Im thinking just in my own experience. The camera is positioned in such a way that if I try to give you eye contact, I cant see your eyes and vice versa. And so we lose that ability to look into one anothers eyes. And again, I think were laboring. Our mind is sort of laboring when its used to using these tacit cues from the bodily experience, and it loses track of those or has a really hard time focusing on them. I think its just really laboring to just make sense of the kind of things were trying to talk about. And for that reason, I think it becomes exhausting. At least thats, I think, a big part of the picture.

One thing I loved about the piece is, you gave me language for something I was feeling, and then gave me courage to stop Zooming with people early in the pandemic, which there was this period when everything tried to move there. But something I reflected on a lot after it is, well, then why do I find it easier to be on the phone?

And I do think it comes back to this idea of the body. You talk about the body being there and not there on Zoom. You cant see it. You cant move it. Its micro-delayed, given what you would expect on the other end of the connection.

But youre also stilled. So on the phone, I cant see your body right now. You cant see mind. Weve turned off the cameras for all these reasons. But it means I can move around.

My body can be like a body, at least on my end, as opposed to a still body, because Im worried about your end. And just that point that what is happening in our bodies affects profoundly what is happening in our interactions with technologies and each other its pretty big, and its laced through your work. So I was wondering if you could talk a bit about it.

So Ive picked up bits and pieces from a variety of philosophers and theorists to kind of help me make sense of what were doing when were using technology. And at some point early on, it became clear to me that the body is a really essential part of this picture. I sometimes think of the body and the world in our minds kind of creating a circuit.

And so then, we introduce a tool into that circuit, and its going to shape how we perceive the world, and its going to shape how we interpret the world. And so the body is at the nexus of our experience of reality, and technology enters into that loop of perception in ways that can be benign, in ways that can be beneficial, in ways that can be detrimental. But it certainly changes it.

And so thats one important lesson that Ive taken from people like Don Ihde, who is a philosopher of technology, who I think is one of the ones that has kind of made this a central concern in his little branch of philosophy of technology. And I think its always useful to ask that question: how is this tool that Im bringing to my body, into my interactions with the world, shaping the way that I perceive the world, in often very subtle ways?

Were about to ask a lot of good questions like this about technology, but let me ask you about one place Ive seen you bring this, which youve made me attentive to, which is technologies that make you forget your body is there. Can you talk a bit about that?

Yeah, so many of us whose work focuses around the computer or around the workspace where we sit down to do knowledge work, I feel like we get very absorbed in that. Theres a tendency to just become absorbed in what were doing and to forget the needs of the body, right? Im thinking, for example, of this idea of email apnea, which was coined by Linda Stone, a researcher with Microsoft many years ago.

You know, you essentially kind of catch your breath when youre focusing on what youre reading online. Its one way in which it kind of upsets the ordinary rhythms of our bodily existence. Theres a lot of effort made to make our tools ergonomic, friendly to the body.

But more often than not, we find ourselves in postures that are not really great for us. And so we have to be reminded. We have an app that reminds us to get up every so often, so we dont stay in that position. So thats one way, I think, in which a very, very common work experience for individuals and an experience that frankly is not just limited to work can make us forgetful of the needs of the body.

So this begins to get at something you do a lot in your work, which is reverse the way we usually think of the ethics of technology. And you use it in this essay that will frame a lot of our conversation about 41 questions one should ask of technology. You begin with the example of a hammer. Now, a hammer can be used, you say, to build a home. It can be used to bash in a skull.

So one way of looking at a technology like a hammer is the ethics of it are simply what we do with it. It is just our ethics, transferred to the hammer. But you suggest a different question, which is, how does having the hammer in my hand encourage me to perceive the world around me? What feelings does it arouse in me? So tell me a little bit about that move, from us directing the technology, to the technology changing our experience, or the nature of ourselves.

A lot of thinking about ethics or technology traditionally a little less so now often involved the question of, what am I going to do with this tool? So hence, the example of the hammer. In this view, the tool is ostensibly neutral.

And I think thats the idea that I find myself pushing back against a good bit. So in one sense, it makes a certain amount of sense that, yeah, I can do good things with this tool, this hammer. I can use it to build a house or repair something, or I can use it to hit somebody. And in that sense, what matters is my intention and the use to which I put it.

So I want to push back on not the fact that thats untrue, but that its inadequate as a way of thinking about how technology impinges on the moral life or what we think of as ethics. And so the example that I give there with the hammer has to do with perception. So one of the key ways in which I think technologies fail to be neutral is that they shape how we perceive the world, and they dispose us in a certain way towards the world.

So the hammers a trite example. People often have heard the expression: to the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And this reflects the way in which, when that hammer comes into that circuit of mind, body, and world, it transforms how the world appears to us or what it makes us see the world as.

And so that is one example. A camera is another example. And by cameras, I simply mean the smartphone so many of us carry with us all the time, and how it kind of reframes aspects of experience as memories to be recorded, for example.

So we might have felt differently about experiences, seen it differently, without the camera in hand. But now that its there, even if we choose not to take the picture, for a moment, it has changed how we interpret what is happening or what is going on.

The camera is such a good example of this. I think sometimes about how much the smartphone camera has changed my experience of parenting. Because constantly, when my son does something cute, my instinct is that I need to whip out my phone to record the cute thing, so it can be shared with my family or memorialized for the future.

And seven times out of 10, when I do that, I stop the thing that was happening. He sees the phone, he gets interested in that, he sees me doing something, he just gets interested in whatever change had happened to me, and I break the circuit of the experience. Im not even saying its all bad. Im happy to have many of the photos and videos I have of him. And then, sometimes I now try to not have my phone when Im with him. I leave it at home. But then, hell do something cute, and Ill be, in a part of my head, frustrated that I just have to sit there and experience it, and I cant let anybody else know this wonderful thing has happened. And its a really different experience, even though I just didnt have access to a smartphone camera at all.

Yeah, I mean, thats a great example. I have two little girls, so I can very much relate to this. And I want to echo the point that you made. A lot of this is not about saying its good or bad. And I think very often, people just want to know, is this a good thing? Is this is a bad thing?

And I think part of the point that I often try to make is that something can be morally significant without necessarily being good or bad by itself. So thats a point that we can come back to at some point. But yeah, definitely, the experience of wanting to document reality. You know, one thing Ive found I dont know if this is true for you as a parent is that somewhere, theres this sense that you want to kind of arrest the growth of your kids, you know.

Theyre growing up so fast, and you want to document where theyve been along the way. Paradoxically, in my experience anyway, I think Ive almost found that having this very pervasive record, visual record of their growth, has made that actually a more pronounced experience, a greater sense of things slipping by, slipping away.

And I often wonder, how would the experience of being a parent in relation to a child in this way have been different, as it was the majority of human history. People just didnt have a photographic record of the sort. All they had was their memory to work with. And so to me, thats an interesting question. Its a moral question that involves a very profound human relationship and how we experience it.

So let me take that as a bridge to the 41 questions. And Im simply going to pose these to you. Youre the one who wrote them. I appreciate you making my job so easy.

And I will maybe sometimes offer a prompt of the technology we can talk about, but of course, you should feel free to take it wherever you want. And so the first question you implore us to ask of a technology is, what sort of person will the use of this technology make of me? And I would say, lets use Twitter as the example.

Yeah, and thats the most general of those questions, I think, and it comes out of my sense that we become what we habitually do. So Ill say that the way I think of the moral life and moral formation is really influenced by virtue ethic theory, which places a lot of emphasis on habit, disposition, and inclinations.

And so Im on Twitter a lot. So this is the one social media platform that I am on with some regularity. And I find that when Im on Twitter, I tend to feel a little anxious, a little scatterbrained. I do feel like my focus is sort of distracted in ways that arent entirely good for me.

So I use it as a way of building relationships, garnering information, kind of keeping an eye on the way the world in that little Twitter sphere is reacting to current events. But I do feel it taxes me mentally. It frames the way I think about what I say.

So Im very aware of the audience on Twitter and how they might respond to what I may want to tweet. And so theres this little editing voice in my head that takes the Twitter audience for granted. And I think eventually, that sort of spills out, that may spill out into other spheres of life.

And then, theres of course the tendency to take the experience of Twitter and normalize it, or to say that this is a one-to-one map of reality. And we have to, I think, guard against that tendency. So there are ways in which it kind of plays with our emotional, cognitive lives the way it frames the self.

Its a kind of performance that were undergoing for the audience on Twitter. Those are some of the ways that I think come to mind, in terms of how thats beginning to shape me as a person, the way that I think about myself and what I do.

I want to hold on that idea of the self as a performance. Because thats one of the things I noticed. People who listen to the show know I have a lot of thoughts on Twitter, and I stay off of it a lot of the time, and then I tend to jump on it when I have something to promote.

But particularly when Im using it more, one of the things that is striking to me about it is it makes me somebody who thinks a much wider expanse of my thoughts are things other people should also hear. You know, I was a writer before there was really Twitter.

And as a writer, the things I thought people should hear were of a certain variety. They had a certain weight to them. A certain amount of effort went into them. They were about a certain set of topics, for the most part. And on Twitter, its literally what I thought of the Loki season finale. I mean, its anything.

And it makes me more audience- and approval-hungry, and possibly more backlash-aversive or something. I do think it is both believing more of what I think should be shared, and also shaping that more to social approval, than I do in other mediums. But over time, that actually does change how I think, and if I let it, what kind of person I am, but also what kind of person I present myself as to the world.

Yeah, no, absolutely. An example of this resonates what you just described. I found myself reading a book a couple of days ago, and underlining some passages of note. And immediately, my first thought was, Ive got to put this on Twitter.

And I had to resist the urge, and I consciously thought of, how would I have done this if I didnt have Twitter? How would my experience of reading have been a little bit different? And why do I feel compelled to share this? Do I feel compelled to share this because I think, oh, this will play really well within my networks?

And I think that sense of approval, of its sometimes described as a kind of dopamine hit that you get and then, we begin to crave that, and then that bending of the self to the perceptions of the audience, that feedback loop, I think, can become really powerful.

Lets go to the next question. What habits will the use of this technology instill? And lets talk about electric lighting.

I recently wrote a little bit about the loss of the night sky, so this is what comes immediately to mind. Famous anecdote I think it was in LA. There was a massive power outage.

And there were a number of calls to 911 about this striking, glowing thing in the sky, which turns out to be the Milky Way, which numerous people hadnt seen. And so one thing that comes to mind with electric lighting this maybe isnt quite a habit, but theres a sense of where I look. What can I see? How do I experience darkness?

And there are long social trends here, going back to the beginning of electrification and even gas lighting in European cities. But it changes the character of daily life, in terms of my habits even of experiencing sleep and rest. And so its mundane technology, but its one thats been profoundly formative of just the experience of the day, how we order and structure our day.

It opened up the night, in many respects, for activities that wouldnt have been possible elsewhere. But I think also, and again, going back to the question of the body, remembering were embodied creatures. Maybe its kind of messing with the rest our body needs. We have the habit of staying up later than perhaps we ought. Were timing ourselves to rhythms that are not necessarily conducive to our well-being.

And so theres a way of experiencing the night, both at a macro level with regards to what we see, and the loss of connection with the naturally dark sky, to social life, impact on social life, and then impact on personal life. So at those three scales, different habits will be generated by the fact that we can flip a switch and carry on with our activities when the sun goes down.

Your next question, I really love. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time? And Ill let you choose the example here.

Oh, the clock. I love thinking about technologies that we take for granted, that we dont think of anymore as technologies. And so the clock is a fascinating piece of technology, the mechanical clock. It was originally used to help monks keep their daily rhythm of prayer, and then it comes to structure so much of modern life.

Lewis Mumford in the 1930s, in his book Technics and Civilization, makes a great deal of this. He says that its the clock that is the centerpiece of the modern world, in that it divides time. It segments time into discrete measurable units. To think that without the mechanical clock, it really doesnt make sense to say, Ill meet you at 12:10.

But that just wasnt the way that human beings experienced the passage of time. It gives us a sense of time as something to be lost or wasted, measured. It generates a kind of anxiety about that. So time, I think, is one of the fundamental moral dimensions of human experience.

And so we tend to think, well, time is just time. Everybody experiences it similarly, and we relate to it similarly. But in fact, its one of the realities that has been, I think, most profoundly shaped by the technologies that we use to measure time. And then, of course, when we were able to put that measurement device on our wrists, it made that ubiquitous.

We all know where we are in this finely calibrated ordering of time, and that allows us to relate to it in different ways, to think of punctuality differently. It changes our sense of the politeness of arrival and departure. And I think there are still certain cultures in which you can see that there is a profound difference with the way, certainly, that Westerners tend to think about what it means to abide by time.

Speaking of always knowing where you are, the next question, which I really like, is how will the use of technology affect my experience of place? And I want to use here a technology that arose in my lifetime, which is ubiquitous GPS maps.

Thats another great example. I actually thought of it on the way to the studio here. I dont have a smartphone, so I dont have GPS on me all the time, and I have an old car.

So I made note. I did use Google Maps to find the location of the place, relative to where I was, and then just made a mental note of it, and I made my way here. And I thought, well, itd be really bad if I got lost and wasnt on time, so I made a point of taking down the number.

And one thing Ive observed in other contexts is that sometimes these technologies that make things very easy very efficient, in some respects they eliminate certain things. So what would I have done if I had gotten lost? I would have stopped for directions. It would have required a kind of human interaction.

And so that changes. But then, also, I think the way we tend to use when I have used GPS the way we tend to use GPS is that it directs our attention not so much to the place itself, but to the directions were receiving. So if were just listening to the voice thats going to tell us, turn in 100 yards or whatever the case may be, our attention is focused on that, rather than, if I were told, you need to watch out for the corner of this intersection, then Im more actively engaged in figuring out where I am.

And so its not that we have to do that all the time, that we need to necessarily that using GPS is bad. But it does, I think, change the relationship that we have to the place, our ability to know that place well. And you may or may not put a moral value on that. But if you do, yeah, definitely, I think that ubiquitous GPS use has an effect of creating a certain distance from place, of abstracting us from place, making us less attentive to it in ways that might be beneficial.

How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people? And the example Id like to use here is search engines.

Thats a good example, in that it pushes it a little bit. Because if we rely on the search engine, for example, to form our picture of the world, our idea of what others are like, when we try to understand those that are not immediately in our network of friends or colleagues, then it filters a picture of the world of others to us.

How are those search results being determined? What is being included? What is being excluded? How is the algorithm calibrating the kind of information Im going to receive?

And I think that does tend to impact the shape of our perception of others, not necessarily those closest to us, but those others that we know in this more mediated fashion. It changes our understanding of who they are, and eclipses, I think, important aspects of the fullness of their personality, or the complexity of their view of the world. I think that would be perhaps a risk with the search engine as the mediator of our relationship to others.

You know, theres somewhere else I thought you might go, but this is in truth just where I went when I saw the question, which is, it made me think about how many conversations with other people I do not have because of search engines.

Yes.

How many times when my map of knowledge to fill something in would simply require, and did require when I was younger, just asking. Do you know? What do you think? Where should I go to dinner? Do you know this persons phone number? Have you heard of? Do you remember that president? Do you know when this happened?

And on the one hand, the information I got from those conversations was probably much less precise. And on the other hand, there was a lot of other information, and there was relationship building that happened in those conversations. And so I dont think I would tend to think about search engines as a social technology or a technology with a heavy social effect.

Theyre not social media, famously. Theyre the thing that came before it. But they actually really changed the social world and took a whole expanse of interaction out of it and into a sort of bilateral between me and the computer.

Yeah, and thats a great example. I think thats a wonderful thing about these questions, you know. Whatever might come to my mind is not going to be what comes to somebody elses mind. But thats, I think, a terrific example of the way that it enters into that loop of social relations, yeah.

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Im going to jump forward a little bit here. What practices will the use of this technology displace? What do you think of when you hear that?

I think of something like the example of the GPS. So the practice of finding my way on a map or getting directions from someone, and so that social connection that gets set aside because I can just look this up on my phone and find my way there. I can think even of something more mundane, the way we organize our dinners or our meals together.

Theres a philosopher of technology, Albert Borgmann, who famously made a big deal about this. And we think about what was involved for a family, and again, one has to recognize that not all families are structured similarly. But if we think about the way that all members of a family might have been involved in putting a meal on the table and gathering around it. So then we think of the alternative, which initially, maybe in the 1980s when Borgmann was writing, was just, pop something into the microwave, and everybodys served.

More recently, you might think of the app, delivery app, that just brings you the food. It has displaced certain rituals or roles within a family, certain interactions within a family or within a network of friends, even, who might gather for a meal. That might be a felt loss.

Again, not necessarily morally wrong or morally right, but consequential with regards to what is binding that family or that network of friends together. There was a kind of labor involved in putting that meal together, and that labor itself had an important role to play in the dynamics of the relationship that are outsourced when we change the practice by finding technological shortcuts around it to get to the same end, but through different means.

I really like this couplet of questions: what will the use of this technology encourage me to notice? And the technology that came to mind there was the ubiquity of social media or just social profiles for people that when I meet somebody or even often before I meet them, I can look them up on a profile that is going to encourage me to notice other things than I would have if I had just called them up or heard about them from a friend.

Yeah, each of us are such complex realities, such a tangle of desires, emotions, insecurities, capacities and capabilities, and histories and narratives. And any attempt to kind of capture that, certainly in an online profile, is necessarily going to leave some important dimensions of the person out.

And if we come to know a person chiefly, initially, through a profile by looking them up, well bring those preconceptions to the table when we meet them, and it will have the tendency, I would say, to reduce our understanding. But of course, that can change over time. The dynamics of the relationship might be such that we get to see these other aspects of one another.

Well, if there is a relationship, it might. But what that made me think of: there was a very funny but also telling article in New York Magazine, probably a month ago now. And it talked about how on dating apps in New York, Tinder and, I guess, Hinge I dont know what everybodys dating on in New York. But it talked about the amount of very far-left signaling on a lot of the apps.

So eat the rich, or Im going to burn civilization down and light my joint in the fires, or just a lot of very hardcore socialist signaling. But then, people meet each other, and of course theyre not that hardcore, and theyre not really revolutionaries, and theyre not really trying to upend society. And theres a very, very funny anecdote in there of a woman who ended up on a date with a guy whose profile was all about how much he hated the rich, about how much he wanted to abolish billionaires, and so on.

And then, when they met, after a couple times and he just kept ranting about how he hated the rich hed be like, listen, Im actually rich. And she was like, oh, well, I still like you. [LAUGHTER] Lets keep dating.

I think a lot of the way we display who we are in flattened profiles is wrong about who we are, what tradeoffs we really make. But what it does is, it creates a kind of filtering of, is this person like me or not?

I wonder how much of that has to do with the scale at which were operating. So you know, like you said, if we build a relationship, we might correct our perception. But were not going to build that kind of relationship with the vast number of people that we interact with online, even if its not directly with them online.

And there is a need to find some quick way of sorting, of categorizing. And so theres this built-in temptation, I think, to use these categories to drop people into or if we think that thats what theyre going to expect of us, to try to fill that role or to live up to that role.

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Opinion | This Conversation Changed the Way I Interact With Technology - The New York Times

It was on the day I read a Facebook post by my sick friend that I started to really question my relationship with technology.

An old friend had posted a status update saying he needed to rush to the hospital because he was having a health crisis. I half-choked on my tea and stared at my laptop. I recognized the post as a plea for support. I felt fear for him, and then I did nothing about it, because I saw in another tab that Id just gotten a new email and went to check that instead.

After a few minutes scrolling my Gmail, I realized something was messed up. The new email was obviously not as urgent as the sick friend, and yet Id acted as if they had equal claims on my attention. What was wrong with me? Was I a terrible person? I dashed off a message to my friend, but continued to feel disturbed.

Gradually, though, I came to think this was less an indication that I was an immoral individual and more a reflection of a bigger societal problem. I began to notice that digital technology often seems to make it harder for us to respond in the right way when someone is suffering and needs our help.

Think of all the times a friend has called you to talk through something sad or stressful, and you could barely stop your twitchy fingers from checking your email or scrolling through Instagram as they talked. Think of all the times youve seen an article in your Facebook News Feed about anguished people desperate for help starving children in Yemen, dying Covid-19 patients in India only to get distracted by a funny meme that appears right above it.

Think of the countless stories of camera phones short-circuiting human decency. Many a bystander has witnessed a car accident or a fist-fight and taken out their phone to film the drama rather than rushing over to see if the victim needs help. One Canadian government-commissioned report found that when our experience of the world is mediated by smartphones, we often fixate on capturing a spectacle because we want the rush well get from the instant reaction to our videos on social media.

Multiple studies have suggested that digital technology is shortening our attention spans and making us more distracted. What if its also making us less empathetic, less prone to ethical action? What if its degrading our capacity for moral attention the capacity to notice the morally salient features of a given situation so that we can respond appropriately?

There is a lot of evidence to indicate that our devices really are having this negative effect. Tech companies continue to bake in design elements that amplify the effect elements that make it harder for us to sustain uninterrupted attention to the things that really matter, or even to notice them in the first place. And they do this even though its becoming increasingly clear that this is bad not only for our individual interpersonal relationships, but also for our politics. Theres a reason why former President Barack Obama now says that the internet and social media have created the single biggest threat to our democracy.

The idea of moral attention goes back at least as far as ancient Greece, where the Stoics wrote about the practice of attention (prosoch) as the cornerstone of a good spiritual life. In modern Western thought, though, ethicists didnt focus too much on attention until a band of female philosophers came along, starting with Simone Weil.

Weil, an early 20th-century French philosopher and Christian mystic, wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. She believed that to be able to properly pay attention to someone else to become fully receptive to their situation in all its complexity you need to first get your own self out of the way. She called this process decreation, and explained: Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty ... ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.

Weil argued that plain old attention the kind you use when reading novels, say, or birdwatching is a precondition for moral attention, which is a precondition for empathy, which is a precondition for ethical action.

Later philosophers, like Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum, picked up and developed Weils ideas. They garbed them in the language of Western philosophy; Murdoch, for example, appeals to Plato as she writes about the need for unselfing. But this central idea of unselfing or decreation is perhaps most reminiscent of Eastern traditions like Buddhism, which has long emphasized the importance of relinquishing our ego and training our attention so we can perceive and respond to others needs. It offers tools like mindfulness meditation for doing just that.

The idea that you should practice emptying out your self to become receptive to someone else is antithetical to todays digital technology, says Beverley McGuire, a historian of religion at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who researches moral attention.

Decreating the self thats the opposite of social media, she says, adding that Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms are all about identity construction. Users build up an aspirational version of themselves, forever adding more words, images, and videos, thickening the self into a brand.

Whats more, over the past decade a bevy of psychologists have conducted multiple studies exploring how (and how often) people use social media and the way it impacts their psychological health. Theyve found that social media encourages users to compare themselves to others. This social comparison is baked into the platforms design. Because the Facebook algorithms bump posts up in our newsfeed that have gotten plenty of Likes and congratulatory comments, we end up seeing a highlight reel of our friends lives. They seem to be always succeeding; we feel like failures by contrast. We typically then either spend more time scrolling on Facebook in the hope that well find someone worse off so we feel better, or we post our own status update emphasizing how great our lives are going. Both responses perpetuate the vicious cycle.

In other words, rather than helping us get our own selves out of the way so we can truly attend to others, these platforms encourage us to create thicker selves and to shore them up defensively, competitively against other selves we perceive as better off.

And what about email? What was really happening the day I got distracted from my sick friends Facebook post and went to look at my Gmail instead? I asked Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google. He now leads the Center for Humane Technology, which aims to realign tech with humanitys best interests, and he was part of the popular Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.

Weve all been there, he assures me. I worked on Gmail myself, and I know how the tab changes the number in parentheses. When you see the number [go up], its tapping into novelty seeking same as a slot machine. Its making you aware of a gap in your knowledge and now you want to close it. Its a curiosity gap.

Plus, human beings naturally avert their attention from uncomfortable or painful stimuli like a health crisis, Harris adds. And now, with notifications coming at us from all sides, Its never been easier to have an excuse to attenuate or leave an uncomfortable stimulus.

By fragmenting my attention and dangling before it the possibility of something newer and happier, Gmails design had exploited my innate psychological vulnerabilities and had made me more likely to turn away from my sick friends post, degrading my moral attention.

The problem isnt just Gmail. Silicon Valley designers have studied a whole suite of persuasive technology tricks and used them in everything from Amazons one-click shopping to Facebooks News Feed to YouTubes video recommender algorithm. Sometimes the goal of persuasive technology is to get us to spend money, as with Amazon. But often its just to keep us looking and scrolling and clicking on a platform for as long as possible. Thats because the platform makes its money not by selling something to us, but by selling us that is, our attention to advertisers.

Think of how Snapchat rewards you with badges when youre on the app more, how Instagram sends you notifications to come check out the latest image, how Twitter purposely makes you wait a few seconds to see notifications, or how Facebooks infinite scroll feature invites you to engage in just one ... more ... scroll.

A lot of these tricks can be traced back to BJ Fogg, a social scientist who in 1998 founded the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab to teach budding entrepreneurs how to modify human behavior through tech. A lot of designers who went on to hold leadership positions at companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Google (including Harris) passed through Foggs famous classes. More recently, technologists have codified these lessons in books like Hooked by Nir Eyal, which offers instructions on how to make a product addictive.

The result of all this is what Harris calls human downgrading: A decade of evidence now suggests that digital tech is eroding our attention, which is eroding our moral attention, which is eroding our empathy.

In 2010, psychologists at the University of Michigan analyzed the findings of 72 studies of American college students empathy levels conducted over three decades. They discovered something startling: There had been a more than 40 percent drop in empathy among students. Most of that decline happened after 2000 the decade that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube took off leading to the hypothesis that digital tech was largely to blame.

In 2014, a team of psychologists in California authored a study exploring technologys impact from a different direction: They studied kids at a device-free outdoor camp. After five days without their phones, the kids were accurately reading peoples facial expressions and emotions much better than a control group of kids. Talking to one another face to face, it seemed, had enhanced their attentional and emotional capacities.

In a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, 89 percent of American respondents admitted that they whipped out their phone during their last social interaction. Whats more, 82 percent said it deteriorated the conversation and decreased the empathic connection they felt toward the other people they were with.

But whats even more disconcerting is that our devices disconnect us even when were not using them. As the MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, who researches technologys adverse effects on social behavior, has noted: Studies of conversation, both in the laboratory and in natural settings, show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they wont mind being interrupted. They dont feel as invested in each other.

Were living in Simone Weils nightmare.

Digital tech doesnt only erode our attention. It also divides and redirects our attention into separate information ecosystems, so that the news you see is different from, say, the news your grandmother sees. And that has profound effects on what each of us ends up viewing as morally salient.

To make this concrete, think about the recent US election. As former President Donald Trump racked up millions of votes, many liberals wondered incredulously how nearly half of the electorate could possibly vote for a man who had put kids in cages, enabled a pandemic that had killed many thousands of Americans, and so much more. How was all this not a dealbreaker?

You look over at the other side and you say, Oh, my god, how can they be so stupid? Arent they seeing the same information Im seeing? Harris said. And the answer is, theyre not.

Trump voters saw a very different version of reality than others over the past four years. Their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other accounts fed them countless stories about how the Democrats are crooked, crazy, or straight-up Satanic (see under: QAnon). These platforms helped ensure that a user who clicked on one such story would be led down a rabbit hole where theyd be met by more and more similar stories.

Say you could choose between two types of Facebook feeds: one that constantly gives you a more complex and more challenging view of reality, and one that constantly gives you more reasons why youre right and the other side is wrong. Which would you prefer?

Most people would prefer the second feed (which technologists call an affirmation feed), making that option more successful for the companys business model than the first (the confronting feed), Harris explained. Social media companies give users more of what theyve already indicated they like, so as to keep their attention for longer. The longer they can keep users eyes glued to the platform, the more they get paid by their advertisers. That means the companies profit by putting each of us into our own ideological bubble.

Think about how this plays out when a platform has 2.7 billion users, as Facebook does. The business model shifts our collective attention onto certain stories to the exclusion of others. As a result, we become increasingly convinced that were good and the other side is evil. We become less empathetic for what the other side might have experienced.

In other words, by narrowing our attention, the business model also ends up narrowing our moral attention our ability to see that there may be other perspectives that matter morally.

The consequences can be catastrophic.

Myanmar offers a tragic example. A few years ago, Facebook users there used the platform to incite violence against the Rohingya, a mostly Muslim minority group in the Buddhist-majority country. The memes, messages, and news that Facebook allowed to be posted and shared on its platform vilified the Rohingya, casting them as illegal immigrants who harmed local Buddhists. Thanks to the Facebook algorithm, these emotion-arousing posts were shared countless times, directing users attention to an ever narrower and darker view of the Rohingya. The platform, by its own admission, did not do enough to redirect users attention to sources that would call this view into question. Empathy dwindled; hate grew.

In 2017, thousands of Rohingya were killed, hundreds of villages were burned to the ground, and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee. It was, the United Nations said, a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.

Myanmars democracy was long known to be fragile, while the United States has been considered a democracy par excellence. But Obama wasnt exaggerating when he said that democracy itself is at stake, including on American soil. The past few years have seen mounting concern over the way social media gives authoritarian politicians a leg up: By offering them a vast platform where they can demonize a minority group or other threat, social media enables them to fuel a populations negative emotions like anger and fear so it will rally to them for protection.

Negative emotions last longer, are stickier, and spread faster, explained Harris. So thats why the negative tends to outcompete the positive unless social media companies take concerted action to stop the spread of hate speech or misinformation. But even when it came to the consequential 2020 US election, which they had ample time to prepare for, their action still came too little, too late, analysts noted. The way that attention, and by extension moral attention, was shaped online ended up breeding a tragic moral outcome offline: Five people died in the Capitol riot.

People who point out the dangers of digital tech are often met with a couple of common critiques. The first one goes like this: Its not the tech companies fault. Its users responsibility to manage their own intake. We need to stop being so paternalistic!

This would be a fair critique if there were symmetrical power between users and tech companies. But as the documentary The Social Dilemma illustrates, the companies understand us better than we understand them or ourselves. Theyve got supercomputers testing precisely which colors, sounds, and other design elements are best at exploiting our psychological weaknesses (many of which were not even conscious of) in the name of holding our attention. Compared to their artificial intelligence, were all children, Harris says in the documentary. And children need protection.

Another critique suggests: Technology may have caused some problems but it can also fix them. Why dont we build tech that enhances moral attention?

Thus far, much of the intervention in the digital sphere to enhance that has not worked out so well, says Tenzin Priyadarshi, the director of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT.

Its not for lack of trying. Priyadarshi and designers affiliated with the center have tried creating an app, 20 Day Stranger, that gives continuous updates on what another person is doing and feeling. You get to know where they are, but never find out who they are. The idea is that this anonymous yet intimate connection might make you more curious or empathetic toward the strangers you pass every day.

They also designed an app called Mitra. Inspired by Buddhist notions of a virtuous friend (kalya-mitra), it prompts you to identify your core values and track how much you acted in line with them each day. The goal is to heighten your self-awareness, transforming your mind into a better friend and ally.

I tried out this app, choosing family, kindness, and creativity as the three values I wanted to track. For a few days, it worked great. Being primed with a reminder that I value family gave me the extra nudge I needed to call my grandmother more often. But despite my initial excitement, I soon forgot all about the app. It didnt send me push notifications reminding me to log in each day. It didnt congratulate me when I achieved a streak of several consecutive days. It didnt gamify my successes by rewarding me with points, badges, stickers, or animal gifs standard fare in behavior modification apps these days.

I hated to admit that the absence of these tricks led me to abandon the app. But when I confessed this to McGuire, the University of North Carolina Wilmington professor, she told me her students reacted the same way. In 2019, she conducted a formal study on students who were asked to use Mitra. She found that although the app increased their moral attention to some extent, none of them said theyd continue using it beyond the study.

Theyve become so accustomed to apps manipulating their attention and enticing them in certain ways that when they use apps that are intentionally designed not to do that, they find them boring, McGuire said.

Priyadarshi told me he now believes that the lack of addictive features is part of why new social networks meant as more ethical alternatives to Facebook and Twitter like Ello, Diaspora, or App.net never manage to peel very many people off the big platforms.

So hes working to design tech that enhances peoples moral attention on the platforms where they already spend time. Inspired by pop-up ads on browsers, he wants users to be able to integrate a plug-in that periodically peppers their feeds with good behavioral nudges, like, Have you said a kind word to a colleague today? or, Did you call someone whos elderly or sick?

Sounds nice, but implicit in this is a surrender to a depressing fact: Companies such as Facebook have found a winning strategy for monopolizing our attention. Technologists cant convert people away unless theyre willing to use the same harmful tricks as Facebook, which some thinkers feel defeats the purpose.

That brings up a fundamental question. Since hooking our attention manipulatively is part of what makes Facebook so successful, if were asking it to hook our attention less, does that require it to give up some of its profit?

Yes, they very much would have to, Harris said. This is where it gets uncomfortable, because we realize that our whole economy is entangled with this. More time on these platforms equals more money, so if the healthy thing for society was less use of Facebook and a very different kind of Facebook, thats not in line with the business model and theyre not going to be for it.

Indeed, they are not for it. Facebook ran experiments in 2020 to see if posts deemed bad for the world like political misinformation could be demoted in the News Feed. They could, but at a cost: The number of times people opened Facebook decreased. The company abandoned the approach.

So, what can we do? We have two main options: regulation and self-regulation. We need both.

On a societal level, we have to start by recognizing that Big Tech is probably not going to change unless the law forces it to, or it becomes too costly (financially or reputationally) not to change.

So one thing we can do as citizens is demand tech reform, putting public pressure on tech leaders and calling them out if they fail to respond. Meanwhile, tech policy experts can push for new regulations. These regulations will have to change Big Techs incentives by punishing unwanted behavior for example, by forcing platforms to pay for the harms they inflict on society and rewarding humane behavior. Changed incentives would increase the chances that if up-and-coming technologists design non-manipulative tech, and investors move funding toward them, their better technologies can actually take off in the marketplace.

Regulatory changes are already in the offing: Just look at the recent antitrust charges against Google in the US, and President Joe Bidens decisions to appoint Big Tech critic Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission and to sign a sweeping executive order taking aim at anti-competitive practices in tech.

As the historian Tim Wu has chronicled in his book The Attention Merchants, weve got reason to be hopeful about a regulatory approach: In the past, when people felt a new invention was getting particularly distracting, they launched countermovements that successfully curtailed it. When colorful lithographic posters came on the scene in 19th-century France, suddenly filling the urban environment, Parisians grew disgusted with the ads. They enacted laws to limit where posters can go. Those regulations are still in place today.

Changing the regulatory landscape is crucial because the onus cannot be all on the individual to resist machinery designed to be incredibly irresistible. However, we cant just wait for the laws to save us. Priyadarshi said digital tech moves too fast for that. By the time policymakers and lawmakers come up with mechanisms to regulate, technology has gone 10 years ahead, he told me. Theyre always playing catch-up.

So even as we seek regulation of Big Tech, we individuals need to learn to self-regulate to train our attention as best we can.

Thats the upshot of Jenny Odells book How to Do Nothing. Its not an anti-technology screed urging us to simply flee Facebook and Twitter. Instead, she urges us to try resistance-in-place.

A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind, she writes. What is needed, then, is not a once-and-for-all type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.

Odell describes how shes trained her attention by studying nature, especially birds and plants. There are many other ways to do it, from meditating (as the Buddhists recommend) to reading literature (as Martha Nussbaum recommends).

As for me, Ive been doing all three. In the year since my sick friends Facebook post, Ive become more intentional about birding, meditating, and reading fiction in order to train my attention. I am building attentional muscles in the hope that, next time someone needs me, I will be there for them, fully present, rapt.

Reporting for this article was supported by Public Theologies of Technology and Presence, a journalism and research initiative based at the Institute of Buddhist Studies and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Sigal Samuel is a Senior Reporter for Voxs Future Perfect and co-Host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes about artificial intelligence, neuroscience, climate change, and the intersection of technology with ethics and religion.

Original post:

Technology may be wreaking havoc on our morality - Vox.com

Despite appearances to the contrary, going digital has not meant a change in culture. In person meetings used to be a study in power relationships. Without any doubt, moving work (and other social interactions) out of the office and into the ether, has, as with all things that have migrated online, lent a new character to these relationships. And it is not beautiful. Nor useful.

Open any serious newspaper (online or old fashioned paper), and you run a very high risk of running into arcane screeds on how the marriage between technology and communications continues to force change on the world we live in. Often, the focus is on work. Not just the way it has become more productive. But also in the degree to which new tools and ways of working might make large swathes of our current labour force redundant. This new effect of the technology revolution shows up beyond work, too. Household utensils are smarter, especially the genre-straddling mobile phone. We learn that the consumption of leisure values is more and more about experience, where once the onus was on ownership.

While last years pandemic has had very obvious health effects, its longer lasting impacts will be felt in those areas in which it has accelerated the uptake of technology. Video conferencing over in-person meetings. Working from home instead of the commute-intensive work from the office. And then there are the tremendous possibilities opened up for telemedicine by the swarm of wearable devices now able to measure their wearers vital signs and process these online and in real time.

For obvious reasons, this commentary focuses on the positives. How working from home, for instance, has made being a mother less laborious a challenge than before the pandemic. In the instances when the negative consequences of technologys imprint on modern man and the interaction of both these and the pandemic come up for mention, they are often posed as problems to be solved. Take fake news for one, and how responses to it may imperil social cohesion. Do not worry that governments have mounted this stead who mean to also undermine civil liberties, as part of a design that perpetuates their stay in office.

Thus, it would appear that whether or not technology is useful to any people depends almost entirely on the context within which it will be used. This is more so when that technology is not a product of the culture that consumes it.

What the tension between these trends seems to suggest is that like most human inventions, technology is not always a force for good. At best, it is an instrument available to man which he may use according to his ken. At worst, the upheavals that rapid technological progress is responsible for change human societies in less than welcome ways. As an instrument, it is as morally ambivalent as is the humble hoe available to build a ridge to sow seeds in, or help decapitate an assailant. Or like the internal combustion engine, responsible simultaneously for the swift expansion of human communities, and the incineration of the earth.

Thus, it would appear that whether or not technology is useful to any people depends almost entirely on the context within which it will be used. This is more so when that technology is not a product of the culture that consumes it. Nothing reminds me more powerfully of this than the video conferencing meetings that I have had to attend since this became a staple of work last year.

if interactions were this way in my kindergarten days, the responses in our Zoom and Team meetings cannot be described as newI was on a Zoom meeting last week. And it was obvious that these video communication apps need an idobale emoji to help with the local propensity to kiss arse.

Despite appearances to the contrary, going digital has not meant a change in culture. In person meetings used to be a study in power relationships. Who sat were? Who arrived before whom? Who gets to carry what? And for whom? Any which way you tell it, obsequiousness was writ unctuous in those interactions. Without any doubt, moving work (and other social interactions) out of the office and into the ether, has, as with all things that have migrated online, lent a new character to these relationships. And it is not beautiful. Nor useful. Affliction with an atavistic variant now means that meetings start as classes once did in the kindergarten. The Big boss man walks in, virtually starts the meeting, and the chorus of Good morning Big Boss is as sickening as it is an auditory challenge.

Alas, the mute button works very well for microphones; but not for speakers. Still, if interactions were this way in my kindergarten days, the responses in our Zoom and Team meetings cannot be described as new. My friend insists that it is not necessarily wrong, either. In his reading, We are a culturally VERY respectful people. How else would we expect to be shown respect if we show no respect to our superiors? Maybe. Maybe not. However, I was on a Zoom meeting last week. And it was obvious that these video communication apps need an idobale emoji to help with the local propensity to kiss arse.

Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqu and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.

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ALBANY, N.Y., Aug. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Global Pressure Transducer Market: Overview

A pressure transducer, also known as a pressure transmitter, converts pressure into an analogue electrical signal, and it is widely used in an extensive range of industries, such as Telemetry, HVAC, oil & gas, automotive, consumer electronics, etc. A pressure transducer is utilized in the oil & gas sector to monitor pressure in liquid tanks orpipes, outlet,inlet,or system pressure, and manyother applications. The system is made of two basic components: an elastic substance that deforms when subjected to a pressured media and an electrical device that identifies the deformation.

The global pressure transducer market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 3.4% during the forecast period of 2021 to 2031. By 2031, the pressure transducer market is estimated to value more than US$ 5.61 Bn. Numerous factors are influencing the global pressure transducer market, such as increasing industrial automation and rising need for pressure transducers in the process industry. As a result, the marketis expected to grow due to the rising applications of pressure transducers in the process industry.

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Market players are ramping up the manufacturing of cellular pressure transducers that are simple to install and can connect directly to a provider's secure data portal, where they provide 24/7 customer and technicalassistance. Wireless pressure transducers with built-in cellular communication are a new entry in the globalpressure transducer market. As compared to traditional transducers, these devices make monitoring pressure andtemperature simpler. An array of sensors can be monitored only by a single system utilizing these transducers.In addition to improving and innovating in pressure transducers, manufacturers provide lower pricing and minimal inventory costs to their customers.

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Finance teams are on an exciting journey of discovery. They are finally starting to embrace the benefits of technology a move that is long overdue, according to Anish Kapoor, CEO of AccessPay, a cloud-based payment specialist.

Finance teams have lagged behind other areas of the business in the use of technology, he says. Marketing and sales have been using tech to become more efficient for 20 years.

He suggests that the decision of finance teams to accelerate their adoption of technology is due to increased compliance burdens in the face of changing requirements from regulators and greater demands placed on businesses by consumers.

They have prioritised investment in other areas over themselves, but now the biggest gains from automation are in the finance function, he says.

The benefits are clear, according to Kapoor. Automating as many tasks as possible will free up time for other revenue generating work or even to guard against future economic shocks.

Business will be under pressure to cut costs due to lower revenues or paying back loans after Covid-19, he warns. Finance functions wont be exempt from these problems.

The finance function, therefore, will need to find innovative ways to keep manage cash to ensure financial stability and monitor payment authorisations in the most cost-effective way possible.

Its important that businesses start investing for the long-term and make significant structural changes, says Kapoor. More organisations are starting to bite the bullet on these decisions.

Kapoor believes there is plenty of scope for development as many of the core financial operations have failed to keep pace with a fast-developing and more connected world.

Getting data to and from your banks is at the heart of what finance teams do and yet the technology hasnt changed in 20 years when we moved from telephone and branch banking to internet banking, he says.

This is something that AccessPay is keen to change.

We are a trusted partner to global banks, he says. Customers use our technology to create a secure, fully digital connection between banks and their ERP [enterprise resource planning], HCM [human capital management] and treasury systems.

Citing corporate customers such as ITV and Imperial College London, he insists digital connections not only result in cost savings, but also provide data in real-time.

They can save hundreds of thousands of pounds in fees, bank charges and financing costs, by managing their cash better, he says.

Driving finance forward

In recent weeks, AccessPay has become available to Sage users through their online marketplace, with it sitting alongside other approved independent software vendors to enhance back-office systems of Sage customers.

Earlier this year, it also announced a partnership with Yapily, the open banking infrastructure provider, to provide treasury solutions for corporates. The tie-up will provide real-time visibility into cash positions and transaction flows for thousands of UK businesses. Kapoor believes such agreements illustrate how technology has become a must-have for the finance function.

Five years ago, we could maintain the status quo but now all businesses are under pressure to do more with less and the only way you can do that is with technology, he says. Finance teams are under huge pressure to deliver more detailed information, with analytics, faster to the business with less resource.

The changing demands are one of the key driving factors. The sheer amount of data they need to process makes automation a crucial component of success.

An important trend within payment provision is corporate banking becoming more digitized within day-to-day operations.

More lending decisions are made using data pulled from ERPs and banks, while more services are only available digitally, such as low-cost international payment services, says Kapoor. For many firms this requires a change of mindset. Finance teams need to be moving to a more digital connection with their banks, to allow them to keep pace with these changes, he adds.

Kapoor insists this is where AccessPay can play a role. Helping to automate and digitise banking operations can free up 50 percent of a finance teams time, he says. It also gives them access to data with which to make better business decisions and allows them to access the new range of digital first financial services.

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Finance teams finally embracing the benefits of technology - Accountancy Age

And it is still the case that when we hear a womans voice as part of a tech product, we might not know who she is, whether she is even real, and if so, whether she consented to have her voice used in that way. Many TikTok users assumed that the text-to-speech voice they heard on the app wasnt a real person. But it was: it belonged to a Canadian voice actor named Bev Standing, and Standing had never given ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, permission to use it.

Standing sued the company in May, alleging that the ways her voice was being usedparticularly the way users could make it say anything, including profanitywere injuring her brand and her ability to make a living. Her voice becoming known as "that voice on TikTok" that you could make say whatever you liked brought recognition without remuneration and, she alleged, hurt her ability to get voice work.

Then, when TikTok abruptly removed her voice, Standing found out the same way the rest of us didby hearing the change and seeing the reporting on it. (TikTok has not commented to the press about the voice change.)

Those familiar with the story of Apples Siri may be feeling a bit of dj vu: Susan Bennett, the woman who voiced the original Siri, also didnt know that her voice was being used for that product until it came out. Bennett was eventually replaced as the US English female voice, and Apple never publicly acknowledged her. Since then, Apple has written secrecy clauses into voice actors contracts and most recently has claimed that its new voice is entirely software generated, removing the need to give anyone credit.

These incidents reflect a troubling and common pattern in the tech industry. The way that peoples accomplishments are valued, recognized, and paid for often mirrors their position in the wider society, not their actual contributions. One reason Bev Standings and Susan Bennetts names are now widely known online is that theyre extreme examples of how womens work gets erased even when its right there for everyone to seeor hear.

The way that people's accomplishments are valued, recognized, and paid for often mirrors their position in the wider society, not their actual contributions.

When women in tech do speak up, theyre often told to quiet downparticularly if they are women of color. Timnit Gebru, who holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford, was recently ousted from Google, where she co-led an AI ethics team, after she spoke up about her concerns regarding the companys large language models. Her co-lead, Margaret Mitchell (who holds a PhD from the University of Aberdeen with a focus on natural-language generation), was also removed from her position after speaking up about Gebrus firing. Elsewhere in the industry, whistleblowers like Sophie Zhang at Facebook, Susan Fowler at Uber, and many other women found themselves silenced and often fired as a direct or indirect result of trying to do their jobs and mitigate the harms they saw in the technology companies where they worked.

Even women who found startups can find themselves erased in real time, and the problem again is worse for women of color. Rumman Chowdhury, who holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego, and is the founder and former CEO of Parity, a company focused on ethical AI, saw her role in her own companys history minimized by the New York Times.

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The voices of women in tech are still being erased - MIT Technology Review