What should digital not do?
As we tell all our clients, digital can do anything. Computers are capable of great things, like changing the world. There’s value in keeping humans in the driver’s seat of digital; this post we break down where digital should not play a role in changing the world.
Here’s tasks digital should not do for us
Create information on its own.
Digital should not autonomously create unverified, unsubstantiated information. As humans, we trust much of what we read and many do not seek out information that makes us think or presents a different point of view. And since we use information to make decisions – important decisions – creating information should be left up to humans. There’s value in using digital to aggregate information, process it, and see patterns, but we should make the raw information so we can share facts with each other. And to help combat the weaponization of information and misinformation.
Teach lessons and parent our kids.
We should allow our kids to learn from a computer, but the lessons and skills we are imparted should be created from a human. This can allow our kids – and fellow adults – to learn new concepts, stretch their critical thinking capabilities, get new life skills, and meet new people. We here at Drive Digital believe that empowering others to think better and more critically is our job as stewards of digital, and that’s a job we take seriously. We believe that the next generation should be smarter, better, and more equipped to handle the world and digital than the current one.
Enact policies that affect real lives.
As tools, digital has the power to affect lives – whether intentionally or not. But digital should not create rules for our lives without our permission or understanding. We should make tools easier to create new policies and make it easier for everyone to understand them and their impacts on us, but they shouldn’t choose the new rules or incorrectly summarize them for us. These core human values we should learn from our experiences from others, and digital should help us guide us in helping us get to the best state possible for us and our neighbors.
Choose our interests and our professions.
The internet is full of helpful information in many forms: for example, YouTube has many informative videos that teach great skills. Sites like these do a great job of displaying information from experts. However, a computer doesn’t have the intelligence or prudence to choose how to edit information or decide what we should invest our skills and future in. This task should be left to those who are trained to do so, like trusted friends, teachers, and mentors. Digital tools can augment the skills of these people, but the agency of us figuring out our drive should be left to humans.
Make medical choices for us.
Digital tools and modern medical devices are great tools to help us understand our health and what is going on in our bodies. These digital tools should be praised for making healthcare more approachable and better. For example, the advances in AEDs (automatic external defibrillators) have made it such that the average person can save a life. We here believe solely relying upon digital for medical knowledge can lead to problems, and that should rather be left to a conversation between you and your doctor. Having agency in your medical choices and knowledge should be left to us humans.
Decide our financial standing in life.
Digital tools can easily move money from one location to another. They can also tell us how well the market is doing. While moving money is easy, getting money without working for it or a computer deciding autonomously deciding what your money does is something a computer shouldn’t do. Building digital tools to empower us to make smart moves is a great use of digital, but moving that money should be done under the guidance of a human or an authorized financial consultant.