Future Now
The IFTF Blog
From Personalized to Empathetic Technologies
There's a lot to like about Eli Pariser's recent TED talk about the ways in which algorithms designed to personalize our experiences of digital information, in effect, put us into information bubbles. In effect, he argues that as sites like Google and Facebook customize an increasingly large percentage of the content we see, we'll naturally, and without our knowledge, be exposed to a progressively narrower range of new ideas and information. In the effort to make more of our content personalized, he argues, we'll lose much of our perspective about the lives and views of others and wind up in increasingly siloed and narrow bubbles.
As Wired describes his argument*:
Google’s algorithm considers 57 different elements in catering its search results for you, and as a result, “there is no standard Google search anymore,” said Pariser, who is writing a book on the political and social effects of web personalization.
‘What we’re seeing is a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones,’ Pariser says.
Being exposed to different viewpoints and information is good for us, because it speaks to our various selves and competing interests. But too much personalization threatens to make us one-dimensional.
He pointed to research on Netflix queues that examined how some films move quickly to the top of a user’s queue while others languish at the bottom of the list, never to be viewed...
The Netflix queue exposes an ethics struggle between our more impulsive selves and the better selves we strive to be, the research showed.
“We all want to be someone who has watched Rashomon,” Pariser said, “but right now we want to watch Ace Ventura for the fourth time.”
What's striking about this example is how similar it is to other sorts of behavior change problems. In the health and food world, for example, one of the reasons people have trouble eating healthy food is that while we might generally wish to be salad eaters, a cheeseburger and fries sound better for dinner tonight. Not only does the cheeseburger sound a lot better to you personally, it is, at the same time, a lot harder to understand why the guy at the table next to you can't stop sucking down junk food and eat something healthier, for once.
In other words, there's the gap that Pariser pointed to, between who we are and who we hope to be. At the Institute, we've considered a bunch of different visualization tools and persuasive methods that could help shrink the time between our present and future selves.
But there's a growing and equally important gap between how we understand our own lives and experiences, and how we understand the experiences of others.
Which brings me to a very different, but increasingly important type of technology for the next decade: Tools that give us the ability to empathize with each other's situations.
Probably the most well-known example of this sort of empathetic technology comes from MIT's Age Lab, which helps people experience the future effects of aging. AGNES, or the Age Gain Now Sympathy System, is a full-body suit that physically strains the body of the wearer to give that person the brief physical experience of being decades older. As an
:
More stretchy bands restrict my arm movements. There are knee pads and Velcro wrist braces; rubber gloves to lessen sensation in my fingers; yellow goggles to limit my depth perception. Everything on the suit is carefully calibrated to mimic the loss of function that happens as we age.
Finally, Puleo fits me into a hard hat and attaches yet more things to that. And that's when this all starts to feel like a bad idea. It has become work simply to stand up straight. And to walk? Puleo has me in Crocs sandals, with bits of rubber foam taped to the bottom. I haven't exactly lost my balance, but it feels like I easily could.
"The act of having to balance makes you more fatigued, makes you more tired," she says.
The idea behind the AGNES suit is that, by experiencing the effects of aging, product and service designers will be better able to understand and fill the needs of older people. But I think there's a bigger, more important idea behind something like AGNES, which is that new technologies are enabling us to simulate others' experiences in more meaningful and emotional ways. This concept will be an incredibly valuable tool, not simply for experiencing the effects of aging, but from doing everything from helping create more effective exercise plans to popping our information bubbles. Imagine, for instance, a tool that lets you simulate the search and information experiences of someone half way around the world. I would love, say, to be able to plug into the news reading habits of a Chinese businessman and the Google bubble of a teenager from Sao Paolo. In a world of global trade, where each of us has an increasingly personalized set of tools for processing the world, the ability to simulate the experiences of others will be increasingly valuable.
My broader point here is that while the last decade's innovations focused on finding ways to personalize the world to an individual's needs. And while these sorts of innovations won't go away, many of the next decade's innovations will stem, instead, from building empathy. Whether its simulating the physical experiences of others to innovate new products or engaging with others' information layers to be able to work together more effectively, one of the big challenges--and opportunities--of the next decade will be to turn personalization tools that seem to divide us into tools that help us break down barriers.
* Eli Pariser's TED talk was posted onto the TED site--long enough for me to download and listen to his talk, but not long enough for it to survive me writing about it. The full talk will be available in April.