Humanizing Technology

It is easier to turn technology into the direction of democracy and social justice when it develops with social and emotional intelligence.
Can we use the Internet to promote deep human communication and support the emergence of prosperous societies where everyone's needs are met and people's lives are filled with joy and meaning?

This is a very difficult question, and the answer is not just about technology, at least not in the traditional sense of that word. It's not about any of the emerging trends that already affect our communities like PeteChoen, Drones, VR, Reality Enhanced, HyperLops or any of the things that Singularity University will bring together.

It is not just about finding new technologies, whether they are more user-centric or based on self-sovereign digital identities than on corporate ownership and control, the area that forms my own specialized technology. Solutions can not be driven by government need to find a military advantage - this is the case for a wide range of daily innovations today as Manuel Delanda describes in his book "War in the Age of Intelligent Machines".

Our work in "technical" techniques will not generate large human gains unless we invest the same time, energy and resources in developing social and emotional technologies that drive the organization of our entire society and how we work together. I think we are at the cusp of having the tools, understanding and infrastructure to achieve it, without our ideas and organization being mediated by giants. But what does that mean in practice?


I think two things are very important.

First, how can we connect all people and all groups who want to align their goals in the pursuit of social justice, deep democracy and the development of new economies that share wealth and protect the environment? How do you support people to protect their own independence while working with other groups in joint action and teamwork?

A key element in answering this question is to generate a digital identity that is not controlled by a company, organization or government.

I have been involved in leading the Ocean Community Internet Identity Workshop for the past 12 years. After much exploration of the technical landscape - the possibility that we have finally made some progress that would lay the groundwork for a true online infrastructure to support identities called "user-centric" or "self-sovereign."

This infrastructure consists of a network with two different types of nodes - people and organizations - with each individual able to join many different groups. But no matter how many groups join, people will need a digital identity that is not owned by Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Google or Facebook. This is the only way you can control your own personal interactions on the Internet. If open standards are not created for this dynamic part of the infrastructure, we will end up in the future where the giants control all our identities. And in many ways we are now in this future.

This is called the "Common Ledger technique" or SLT in the more commonly known as "Blocchin" or "Distributed Ledger Technology". Salt is a major innovation in terms of databases that can be read by anyone who is extremely resistant to tampering - in the sense that data can not be changed or scanned once they entered. There is currently a lot of work in progress to design key encryption management and this is necessary to support the creation and operation of these unique communication and communication channels between individuals and organizations. The Sovereign Slate Foundation was built specifically for the IDI administration and donated the required code to the Heberleger Foundation under the Indy Project.


While this critical infrastructure is being born we need to think about how to take advantage of it to the world we want to create - an interconnected world of humanity instead of centralized social networks controlled by companies that the mission of public circulation for ends of profit is to manipulate us to buy more things. These networks sell us access and limit our ability to communicate and organize independently. They have agreements with companies such as Cambridge and Analytica Balentir to absorb the exhaust gases from our digital lives, spy on us, and our collective manipulation to achieve their own goals.

As a basis for this new generation of identities that focus on the user or self-sovereignty, the teacher's book set of critical technology if the control of Internet companies and our life is the opposite, but this will not be enough for the human technology, and this is my second important point: "social and emotional" technologies are also lively.

Social technologies are the tools we use to interact with each other in groups of any size, from the Parent Association and other neighborhood organizations to national governments and international organizations. They are increasingly important in the transition from exclusive dependence on representative political processes and institutions to a wider range of deeper and more deliberative forms of democracy. Social technology was a vote for representatives who started 300 years ago, but these systems are collapsing and do not serve us well enough today.


Emotional techniques are the tools we use to interact with ourselves internally and in our relationships with others. They are more important than ever, since the mental health of all things is now a major concern - where a person inflicting enormous damage through high tech weapons or for basic infrastructure piracy we have. These techniques are well known and include mediation and meditation of different types of practices, yoga, mind and nonviolent communication, offering joint counseling, procedural step 12 Kmadmna alcohol Anonymous.

Social technologies work much better if people have a set of these tools and emotional practices to tap into because they are better able to manage themselves and interact with others. We want security and we put billions of dollars in the security surveillance industrial complex after 9/11, but what about the deeper question about how to communicate with each other and solve problems together? What do we do to address each individual's mental and emotional well-being to reduce alienation and separation?

How can you interact with people about very different aspects of the controversial issues of cooperation to solve what seem to be intractable problems? How can one form comprehensive deliberations include complete communities and building social capital and communication? Individuals such as Mickey Kashtan and Tom Attlee and Sharif Abdullah and groups such as the National Coalition have worked for dialogue and deliberations on these issues for many years, but deserve more investment and support. Without new innovations in these social and emotional technologies, no "technical" technology will provide us.

To give a concrete example, Sweet Spot is designed to facilitate interactive meetings of professional, scientific and technical communities in so-called conferences. I have participated in leading one of these conferences - twice a year for more than a decade, which we have developed through many innovations built on caring for the emotional capacity of the people affected and the social processes we use in our meetings .

They are organized mainly through the technology of open spaces where a live agenda is created on the day of the event with all participants. We launched an hour of demonstrations the second day after lunch, and we had dinner together every night. The styles described in the cover working group were particularly useful - things like "embracing variation and difference" (meaning that anyone is welcome in the conversation). Opening and closing each day in a circle while spacing up to 15 different sessions every hour for the rest of the time they spend together called the "open convergence conditions" rhythm "and divergence. All in all, these operations have been very successful in building a stronger group culture.

I was excited by the possibilities of identity technologies that focused on the user for over 15 years while part of a community Planiturk, who met to consider the global environment and information technology and thinking through how planetary challenges can be addressed more effectively. But through the joint efforts of the leadership process to build infrastructure it has become apparent that we also need to invest in social and emotional techniques that allow us to cooperate and work together at all levels.

The three forms of technology are necessary to transform our mutual relationships and our wider social and social systems. Technical technologies provide tools that allow individuals to communicate and work together for the well-being and well-being of their communities. Social technologies allow the effective and complete use of these tools in collective action processes. Emotional technologies support mental health for all as a precondition to participate in these processes with greater opportunities for success.

Simply put, technologies of the easiest technique in the sense of democracy and social justice if developed and applied with social and emotional intelligence. Combining the three together is the key to using technology to edit the extremes.