A different perspective on technologies that influence human behaviour

"Persuading people through technology is the next social revolution. Facebook demonstrates just how powerful it will be." -BJ Fogg

There is a lot of hype in the media about how social media technologies like mobile computing, facebook, twitter, online gaming have changed the way we live and interact.

If we look at it closely it becomes clear that it is not our behaviour that has changed, it is just that we have taken advantage of the internet to efficiently carry out our core human activities: communicating, listening, watching, learning, comparing, and contrasting.

The social media technologies so far have allowed us to do what we already do, even better and more efficiently, more often, in more places and much faster. Examples of these include smart phones (talk, browse, photograph & videos, share, blog etc); iTunes has changed the way people listen to music, study, access entertainment, read books and play; and Wikipedia allows us to share our time and effort altruistically to share information with others.

So far we have been in control of the way we use the technology. But there are very interesting developments taking place where innovators are using technology to fiddle with human behaviour with a view to changing our behaviour. Welcome to the world of persuasive technologies, technologies that could affect your freedom and change the way you choose & decide. This is very promising and at the same time opens a can of worms

Emerging technologies that influence us

Fortune magazine lists BJ Fogg as one of the 10 new gurus that you should know. BJ Fogg is the founder of the Persuasive Technologies Lab at Stanford University,

Avoiding Human Extinction: What makes our species so intelligent yet so self destructive

Stephen Hawking

“I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million” – Stephen Hawking, during his interview with Big Ideas.

Ever wondered what makes us humans, as a species, so brilliant yet so self destructive.  Latest findings on human origins show that as recently as 125,000 years ago, the human race had come very close to extinction.

Chance and our cognitive and technological ability saved us from the brink of extinction. So can we cheat extinction again, and what is so different this time around?

In this blog post we look at how the human ability to communicate, think and tinker with our world has evolved, and what it means for our future.