Technology Paternalism

• “Beep” – you have switched on the electric water kettle.
  “Beep” – you have changed the target temperature of the water kettle.
  “Beep” – you have lifted the water kettle.
  “Beep” – you have put the water kettle back on the base.
  (Who on earth gave the water kettle permission to address me with the familiar form of address – German “du”? Well, strictly speaking it doesn’t talk, but from the sound of the “beep”, it is evident that it uses this form.) You can neither deactivate these signals nor turn down the volume. Making tea in the morning without waking up your sweetheart with those chirps – no chance unfortunately.

• We are at the train station. An ICE (Intercity Express) 4 has just arrived. Permanent noise: Dip, dip, dip, dip, dip, dip, dip. This is supposed to tell us: “There is a door here”, “There is a door here …” – possibly for a quarter of an hour if the train happens to stay at a station that long.
  Then suddenly, at alarm frequency and a volume of over 70 dB: dididididididididi! That is supposed to mean “Attention please, this door will soon be closed! Quick, quick! Bring your arms, legs, suitcases and prams to safety or things will turn brutal!”
  Volume and frequency suggest immediate life-threatening danger. Whereas ICE 1 to 3 have friendly acoustic signals, the new ICE 4 alert gives people a start and increases their heart rate. This affects everone, not just those intending to get on or off.

The sound is a pain in the neck. But that is not the point. The point is the phenomenon behind it.

This BigBrotherAward 2024 goes to a trend. The trend is called

“Technology Paternalism”.

Never heard of it? That’s precisely why we are giving it – technology paternalism – a BigBrotherAward tonight. That way you will recognise it whenever you come across it.

The term “technology paternalism” was coined in 2005 by Sarah Spiekermann and Frank Pallas¹. The term “paternalism” is derived from Latin “pater”, i. e. father.

Acts are called “paternalistic” when their objective is other people’s well-being, but this often goes against their will.

In “technology paternalism”, technology has taken the part of the pater familias who always knows better and constantly tells us what to do and what not to do. It’s all for our best … technology paternalism is a kind of friendly siege, always waiting to bomb you with good advice. And this phenomenon has recently become extremely popular.

Technology paternalism comes in different forms, where the technology causes different degrees of discomfort:

1. The intrusive, patronising, unnnerving, imposing type

• This is, for example, the door signal on the ICE 4 and now also on various regional trains, such as the Munich S‑Bahn. Why do Deutsche Bahn and the wagon builder Alstom install such obnoxious sources of noise? Only for our own good, of course.
  According to my findings, the railway company have based their decisions on the EU regulation called TSI PRM², which is intended to facilitate rail travel for the visually impaired. That is of course a justified and important objective. Badly implemented, however, as the blind do not need loud signals. On the contrary: “These door signals are just too loud” and “When the whole station beeps, we become disoriented”, according to a representative of a Swiss blind people’s organisation.
  A spokesman of the German rail passengers’ NGO Pro Bahn suspects that the EU regulation may have been misunderstood by the German railway company and by Alstom, as the EU regulation does not prescribe 70 dB – it is flexible in this respect: 5 dB above the surrounding noise level is enough.

Another unpleasant property of technology paternalism:

2. The nitpicking, dogmatic, rigid, merciless type

• That would include things like the video assistant in football. There is hardly a strategic move which can be finished without offside positions being measured down to a centimetre and discoveries of possible handball offences³. You cannot help feeling that the players are nothing but avatars in an online game – at least the graphics are pretty good.

• The intrusive, patronising type actively disturbs us and gets on our nerves.

• The nitpicking, merciless type constantly confronts us with our human imperfections and puts pressure on us.

But there is a third dosage form of technology paternalism that seems quite friendly at first sight:

3. The inconspicuous, convenient, smoothly functioning type – the really dangerous one

• That is the most dangerous form of technology paternalism because it doesn’t let us immediately feel the patronising “Don’t worry so much, dad will take care of it for you” pat on the head. It makes everything quite easy.

• In 2013 we presented Google with a BigBrotherAward. In my laudatory speech⁴ I let the Google CEOs speak. Let us listen to their visions for the future once again because they are coming closer. Quoting Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO: “When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that’s a bug. We should be able to give you the right answer just once.” This makes us wonder how much Google needs to know about us to show this single correct search result. And then we should ask ourselves why we should trust Google to really pick the result that is truly right for us – and not the most profitable one for Google.

• The Telekom AI phone without apps
  The German telecommunication company Deutsche Telekom seems to be in the process of putting this vision of convenience into practice: together with a startup company, Brain.ai, they presented at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress in February 2024 their prototype of a first AI smartphone⁵, which is supposed to work without any apps whatsoever. No apps? Woohoo! For a second we are happy that the ever-increasing flood of apps is going to end. Well, the Telekom smartphone uses an Android operating system and an AI application called “Natural”. We can communicate with Natural in natural language – via speech instruction. The example given is “Book me a flight to Barcelona on day x, book a hotel and a good restaurant for the evening.” Sounds appealing because who wants to spend their time searching flight or hotel booking pages? Rather than searching pages via browser we can now let the AI decide for us what we are going to see. Very convenient. But what is a good restaurant according to the AI? One with many positive reviews – that may have been paid for? Or a restaurant which directly pays prospective AI providers for advertisements? Because it is not clear how this information is financed.

• All the examples shown by Telekom have something to do with purchasing. Let’s move on to the more sophisticated questions beyond consumption: how can I find the daily news, intriguing articles on politics, technology and health and how do I find important information before the next general elections? The AI phone will surely come up with an answer to these, too. But from what sources does it derive its results? Telekom says, “Users can concentrate on what they want rather than how they will get it.” That sounds very convenient indeed. But it also sounds a bit like the technology paternalism slogan: “Don’t ruin your pretty head with worries, Daddy will look after it for you.”

• The inconspicuous form of technology paternalism no longer asks questions, trust is no longer an issue – the technology is simply there and works. How? We don’t know.

Big Tech’s visions for the future

• Another quotation by Eric Schmidt: “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

• This type of vision is designed to incapacitate us or to prevent those who grew up with it from ever reaching capability. We all hate to be told such things as we consider ourselves enlightened and immune to manipulation. Enlightenment can, however, develop in the opposite direction. As Leena Simon writes in her book – in allusion to Kant: “Technology paternalism is the self-imposed return of humans to incapability.”⁶

Convenience has dangerous consequences: How we lose abilities and what that means

Convenience doesn’t allow us to develop many skills in the first place. And we lose skills that we have but don’t practise:

• Those who always allow the GPS navigation system to guide them will no longer learn to read maps. Many would say: No problem, I don’t need that. But those who only follow GPS directions don’t develop the rough overview plan in their heads which can provide orientation without assistance. For them a mobile phone without power in a strange city or without a mobile network in the mountains can be quite unpleasant.

• Those who always rely on their smartphone to guide them will forget how to approach other people.

• Those who only learn about the daily news from social media and skip from short message to short message, from headline to headline, from video to video lose their skill to concentrate on longer, more sophisticated texts that provide deeper information⁷.

The smaller our total picture of things is, the more susceptible we become to manipulation. “Look at this, go there, buy that.” Subtext: “We know you so well that we can decide all this for you.”

Technology paternalism, however, is not only about our individual disadvantages. The point is that technology paternalism perverts our society. With a device such as the app-free AI phone from Telekom we should not only see the dangers in the patronising guidance of individual users – but also the damage done to all the creative people whose work is exploited and who are themselves made invisible in the process⁸. The damage done to the media whose websites are no longer found and which go down the drain. The damage we all suffer from even more disinformation funded from obscure sources. The damage to small companies who already have to list their products on Amazon to be found and who will probably have to try and co-operate with AI Big Tech companies in future.

Websites, for now, are still the places on the web that exist outside commercial web shops and allow for publication of people’s own content independently from Big Tech companies. Whether they will be easy to find is already decided by search engines. However, websites might become completely unimportant in future when nobody has a browser on their mobile device any longer. The bottleneck⁹ which the connection between the provider and the user has become is getting narrower and narrower.

Telekom doesn’t seem to have thought about these consequences in connection with its app-free smartphone. Big tech has done so. Goldman Sachs writes with rare clarity in an analysis from August 2024: The gigantic AI investments have to be profitable for Big Tech companies. And the first idea that comes to mind: tie people to platforms to expose them to more targeted advertising¹⁰.

The alleged butler suddenly turns into a patriarch and pushes you around. Damn – it was you who let him in in the first place!

But: We don’t have to do that. Technology is human-made. It is made by people according to Big Tech directions. Behind the algorithms there are people with a desire for power and a business plan.

It is in our hands to demand different technologies, split up monopolies and change the framework conditions. Lobbycontrol and Rebalance Now, together with other organisations, developed a whitepaper that describes how this can be done. “Beyond Big Tech” is a long-term project which requires courage and persistence. This much is clear: it is not only about philosophical questions, it is about tough decisions about what technologies to use in future, who decides what happens within them, how we will work and communicate and how our society will function.

To grow up we have to leave home, take responsibility. That means cooking, taking the rubbish out, remembering to take your rain jacket – or just enjoy getting wet. It means making your own decisions, making your own mistakes and learning to avoid them – or to deliberately repeat them next time.

It is our own laziness which enables the rise of technology paternalism. If we don’t want technology to take the part of a universally knowledgeable Daddy, if we do not want to fall back into incapacity, then it will be uncomfortable – but also wild, sweet and exciting.

We will take this liberty.

Thank you for reminding us to do so with the odd “beep”, dear technology paternalism.

Congratulations on the BigBrotherAward!