Technology is the answer. [Product Management on Medium]

Technology is the answer.

Wait, what was the question?

To be honest, it usually doesn’t matter. Need to talk to your mom while she’s hiking in France? Want to track down your grandmother’s grandfather’s childhood census? Time to schedule that eye exam/annual physical/dinner delivery/coffee date/parent-teacher conference/hair cut?

Technology solves so many of our daily problems that it’s easy to ignore the bigger questions:

Are we building systems that work for people?

What are the impacts of technology on the world?

How do flawed, biased humans build the all-knowing, intelligent systems of the future?

Take the Icelandic language.

Vehicle GPS units stumble over Icelandic names for streets and highways. So-called digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa don’t understand the language
- Maria Gallucci for Mashable

Is support for an entire language a “nice to have”, a low priority feature? When it’s not your country, your culture, it seems like an easy decision to make. The question of whether a team slips the project timeline or builds in Icelandic language support. (You can hear the conference room sniggers.)

It’s easy to see how the decision gets made. What’s harder to see is what it means as one piece of a much larger whole. If your technology becomes widely adopted and used, and doesn’t support how certain people live, are you somehow forcing change? If you restrict digital spaces to only certain languages, are you slowly changing how language is used in the real world as well?

The product decisions that we all make set the baseline for what is expected and what is optional. The overlap of the digital and physical spaces cannot be ignored.

Similar themes emerge in another piece of tech making headlines: facial recognition systems that don’t recognize all faces.

A 2011 study, co-authored by one of the organizers of NIST’s vendor tests, found that algorithms developed in China, Japan, and South Korea recognized East Asian faces far more readily than Caucasians. The reverse was true for algorithms developed in France, Germany, and the United States, which were significantly better at recognizing Caucasian facial characteristics.
- Clare Garvie and Jonathan Frankle for The Atlantic

Your stated goal may not be to build technology for the entire world. But aren’t we all, really? We may design our systems in English, for American audiences, but that’s marketing. There’s nothing stopping people around the world from picking it up and trying it out, even using it daily. Nothing except the restrictions that we build in.

Even when we believe we are starting from zero, because no technology or system exists, we bring our own biases and worldviews.

These small stories touch so many larger questions being asked right now: what is the internet for? What are the ethics of the tech industry? What is the responsibility of those of us inside it? What work is worth doing, regardless of the projected revenue growth?

What do our minor, sometimes seemingly inconsequential tech and product decisions mean to the world?

Source: Product Management on Medium http://ift.tt/2q2VZ34