Tech 63100 Week 6
What Tech Calls Thinking
Question: What creates desire?
Desire
René Girard believed that all human desire is mimetic, i.e., it is a mirror for another person's desire for the same thing. This leads to two conclusions: (1) since we all want the same things, there is constant competition and conflict to achieve the same thing; and (2) we are all sheep (Daub, 2020). These conclusions become critical drivers for Silicon Valley and capitalistic economies, in general. Companies compete with each other to fulfill the desires of the general public to increase market share leveraging psychological and marketing techniques to influence desires and drive up demand.
According to Eyal (2012), a company that creates "internal triggers" in its users are able to form strong user habits that directly increase their bottom line. These habit-forming companies attach their services to the user's daily routines and emotions so their products are directly associated to their "self triggers". To accomplish this attachment, these habit-forming companies manufacture desire, leveraging the framework described in Eyal's Desire Engine. Habit-forming companies use external triggers (emails, web links, app icons, etc.) to spark action. These actions are intentionally designed to be (1) associated to a user's motivation so they feel inclined to take action and (2) be as easy possible to broaden the user base that has the ability to execute the action successfully. From the action, the user receives a variability reward, which creates a dopamine surge when the user receives the reward and the variability creates repetition as the reward received when the user doesn't know what they will get multiplies the effect of the dopamine creating repeated actions from the user to continuously receive these rewards. Through repetition of actions on these external triggers, users begin to form internal triggers that attach existing behaviors and emotions to these actions until they eventual form a habit.
The Exponential Age
Question: How can companies keep pace with technology's speed of change?
Exponential Gap
Organizations that plan, practice, and experiment with technologies of the future based on the understanding technologies that are expensive now will eventually become affordable (implied by Moore's law), are the companies that are well-positioned to take advantage of exponential technology. These are the companies that will understand how the exponential technology will change behaviors, relationships, and structures ahead of its competitors allowing the company to grow at an unprecedented scale. The result is extraordinary market power that fundamentally undermines the dynamism of a market (Azhar, 2021).
This gap exists because: (1) we're bad at math, thus unable to identify a technology's impact as exponential; (2) it's hard to predict the future as we are prone to underestimation, overestimation, and not accounting for unforeseen consequences in prediction models; and (3) it is difficult to adapt to the technology at the same pace it changes. To flatten out the exponential curve, we can slow the pace of technological advancement or we can better prepare institutions for rapid change so they can adapt at pace so adoption is steady and linear. The latter being more advantageous for advancing human society (Azhar, 2021).
Since 2000, about 52% of companies on the Fortune 500 were not able to keep pace and have since become obsolete. The modern companies of today are either tech companies or are tech-driven companies. To keep pace, companies must: (1) make every process as tech-driven as possible; (2) build a data infrastructure to support your tech; (3) focus on new metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs); (4) make innovation an ongoing discussion; and (5) embrace change, even if it seems to defy better judgement (Donahue, 2020).
References
Azhar, A. (2021). The Exponential Age. Diversion Books.
Daub, A. (2020). What Tech Calls Thinking. New York: FSG Originals.
Donahue, C. (2020). How to Keep Pace with Digital Transformation and Avoid Becoming Obsolete. Retrieved Feb 2024 from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2020/02/12/how-to-keep-pace-with-digital-transformation-and-avoid-becoming-obsolete/.
Eyal, N. (2012). How to Manufacture Desire. Retrieved Feb 2024 from TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/04/how-to-manufacture-desire/.