Tech companies want to automate our communities—in particular, our transportation and mobility systems. Unfortunately, we’re not well-prepared—physically or psychologically—to adjust to the onslaught.
From the latest developments in driverless vehicles in San Francisco to the reintroduction of robot dogs in New York and the growing push for delivery drones across the U.S., it’s clear that Silicon Valley firms aspire to remove as many people from the transportation equation as possible—unless we pay them for a ride. They’ve disrupted communities and traffic with ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft, but this seems to be a next step: removing the humans that not only need income, but also provide a level of interface between the tech companies and their consumers.
Tech companies seem to expect that we will continue to tolerate this inundation by their various “solutions,” all while not realizing that many of these “disruptive innovations,” may create more problems. This is particularly applicable for those of us who are not able to take advantage of these devices and services and instead have to change our behavior to adapt to them. As more and more technologies cross our paths, this may prove to be too much for us.
It all comes down to “divided attention” and “inattentional blindness,” two interrelated concepts from cognitive psychology. Divided attention describes the state when our attention is split—as it would be if we were driving (or walking) down the street and talking on our phone. We can’t focus on doing both tasks at the same time, so we rapidly cycle between them. Inattentional blindness is the result of that division, causing us to miss objects and people in plain sight.
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