Technology Does Not Guarantee Human Happiness

It was around 2015, while I was working on launching my own venture, that I started asking questions like this. What seemed at first like a far-fetched question turned out, once I casually brought it up at drinking parties and the like, to be something a great many entrepreneurs and engineers were quietly wrestling with too.

Philosophical thinking is indispensable when considering a business. The word “philosophy” might make this sound like a lofty affair, but in practice it’s nothing so grand. It simply means the stance of doubting what you take to be normal. It’s easier to grasp if you think of it as asking why, again and again.

Suppose, for example, you’re developing a device that detects an employee’s poor physical condition and notifies a manager. The benefits pile up: reduced physical risk to employees, fewer hours spent by team leaders on management, and accumulation of quantitative data on employees’ task loads and physical condition. Great, this is clearly worth doing.

But now let’s bring in a philosophical stance and start doubting all of it.

Ask, for instance, why exactly it’s good to reduce physical risk. Doing so reveals several stakeholders involved. Dividing them into “the executive,” “the manager,” “the team leader,” and “the member,” we find: it goes without saying that the member themselves would prefer to be physically healthy; for the team leader, if a member falls ill the schedule slips, so it’s better to have them rest than push through while unwell; for the manager, being able to grasp the whole picture without visiting every site in person is extremely efficient; and for the executive, being able to avoid the risk of major accidents or workplace injuries through a cheap service is clearly desirable. It looks like we might be aiming not just for three-way benefit but four-way benefit.

Next, let’s doubt whether “reducing the team leader’s management hours” is really desirable. In effect, this means fewer opportunities to check on people’s condition at the morning meeting or talk with the leader about how things are going — the device will do that instead, how wonderful. For the executive, reduced hours mean reduced cost, which also leads to headcount reduction, and that’s desirable (people not working is preferable). For the manager, fewer factors depending on the team leader’s competence means less risk, which is desirable (again, people not working is preferable). For the leader themselves, having a lower-resolution grasp of members’ situations and fewer points of contact makes managing harder. And even if management hours go down, other work will just get piled on, so the job doesn’t actually get any easier. For the member, fewer points of contact with the leader increases anxiety. Things are starting to look shaky. And here a new proposition emerges: is reducing hours actually the right thing to do?

Thinking the same way about data accumulation, a similar question arises: who exactly benefits directly from accumulating this data?

What’s interesting is that a business plan that seemed flawless and wonderful at first grows more and more dubious the deeper you dig with philosophical thinking. You dig and dig, convince yourself, then dig again. The state you reach once everything is finally sorted out and clear is what people mean by something clicking into place.

That skeptical stance — is reducing hours actually right? — can be the trigger for a very major breakthrough. That’s because converting reduced hours into money to measure the value of a system being introduced is common sense practiced everywhere. Let’s go ahead and doubt that common sense too.

I’ll avoid going into detail here, but repeating this kind of philosophical thinking usually leads somewhere: to the proposition, does this actually make people happy? In the end, it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that all human activity is undertaken in pursuit of happiness, so perhaps this is only natural. On the way to arriving there, I’ve even passed through propositions like “is economic growth a good thing?” — even though I thought I was just thinking about a business model.

There’s a philosopher named Wittgenstein who wrote about the importance of clarifying definitions. The opposite of clarification is careless generalization, and he warned that unless you properly settle the definitions of your words, the logic itself becomes meaningless. A clear example is the statement “beautiful people have it easy.” “Having it easy” presumably means something like being able to live a good life. But the definition of a good life differs from person to person. Some people prioritize acquiring money above everything else in life, while others feel fulfilled simply by having time to spend with family. In other words, the statement “beautiful people have it easy” changes meaning entirely depending on how you define “easy,” which means it substantially means nothing at all.

So when it comes to the proposition in the title — does technology make people happy? — we can see that the definition of “happiness” is the key. And the definition of “happiness,” much like “easy” above, varies enormously from person to person. So let’s instead take the contrapositive. For a proposition “A implies B,” the contrapositive is “not B implies not A.” Here that becomes: without technology, people are not happy. This proposition is clearly false. If we were to affirm it, we’d be forced to brand our parents’ generation as unhappy compared to ours, our grandparents’ generation as unhappy compared to our parents’, and our great-grandparents’ generation as unhappy still further back. I simply can’t believe that. If a contrapositive can be proven true, then the original proposition is also true. So since the contrapositive here turns out false, what we learn is this: having technology doesn’t necessarily mean people are happy. In fact the two are close to unrelated. In other words, if you think you’ve made people happy simply by introducing some piece of technology, that’s a serious delusion.

Am I saying technology should be rejected? No, that’s not it.

What I want to say is that we should doubt the supposed benefits of making something more efficient or more convenient. Just as it’s worth thinking about whatever was lost through the mechanization that followed the Industrial Revolution — beauty, texture, or perhaps a certain grittiness — we also need to think about the people who get laid off once hours are reduced, the minority who suffer under new schemes of exploitation born from the sharing economy, and the one person in a million who ends up disadvantaged by an AI’s unexpected input. We need to ask: does this technology actually make everyone happy?

Naturally, as in the earlier example, plenty of technologies and business ideas achieve not just three-way but four-way benefit. To see through to the essence of things, and to avoid squandering the precious time and effort of one’s life, it’s extremely important to always approach things with a skeptical stance.

The content of this post is an excerpt (original text) from the following book. If you’re interested, please consider purchasing it.

The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup

The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/08/1100/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.