Technology & Society

In what ways has technology changed how people communicate? The biggest change is probably volume and pace rather than medium. People communicate far more often than before, but the average message carries less context and gets less attention. The letter someone wrote a century ago contained more information per exchange than a typical text. That's not necessarily worse — it depends what you need from communication — but it does change what kinds of understanding you can build. Do you think social media brings people together or pushes them apart? Both, and the question is a bit like asking whether roads connect or cause accidents. Social media genuinely connects people who share particular interests across geography — that's a real good. It also reinforces existing views and limits exposure to different ones. The net effect probably varies by platform and how the person uses it. Any sweeping claim in either direction is missing something. Should there be limits on how much time children spend online? Probably, with caveats. The evidence that very high screen time affects younger children's development is reasonably consistent. For teenagers it's more complicated — content and context matter as much as duration. Three hours of a teenager doing creative work or maintaining genuine friendships online is different from three hours of passive scrolling. Any useful policy would need to make that distinction, which most don't. How has technology changed the relationship between employers and employees? In both directions at once. Remote work has given many people more flexibility, which is broadly positive. But the same technology makes workers continuously reachable — the boundary between work time and personal time has blurred, especially in knowledge work. And monitoring has become far easier, which raises questions about trust and privacy that most organisations haven't seriously grappled with. Do you think technology is making people more or less creative? More, in aggregate, though not uniformly. The tools available to someone who wants to make music, write, or film something are extraordinary compared to twenty years ago. A lot of creative work that used to need expensive equipment or institutional backing can now be done independently. The worry that AI-generated content reduces the incentive to develop creative skills is real, but I think it's probably premature.