3 Takeaways from the Foundations of Humane Technology Course

A while ago I wrote an article about the Time Well Spent movement and how that connects into ‘dark design.’ Since then, key design ethicist, Tristan Haris, has co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, which I believe will provide some much-needed insight in the near future. They made the Netflix hit documentary, The Social Dilemma, and recently released a free course to help raise awareness about what technology companies are doing to manipulate people.

I took the course and there are a lot of important ideas in there. This content mostly has to do with design but not in the typical ‘software development’ kind of way. Instead, a lot of these concepts and ideas are about humanities ethics, morals, and economic systems and how they tie into what we think of as technology.

“Paleolithic emotions, Medieval institutions,

God-like technology.” — E.O. Wilson, father of ‘sociobiology’

Humanity has Problems.

While humanity has always faced difficult challenges, never have those challenges been…