
Bringing down the Digital Divide. This is a historical opportunity for UX… | by Luis Berumen Castro | Jan, 2024
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I have heard many conversations about AI’s role in the User Experience profession. Some of them assume that UXers will have nothing to do when AI takes over. Please hear me out before buying into those ideas.
History has proven that every technological advance leaves people out, but for innovation to bring long-lasting rewards, it needs to draw people in. Designers, this might be the worst time to quit; so much work is ahead of us.
The first people to welcome a new day lived on the island of Kiritimati in Oceania. They are located 14 hours ahead of the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The rest of us will need to wait hours before celebrating the arrival of a new dawn. They are always ahead of us; that is how the world turns.
Imagine time somehow decided to skip that island so a thousand Polynesians would be trapped in the past—no more progress. The rest of the world slowly leaves them behind, building a different world further from their comprehension. What do you think would be long-term ramifications for them… and us?
It sounds like science fiction, but this is something that is happening right now to billions of people (maybe even you) without any given notice. Technology creates those divisions, and without mechanisms to democratize innovation, those gaps can only get bigger as innovation accelerates.
These accelerations create out-of-time zones in different scales. They can be noticeable and intentional, like giving power to a dictatorship to cut out access to a non-partisan digital outlet. Or personal and insidious, like a sensor in a soap dispenser that cannot “see” your skin colour (source).
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” — William Gibson, Science Fiction writer, coined the term “cyberspace”
For many, your imperfect present might be an ideal and unatenable future.
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