The “Black Mirror” Nosedive clip combines AR technology, social media, and socioeconomic systems. In this worldview, people can rate each other from 1 to 5 stars during interactions. Each person’s final comprehensive score will affect the social resources they can get in life. Such as apartment qualifications, air tickets, discounts, etc. I am very longing for the advancement of technology in the future life to allow augmented reality technology to penetrate all aspects of our daily lives. People can query or obtain information more quickly. As long as we wear special glasses or contact lenses, we could get information as soon as we glance at people and objects. The relevant information of the object will pop up next to it, which is very convenient. At the same time, Nosedive also reflects a series of problems that people have been kidnapped by social ratings. In this story, the concept of tying data and human rights is unacceptable in terms of ethics. People should not be limited by data, let alone measured by data.
Technology should be used to solve people’s problems rather than restrict or force changes in people’s behavior. The reason why I upload, share, and let the server analyze my data is that I want to use the data as a reference to make my life better. For example, the sleep quality test application I am using tracks my daily sleep time and sleep depth. The next day, I used this data analysis to make a plan to arrange a more reasonable sleep time and method, thereby improving my long-term sleep quality. This is one way to make life better through data. Once people pay too much attention to numbers and data, they will have the consequence of being “trapped” by technology. For example, some dieting applications calculate the calories consumed by the user to remind the user to exercise or reduce meals. And these calorie data always cause psychological pressure to users. Many people went on hunger strikes irrationally. In the long run, this may not necessarily improve the user’s health index.
Even with irrelevant data, most of the time, a technological development that forcibly changes people’s behavior will cause problems. Before I entered a quarantined hotel in China, I needed to pay the hotel accommodation fees for 14 days. The point is that the staff only accepted smartphone payment and transfer, while cash and credit cards were all rejected. This goes against the original intention of people designing electronic payments. Designers may hope that electronic payment can bring a faster and more convenient experience than traditional payment methods. They do not want to turn traditional payment into a rejected and abandoned payment method. Technology should provide people with more possibilities, rather than drive people from migrating from one behavior to another.
