☑️ Tech adds tasks

TL; DR – Tech products are additive, they add tasks to our lives. That’s a big deal, and a big responsibility for those who build them, given our finite time on this planet. Meeting that responsibility means solving real problems, and building with restraint.

I was in Rome a couple of months ago, for the first time ever.

It’s a beautiful city. A jumble of history and energy, graffiti and high culture, hills and cobbled streets. More recently though, the city has become strewn with electric scooters.

They’re everywhere. Rome has 14,500+ of them. One minute, someone riding an e-scooter was zipping past me. The next, I was stepping over a pile of them on the footpath. Some have even sunk into the river Tiber, as it meanders through the city.

The electric scooter – or ‘e-scooter’ – captures a fundamental aspect about new tech products that come into our lives. They are additive. They add tasks to our lives, when we use them or when we come into contact with someone else using them.

E-scooters give their users a new mode of transport, to get from A to B. For everyone else, they add something to share the footpath and road with. They’ve added potential new regulations to the city’s statute books. A new app on our phones. New jobs for local police (when they aren’t used correctly). A new choice for shop owners and bus drivers (do I let these guys in with their scooters?). A new hurdle for people with blindness, or wheelchairs, to overcome. A new eyesore that blots a proud and noble cityscape. And so on. Tech adds tasks.

Here’s two other tech products that have played a big role in my last five years at work. Both have, in different ways, added tasks for those who use them and everyone else too.

Slack, our ‘workplace productivity’ platform, bundles together direct messages, group chats, and channels (a message board type feature) into one place. I remember transitioning from talking to colleagues and collaborators over email, to Slack. Now, I’d say I send/receive upwards of 50 messages a day, and view over 500 across all the chats and channels I’m in. I estimate Slack has added 10x to my volume of communication, and 10x to the number of people I speak to on a typical workday, relative to the world of emails.

A couple of years ago, in Zimbabwe, I was part of a team installing Internet-of-Things enabled solar energy systems in rural health clinics. These systems provided reliable energy. They meant the clinic could use artificial lights and serve its community after hours. It could store vaccines in fridges. Staff could keep their phones and computers charged.

On the flipside, the tech set up an entire new to-do list for clinic staff: keeping the panels dust-free, running basic maintenance, monitoring energy capacity, and learning to use a host of new devices that the clinic could now run. With electric lighting, staff also worked longer hours. The sun setting no longer meant the end of the workday.

Tech adds tasks. That’s one big reason we work longer hours than ever, despite having more tech than ever. The 15 hour work week, predicted in 1930 by the economist John Maynard Keynes as achievable by 2030, seems further and further away.

We live, on average globally, for 71 years. Adding tasks into human life’s finite container (and cognitive capacity) is a big deal. We should do it carefully, and with restraint.

Doing it carefully means solving real problems. Problems like the fact that half of Zimbabwe’s population doesn’t have access to electricity. Yes, our solar energy systems brought a lot of downstream tasks with them. But they were worth it, for the doctors, nurses and patients we served.

‘Solve real problems’ sounds simple enough (and it’s fairly mainstream advice in the tech/startup space). And there’s many examples of tech that does this. Anaesthesia before surgery. Sewing machines to make and mend clothes, much faster and cheaper than before. Solar PVs to generate clean, reliable electricity.

But there’s one nuance I want to talk about. Between solving a real problem, and not solving one at all, is a grey space. That space is where you take a situation (say, a medium-sized journey, 30 mins by foot or 10 mins by public transport), and by building a tech product to address it (say, an e-scooter) transform the situation into a problem the tech has now ‘solved’. Crucially, before the tech, no-one saw the situation as a big problem that needed solving. And by ‘solving’ it, the tech (as always) has added more tasks for everyone.

Minor problem ‘solved’, major headaches created. More to think about, more to do. Tech adds tasks, and the payoff isn’t always worth it.

Picking problems carefully is one half of the answer. The other half is what my friend Adam Delehanty calls building “technology of rigorous constraint”. These are tech products that do less, on purpose. They’re narrow and specific in what they offer.

And they create less tasks. Slack is a case study in how not to do this. It not only has a sprawling set of features, it’s also constantly bringing you new tasks: things to do, things to be aware of, options to consider, things you’re missing out on, and so on. Some very useful, some interesting, some useless. All delivered relentlessly and without constraint.

To summarise: tech add tasks. Those who build tech should take this fact very seriously.

Taking it seriously means solving real problems, and building with restraint.

Post-script on AI: Have as complicated a back-end as you want. But when building products using large language models and neural networks, build them to solve a problem (preferably a big, acute one). And with a front-end that targets that specific problem, and nothing else. Yes to AI for protein folding; no to AI-based general-purpose chatbots.

🎬 Thanks to Bill Geis and Amna Faiq Ali for looking at drafts of this.

🤔 Got thoughts? Don’t keep them to yourself. Email me on asad@asadrahman.io. Let’s figure this out together.

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Banner generated by DALL.E. The image was generated in response to the prompt: “A painting of someone with many tasks to do, lots of notifcations and lots on his mind”.