Maybe Big Tech isn't the problem — maybe it's humanity

We blame photoshopping and social sites for an increase in body dysmorphia, but I remember fad diets in the 1980s, pre-internet, writes Byddi Lee

There is nothing new about bullying, cyber or otherwise. Technology simply makes that easier.

First thing this morning, a WhatsApp from Meta invited me to ask their AI to “imagine" me in a pink ski suit, or “imagine” a professional portrait of me, and it will create the image. 

Minutes later, I opened my emails to Audible offering "virtual voice" AI-narrated audiobooks — allowing me to create an audiobook from my e-books using computer-generated voices. 

All this occurred before I’d had my morning coffee, and just a few weeks after Meta’s alleged use of pirated books from thousands of authors sparked a protest by the Society of Authors outside Meta’s headquarters in London.

I have a pink ski jacket and don’t need to imagine what I look like in pink ski gear. I have a professional headshot — one that looks like me — so I don’t need one that makes me look younger, thinner, and only serves to make people snigger when I appear before them in real life.

The virtual voice audiobook is tempting, but since I work closely with a community theatre group, I’d never ask an AI to read my books when I could gainfully employ an actor. I can’t afford to pay an actor, so the audiobooks go un-made and the actor is unpaid either way.

I’m fascinated by the leaps technology has made during my lifetime, especially in communications. I remember our first telephone, a landline back in the late 1970s, attached to the wall with a wire.

The only 'wireless' in those days was a battery-operated radio that sat on the kitchen windowsill so mum could hear it in the garden

The phone was for dad's small business and no use to us kids since nobody else we knew had a phone.

Dad’s younger brother worked in Saudi Arabia as an engineer. When he came home after a year — no nipping home for long weekends in those days — he’d tell us about the marvellous inventions he’d seen.

“There’s this machine,” he said with awe, “that answers your telephone, even when you aren’t home, and records the caller's message.” 

We were aware of a tape recorder. Who of a certain age doesn’t remember sitting poised to press the red record button along with the play button at the right moment during Top of The Pops? Disaster could strike at any time and ruin the tape mix if someone in the room spoke. But a tape recorder that worked by itself? What voodoo was this?

Another time, my uncle came home with news of a machine that recorded your TV shows when you weren’t home. When we got our own video recorder, we’d turn on the telly, set the channel, and leave the whole thing on before leaving. 

It was a while before we realised not only did we not need to have the TV switched on, but that we could even watch something else on a different channel — get this — at the same time

We weren’t a high-tech family, though we did have an old record player whose speakers could be stored on top so that it looked like a suitcase, complete with a handle to pick the whole lot up. 

Dad made great technological strides in the development of a remote control when he bought a TV with touch-sensitive buttons. Armed with an extendable car radio aerial (something you never see any more), he could dispense with asking us to switch the channel and wobbled a fully extended aerial to touch the buttons. There were six buttons but only three channels — four if you counted RTÉ, which only worked in good weather.

Virtual clothing

In stark contrast was Dad’s older brother who had emigrated to America and worked in Pan Am as a computer programmer. This uncle often talked about programming on cards, arranged in and carried about in boxes.

He was at the forefront of programming the machines that airports used for tickets, and later boarding passes, until our home computers took over both jobs. 

Similar machines now churn out the labels we stick on our suitcases. Perhaps in the future, we’ll all be wearing virtual clothes as “imagined” by Meta AI, making suitcases and these machines obsolete.

Dad joined the digital age in the mid-80s and bought a Commodore 64. More high tech than cards in boxes, this miracle of technology uploaded programmes from a tape cassette.

Venturing where nobody in our household had gone before, I played The Quest — a text adventure game that came with the machine — only to be stymied by a dwarf who could not be bribed with magical swords, keys, or lamps.

Perhaps if I’d outwitted the dwarf and gained access to the rest of the labyrinth, I’d be addicted to gaming or become the next tech wizard. Instead, I resorted to learning some basic and wrote a short programme that displayed my name in green letters repeatedly on a black screen.

That Commodore 64 triggered my curiosity about computers

As someone with terrible handwriting, I embraced word processing despite the laments that we’d all forget how to write. After completing a degree in environmental biology in 1990, I did a master’s degree in computer science and learned to programme properly — laying the foundations for my life as a researcher, a teacher, a traveller, a writer, and a human being in a digital age.

As the dial-up era migrated to broadband internet, we navigated the non-event that was the millennium bug and faced the crisis of putting our beloved postal workers out of work by switching to email. 

Humanity entered the digital age whether they wanted to or not, and, more alarmingly, even if they weren’t able to cope with it

In a world where global news is served up  — true or false — where people commune on social media, and where we chat with loved ones on the other side of the globe in real-time using video conferencing (no more long-distance delays as voices travel on undersea cables) many resent technology.

Tech is the scapegoat for the ills of society. We blame photoshopping and social sites for an increase in body dysmorphia, but I remember fad diets in the pre-internet 1980s. And what about those impossibly thin models in the 'Twiggy' era of the 1960s? Or Victorian times, when corseted women fainted because they hadn’t room to breathe? Did they see that on Instagram?

There is nothing new about bullying, cyber or otherwise. Technology simply makes that easier, like it makes most things easier, from grandparents long-distance video-conferencing their family to brain implants so the paralysed can walk.

Meta isn’t the first to allegedly "steal” artists's work. What would you call what we did with our tape recorders during Top of the Pops?

Perhaps there is truth in the aphorism written in 1849 by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr: “The more things change, the more they remain the same" — a sentiment echoed almost verbatim by Bon Jovi’s 2010 song, The More Things Change. 

Are we too willing to hold technology responsible? Is cruelty and laziness hardwired into the human psyche? In the midst of our blame culture, perhaps we need to take a good hard look at ourselves. 

Maybe technology is not actually the problem — maybe humanity is.

• Byddi Lee is an author living in Armagh.