In Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020, Harper, Rodden, Rogers and Sellen discuss and predict what they believe to be the future of technology, or at least up until 2020. This piece exemplifies and emphasizes the vast ways that technology and the various devices we use in our everyday lives are increasing in complexity and usage rapidly. However, their argument focuses much attention to gearing technology towards human values, something we may be lacking currently. 

This work was split into four different sections. Part 1 analyzes the major changes and adjustments technology has made throughout the past 20 years, while part 2 goes into a more intricate and detail-oriented approach of outlining how these changes have affected human beings as a species, listing five different types of transformations to categorically label them. Part 3 discusses HCI, or Human-Computer Interaction and the research that has been done concerning it, and part 4 goes on to list seven different recommendations for HCI use and how it could be shifted for the benefit of users. In part 3 and its discussion of HCI, the authors discussed the need “to understand and analyze the wider set of issues that are now at play, most notably human values, including the moral and ethical aspects”. As a recurring theme in this article, this section goes on to explain that with its rapid expansion and complex nature by users, there are more far-reaching consequences that we don’t stop to think about. For example, they detail the idea of a mobile device that shares a person’s interests and dislikes to other people in the close vicinity. Though this device would be used for this purpose, it is inevitable that someone crossing the street, unintended to see these likes and dislikes, will pick up the user. Furthermore, this would lead to an unintentional and unwanted interaction between two users, corrupting the users’ privacy and delegitimizing the product. This is what HCI needs to think about, all geared towards preserving and emphasizing the moral and ethical standards of users.

This is just one example pulled from the article that generalizes the need for change with HCI and other technological practices. It’s an interesting perspective to look at as we are past the year of 2020 and reading about the predictions for what that year was going to be like. There is no doubt in my mind that Covid-19 would’ve provided much more distress for users and people in general had these predictions for the world of 2020 not been accurate, but there is still much to adjust and change for the years to follow.