The tech world is now telling us to relinquish control. Stop thinking and turn your brain off was the previous messaging. Now? Your brain is useless. Use this product or get lost.
Earlier this week I received an interesting pop-up from Jira. They were promoting some new AI features and triggered a guided workflow for me while using the application to introduce this feature. The flow popped up following a pattern we should all be used to by now: My screen went dark except for a modal, two buttons popped up, one darker and one lighter. Nothing we haven’t see before. Except, their button CTAs were “try now” and “learn more.” Now I am a relatively tech forward person always willing to try new things. But no option to cancel or dismiss? In that instance I was forced to either try the AI feature or “learn more” about it (I clicked learn more which immeadiately went into an AI demonstration of the new feature) my control of the situation completely taken away.
The imperative to relinquish control appears everywhere. Recently I have been using OpenAI’s codex for help with some development problems (I am a bit late to codex apparently) via the command line tool. Once I actually ran the command, codex immediately alerted me that my repo was version controlled and that I should allow Codex to do whatever in the repo. My choice was defaulted to yes. Dark patterns are not new to technology, or to me either. Design decisions which nudge users toward particular choices all are known and expected. What is interesting with this however is that the illusion of choice presented to you at all when ultimately there aren’t any choices being made.
Our technology is now communicating to us that it is time for us to take the back seat. Humans have had their time. The features being created you cannot opt out of, either. We have to start using them as the human in the loop now, or learn about how others are using the feature to get ahead of you. You couldn’t even be a luddite if you tried!