The downsides of the digital transformation

APC’s editor is reminded that there are still many areas where old beats new, and local beats global.

The arrival of new technologies like big data and machine learning have allowed us to take our first steps into the world’s second big digital transformation — one where solutions to both consumer and business problems can be delivered in more precise and individually tailored ways.

They undoubtedly hold a lot of promise; however, I can’t help but feel a little disheartened when I’m reminded on a near daily basis that today’s tech still has a long way to go. When it comes to consumerfacing applications, those ‘smart’, data-driven solutions are often in the hands of tech giants — and, as we’ve seen, they’re not always putting the users first.

Let’s take smart speakers and the weather. My Google Home sucks when it comes to telling me if it’s going to rain or not today. That’s because, no matter where you live, Google uses just one weather source for all of its forecasts — the IBM-owned and US-based weather.com. While I can’t vouch for its accuracy on its American home turf, if you compare weather.com’s Australian forecasts with any reputable local source, you’ll find the former’s are way out of whack — often by several degrees, and particularly when it comes to predicting precipitation. A web search shows similar complaints about weather.com from Google users in other countries, too.

This weather problem is, for me, a bit of a microcosm of what we’ve seen (and continue seeing) occur to media in this age of rapidly advancing digitisation and automation. The way information is being disseminated is increasingly being taken out of human hands and, in many areas, that’s resulted in the destruction of tailored, localised solutions in favour of a one-size-fitsall approach. The maddening part is that getting accurate weather is a software engineering problem — the kind of thing that Google and Facebook as supposed to love because, once the developers have written the code, it doesn’t require significant resources to maintain it. (They don’t need to pay anyone.)

If the tech giants care about providing users with accurate info — like they repeatedly claim to — you’d think that something as uncontroversial as getting the local weather right would be an easy win.

So how about it, Google? Can you spare some dev time to fix this ‘easy’ problem? I can wait. In the meantime, I’ll just keep packing my brolly...