Monthly Archives: August 2021

It was on the day I read a Facebook post by my sick friend that I started to really question my relationship with technology.

An old friend had posted a status update saying he needed to rush to the hospital because he was having a health crisis. I half-choked on my tea and stared at my laptop. I recognized the post as a plea for support. I felt fear for him, and then I did nothing about it, because I saw in another tab that Id just gotten a new email and went to check that instead.

After a few minutes scrolling my Gmail, I realized something was messed up. The new email was obviously not as urgent as the sick friend, and yet Id acted as if they had equal claims on my attention. What was wrong with me? Was I a terrible person? I dashed off a message to my friend, but continued to feel disturbed.

Gradually, though, I came to think this was less an indication that I was an immoral individual and more a reflection of a bigger societal problem. I began to notice that digital technology often seems to make it harder for us to respond in the right way when someone is suffering and needs our help.

Think of all the times a friend has called you to talk through something sad or stressful, and you could barely stop your twitchy fingers from checking your email or scrolling through Instagram as they talked. Think of all the times youve seen an article in your Facebook News Feed about anguished people desperate for help starving children in Yemen, dying Covid-19 patients in India only to get distracted by a funny meme that appears right above it.

Think of the countless stories of camera phones short-circuiting human decency. Many a bystander has witnessed a car accident or a fist-fight and taken out their phone to film the drama rather than rushing over to see if the victim needs help. One Canadian government-commissioned report found that when our experience of the world is mediated by smartphones, we often fixate on capturing a spectacle because we want the rush well get from the instant reaction to our videos on social media.

Multiple studies have suggested that digital technology is shortening our attention spans and making us more distracted. What if its also making us less empathetic, less prone to ethical action? What if its degrading our capacity for moral attention the capacity to notice the morally salient features of a given situation so that we can respond appropriately?

There is a lot of evidence to indicate that our devices really are having this negative effect. Tech companies continue to bake in design elements that amplify the effect elements that make it harder for us to sustain uninterrupted attention to the things that really matter, or even to notice them in the first place. And they do this even though its becoming increasingly clear that this is bad not only for our individual interpersonal relationships, but also for our politics. Theres a reason why former President Barack Obama now says that the internet and social media have created the single biggest threat to our democracy.

The idea of moral attention goes back at least as far as ancient Greece, where the Stoics wrote about the practice of attention (prosoch) as the cornerstone of a good spiritual life. In modern Western thought, though, ethicists didnt focus too much on attention until a band of female philosophers came along, starting with Simone Weil.

Weil, an early 20th-century French philosopher and Christian mystic, wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. She believed that to be able to properly pay attention to someone else to become fully receptive to their situation in all its complexity you need to first get your own self out of the way. She called this process decreation, and explained: Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty ... ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.

Weil argued that plain old attention the kind you use when reading novels, say, or birdwatching is a precondition for moral attention, which is a precondition for empathy, which is a precondition for ethical action.

Later philosophers, like Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum, picked up and developed Weils ideas. They garbed them in the language of Western philosophy; Murdoch, for example, appeals to Plato as she writes about the need for unselfing. But this central idea of unselfing or decreation is perhaps most reminiscent of Eastern traditions like Buddhism, which has long emphasized the importance of relinquishing our ego and training our attention so we can perceive and respond to others needs. It offers tools like mindfulness meditation for doing just that.

The idea that you should practice emptying out your self to become receptive to someone else is antithetical to todays digital technology, says Beverley McGuire, a historian of religion at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who researches moral attention.

Decreating the self thats the opposite of social media, she says, adding that Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms are all about identity construction. Users build up an aspirational version of themselves, forever adding more words, images, and videos, thickening the self into a brand.

Whats more, over the past decade a bevy of psychologists have conducted multiple studies exploring how (and how often) people use social media and the way it impacts their psychological health. Theyve found that social media encourages users to compare themselves to others. This social comparison is baked into the platforms design. Because the Facebook algorithms bump posts up in our newsfeed that have gotten plenty of Likes and congratulatory comments, we end up seeing a highlight reel of our friends lives. They seem to be always succeeding; we feel like failures by contrast. We typically then either spend more time scrolling on Facebook in the hope that well find someone worse off so we feel better, or we post our own status update emphasizing how great our lives are going. Both responses perpetuate the vicious cycle.

In other words, rather than helping us get our own selves out of the way so we can truly attend to others, these platforms encourage us to create thicker selves and to shore them up defensively, competitively against other selves we perceive as better off.

And what about email? What was really happening the day I got distracted from my sick friends Facebook post and went to look at my Gmail instead? I asked Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google. He now leads the Center for Humane Technology, which aims to realign tech with humanitys best interests, and he was part of the popular Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.

Weve all been there, he assures me. I worked on Gmail myself, and I know how the tab changes the number in parentheses. When you see the number [go up], its tapping into novelty seeking same as a slot machine. Its making you aware of a gap in your knowledge and now you want to close it. Its a curiosity gap.

Plus, human beings naturally avert their attention from uncomfortable or painful stimuli like a health crisis, Harris adds. And now, with notifications coming at us from all sides, Its never been easier to have an excuse to attenuate or leave an uncomfortable stimulus.

By fragmenting my attention and dangling before it the possibility of something newer and happier, Gmails design had exploited my innate psychological vulnerabilities and had made me more likely to turn away from my sick friends post, degrading my moral attention.

The problem isnt just Gmail. Silicon Valley designers have studied a whole suite of persuasive technology tricks and used them in everything from Amazons one-click shopping to Facebooks News Feed to YouTubes video recommender algorithm. Sometimes the goal of persuasive technology is to get us to spend money, as with Amazon. But often its just to keep us looking and scrolling and clicking on a platform for as long as possible. Thats because the platform makes its money not by selling something to us, but by selling us that is, our attention to advertisers.

Think of how Snapchat rewards you with badges when youre on the app more, how Instagram sends you notifications to come check out the latest image, how Twitter purposely makes you wait a few seconds to see notifications, or how Facebooks infinite scroll feature invites you to engage in just one ... more ... scroll.

A lot of these tricks can be traced back to BJ Fogg, a social scientist who in 1998 founded the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab to teach budding entrepreneurs how to modify human behavior through tech. A lot of designers who went on to hold leadership positions at companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Google (including Harris) passed through Foggs famous classes. More recently, technologists have codified these lessons in books like Hooked by Nir Eyal, which offers instructions on how to make a product addictive.

The result of all this is what Harris calls human downgrading: A decade of evidence now suggests that digital tech is eroding our attention, which is eroding our moral attention, which is eroding our empathy.

In 2010, psychologists at the University of Michigan analyzed the findings of 72 studies of American college students empathy levels conducted over three decades. They discovered something startling: There had been a more than 40 percent drop in empathy among students. Most of that decline happened after 2000 the decade that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube took off leading to the hypothesis that digital tech was largely to blame.

In 2014, a team of psychologists in California authored a study exploring technologys impact from a different direction: They studied kids at a device-free outdoor camp. After five days without their phones, the kids were accurately reading peoples facial expressions and emotions much better than a control group of kids. Talking to one another face to face, it seemed, had enhanced their attentional and emotional capacities.

In a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, 89 percent of American respondents admitted that they whipped out their phone during their last social interaction. Whats more, 82 percent said it deteriorated the conversation and decreased the empathic connection they felt toward the other people they were with.

But whats even more disconcerting is that our devices disconnect us even when were not using them. As the MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, who researches technologys adverse effects on social behavior, has noted: Studies of conversation, both in the laboratory and in natural settings, show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they wont mind being interrupted. They dont feel as invested in each other.

Were living in Simone Weils nightmare.

Digital tech doesnt only erode our attention. It also divides and redirects our attention into separate information ecosystems, so that the news you see is different from, say, the news your grandmother sees. And that has profound effects on what each of us ends up viewing as morally salient.

To make this concrete, think about the recent US election. As former President Donald Trump racked up millions of votes, many liberals wondered incredulously how nearly half of the electorate could possibly vote for a man who had put kids in cages, enabled a pandemic that had killed many thousands of Americans, and so much more. How was all this not a dealbreaker?

You look over at the other side and you say, Oh, my god, how can they be so stupid? Arent they seeing the same information Im seeing? Harris said. And the answer is, theyre not.

Trump voters saw a very different version of reality than others over the past four years. Their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other accounts fed them countless stories about how the Democrats are crooked, crazy, or straight-up Satanic (see under: QAnon). These platforms helped ensure that a user who clicked on one such story would be led down a rabbit hole where theyd be met by more and more similar stories.

Say you could choose between two types of Facebook feeds: one that constantly gives you a more complex and more challenging view of reality, and one that constantly gives you more reasons why youre right and the other side is wrong. Which would you prefer?

Most people would prefer the second feed (which technologists call an affirmation feed), making that option more successful for the companys business model than the first (the confronting feed), Harris explained. Social media companies give users more of what theyve already indicated they like, so as to keep their attention for longer. The longer they can keep users eyes glued to the platform, the more they get paid by their advertisers. That means the companies profit by putting each of us into our own ideological bubble.

Think about how this plays out when a platform has 2.7 billion users, as Facebook does. The business model shifts our collective attention onto certain stories to the exclusion of others. As a result, we become increasingly convinced that were good and the other side is evil. We become less empathetic for what the other side might have experienced.

In other words, by narrowing our attention, the business model also ends up narrowing our moral attention our ability to see that there may be other perspectives that matter morally.

The consequences can be catastrophic.

Myanmar offers a tragic example. A few years ago, Facebook users there used the platform to incite violence against the Rohingya, a mostly Muslim minority group in the Buddhist-majority country. The memes, messages, and news that Facebook allowed to be posted and shared on its platform vilified the Rohingya, casting them as illegal immigrants who harmed local Buddhists. Thanks to the Facebook algorithm, these emotion-arousing posts were shared countless times, directing users attention to an ever narrower and darker view of the Rohingya. The platform, by its own admission, did not do enough to redirect users attention to sources that would call this view into question. Empathy dwindled; hate grew.

In 2017, thousands of Rohingya were killed, hundreds of villages were burned to the ground, and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee. It was, the United Nations said, a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.

Myanmars democracy was long known to be fragile, while the United States has been considered a democracy par excellence. But Obama wasnt exaggerating when he said that democracy itself is at stake, including on American soil. The past few years have seen mounting concern over the way social media gives authoritarian politicians a leg up: By offering them a vast platform where they can demonize a minority group or other threat, social media enables them to fuel a populations negative emotions like anger and fear so it will rally to them for protection.

Negative emotions last longer, are stickier, and spread faster, explained Harris. So thats why the negative tends to outcompete the positive unless social media companies take concerted action to stop the spread of hate speech or misinformation. But even when it came to the consequential 2020 US election, which they had ample time to prepare for, their action still came too little, too late, analysts noted. The way that attention, and by extension moral attention, was shaped online ended up breeding a tragic moral outcome offline: Five people died in the Capitol riot.

People who point out the dangers of digital tech are often met with a couple of common critiques. The first one goes like this: Its not the tech companies fault. Its users responsibility to manage their own intake. We need to stop being so paternalistic!

This would be a fair critique if there were symmetrical power between users and tech companies. But as the documentary The Social Dilemma illustrates, the companies understand us better than we understand them or ourselves. Theyve got supercomputers testing precisely which colors, sounds, and other design elements are best at exploiting our psychological weaknesses (many of which were not even conscious of) in the name of holding our attention. Compared to their artificial intelligence, were all children, Harris says in the documentary. And children need protection.

Another critique suggests: Technology may have caused some problems but it can also fix them. Why dont we build tech that enhances moral attention?

Thus far, much of the intervention in the digital sphere to enhance that has not worked out so well, says Tenzin Priyadarshi, the director of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT.

Its not for lack of trying. Priyadarshi and designers affiliated with the center have tried creating an app, 20 Day Stranger, that gives continuous updates on what another person is doing and feeling. You get to know where they are, but never find out who they are. The idea is that this anonymous yet intimate connection might make you more curious or empathetic toward the strangers you pass every day.

They also designed an app called Mitra. Inspired by Buddhist notions of a virtuous friend (kalya-mitra), it prompts you to identify your core values and track how much you acted in line with them each day. The goal is to heighten your self-awareness, transforming your mind into a better friend and ally.

I tried out this app, choosing family, kindness, and creativity as the three values I wanted to track. For a few days, it worked great. Being primed with a reminder that I value family gave me the extra nudge I needed to call my grandmother more often. But despite my initial excitement, I soon forgot all about the app. It didnt send me push notifications reminding me to log in each day. It didnt congratulate me when I achieved a streak of several consecutive days. It didnt gamify my successes by rewarding me with points, badges, stickers, or animal gifs standard fare in behavior modification apps these days.

I hated to admit that the absence of these tricks led me to abandon the app. But when I confessed this to McGuire, the University of North Carolina Wilmington professor, she told me her students reacted the same way. In 2019, she conducted a formal study on students who were asked to use Mitra. She found that although the app increased their moral attention to some extent, none of them said theyd continue using it beyond the study.

Theyve become so accustomed to apps manipulating their attention and enticing them in certain ways that when they use apps that are intentionally designed not to do that, they find them boring, McGuire said.

Priyadarshi told me he now believes that the lack of addictive features is part of why new social networks meant as more ethical alternatives to Facebook and Twitter like Ello, Diaspora, or App.net never manage to peel very many people off the big platforms.

So hes working to design tech that enhances peoples moral attention on the platforms where they already spend time. Inspired by pop-up ads on browsers, he wants users to be able to integrate a plug-in that periodically peppers their feeds with good behavioral nudges, like, Have you said a kind word to a colleague today? or, Did you call someone whos elderly or sick?

Sounds nice, but implicit in this is a surrender to a depressing fact: Companies such as Facebook have found a winning strategy for monopolizing our attention. Technologists cant convert people away unless theyre willing to use the same harmful tricks as Facebook, which some thinkers feel defeats the purpose.

That brings up a fundamental question. Since hooking our attention manipulatively is part of what makes Facebook so successful, if were asking it to hook our attention less, does that require it to give up some of its profit?

Yes, they very much would have to, Harris said. This is where it gets uncomfortable, because we realize that our whole economy is entangled with this. More time on these platforms equals more money, so if the healthy thing for society was less use of Facebook and a very different kind of Facebook, thats not in line with the business model and theyre not going to be for it.

Indeed, they are not for it. Facebook ran experiments in 2020 to see if posts deemed bad for the world like political misinformation could be demoted in the News Feed. They could, but at a cost: The number of times people opened Facebook decreased. The company abandoned the approach.

So, what can we do? We have two main options: regulation and self-regulation. We need both.

On a societal level, we have to start by recognizing that Big Tech is probably not going to change unless the law forces it to, or it becomes too costly (financially or reputationally) not to change.

So one thing we can do as citizens is demand tech reform, putting public pressure on tech leaders and calling them out if they fail to respond. Meanwhile, tech policy experts can push for new regulations. These regulations will have to change Big Techs incentives by punishing unwanted behavior for example, by forcing platforms to pay for the harms they inflict on society and rewarding humane behavior. Changed incentives would increase the chances that if up-and-coming technologists design non-manipulative tech, and investors move funding toward them, their better technologies can actually take off in the marketplace.

Regulatory changes are already in the offing: Just look at the recent antitrust charges against Google in the US, and President Joe Bidens decisions to appoint Big Tech critic Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission and to sign a sweeping executive order taking aim at anti-competitive practices in tech.

As the historian Tim Wu has chronicled in his book The Attention Merchants, weve got reason to be hopeful about a regulatory approach: In the past, when people felt a new invention was getting particularly distracting, they launched countermovements that successfully curtailed it. When colorful lithographic posters came on the scene in 19th-century France, suddenly filling the urban environment, Parisians grew disgusted with the ads. They enacted laws to limit where posters can go. Those regulations are still in place today.

Changing the regulatory landscape is crucial because the onus cannot be all on the individual to resist machinery designed to be incredibly irresistible. However, we cant just wait for the laws to save us. Priyadarshi said digital tech moves too fast for that. By the time policymakers and lawmakers come up with mechanisms to regulate, technology has gone 10 years ahead, he told me. Theyre always playing catch-up.

So even as we seek regulation of Big Tech, we individuals need to learn to self-regulate to train our attention as best we can.

Thats the upshot of Jenny Odells book How to Do Nothing. Its not an anti-technology screed urging us to simply flee Facebook and Twitter. Instead, she urges us to try resistance-in-place.

A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind, she writes. What is needed, then, is not a once-and-for-all type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.

Odell describes how shes trained her attention by studying nature, especially birds and plants. There are many other ways to do it, from meditating (as the Buddhists recommend) to reading literature (as Martha Nussbaum recommends).

As for me, Ive been doing all three. In the year since my sick friends Facebook post, Ive become more intentional about birding, meditating, and reading fiction in order to train my attention. I am building attentional muscles in the hope that, next time someone needs me, I will be there for them, fully present, rapt.

Reporting for this article was supported by Public Theologies of Technology and Presence, a journalism and research initiative based at the Institute of Buddhist Studies and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Sigal Samuel is a Senior Reporter for Voxs Future Perfect and co-Host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes about artificial intelligence, neuroscience, climate change, and the intersection of technology with ethics and religion.

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Technology may be wreaking havoc on our morality - Vox.com

Despite appearances to the contrary, going digital has not meant a change in culture. In person meetings used to be a study in power relationships. Without any doubt, moving work (and other social interactions) out of the office and into the ether, has, as with all things that have migrated online, lent a new character to these relationships. And it is not beautiful. Nor useful.

Open any serious newspaper (online or old fashioned paper), and you run a very high risk of running into arcane screeds on how the marriage between technology and communications continues to force change on the world we live in. Often, the focus is on work. Not just the way it has become more productive. But also in the degree to which new tools and ways of working might make large swathes of our current labour force redundant. This new effect of the technology revolution shows up beyond work, too. Household utensils are smarter, especially the genre-straddling mobile phone. We learn that the consumption of leisure values is more and more about experience, where once the onus was on ownership.

While last years pandemic has had very obvious health effects, its longer lasting impacts will be felt in those areas in which it has accelerated the uptake of technology. Video conferencing over in-person meetings. Working from home instead of the commute-intensive work from the office. And then there are the tremendous possibilities opened up for telemedicine by the swarm of wearable devices now able to measure their wearers vital signs and process these online and in real time.

For obvious reasons, this commentary focuses on the positives. How working from home, for instance, has made being a mother less laborious a challenge than before the pandemic. In the instances when the negative consequences of technologys imprint on modern man and the interaction of both these and the pandemic come up for mention, they are often posed as problems to be solved. Take fake news for one, and how responses to it may imperil social cohesion. Do not worry that governments have mounted this stead who mean to also undermine civil liberties, as part of a design that perpetuates their stay in office.

Thus, it would appear that whether or not technology is useful to any people depends almost entirely on the context within which it will be used. This is more so when that technology is not a product of the culture that consumes it.

What the tension between these trends seems to suggest is that like most human inventions, technology is not always a force for good. At best, it is an instrument available to man which he may use according to his ken. At worst, the upheavals that rapid technological progress is responsible for change human societies in less than welcome ways. As an instrument, it is as morally ambivalent as is the humble hoe available to build a ridge to sow seeds in, or help decapitate an assailant. Or like the internal combustion engine, responsible simultaneously for the swift expansion of human communities, and the incineration of the earth.

Thus, it would appear that whether or not technology is useful to any people depends almost entirely on the context within which it will be used. This is more so when that technology is not a product of the culture that consumes it. Nothing reminds me more powerfully of this than the video conferencing meetings that I have had to attend since this became a staple of work last year.

if interactions were this way in my kindergarten days, the responses in our Zoom and Team meetings cannot be described as newI was on a Zoom meeting last week. And it was obvious that these video communication apps need an idobale emoji to help with the local propensity to kiss arse.

Despite appearances to the contrary, going digital has not meant a change in culture. In person meetings used to be a study in power relationships. Who sat were? Who arrived before whom? Who gets to carry what? And for whom? Any which way you tell it, obsequiousness was writ unctuous in those interactions. Without any doubt, moving work (and other social interactions) out of the office and into the ether, has, as with all things that have migrated online, lent a new character to these relationships. And it is not beautiful. Nor useful. Affliction with an atavistic variant now means that meetings start as classes once did in the kindergarten. The Big boss man walks in, virtually starts the meeting, and the chorus of Good morning Big Boss is as sickening as it is an auditory challenge.

Alas, the mute button works very well for microphones; but not for speakers. Still, if interactions were this way in my kindergarten days, the responses in our Zoom and Team meetings cannot be described as new. My friend insists that it is not necessarily wrong, either. In his reading, We are a culturally VERY respectful people. How else would we expect to be shown respect if we show no respect to our superiors? Maybe. Maybe not. However, I was on a Zoom meeting last week. And it was obvious that these video communication apps need an idobale emoji to help with the local propensity to kiss arse.

Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqu and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.

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ALBANY, N.Y., Aug. 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Global Pressure Transducer Market: Overview

A pressure transducer, also known as a pressure transmitter, converts pressure into an analogue electrical signal, and it is widely used in an extensive range of industries, such as Telemetry, HVAC, oil & gas, automotive, consumer electronics, etc. A pressure transducer is utilized in the oil & gas sector to monitor pressure in liquid tanks orpipes, outlet,inlet,or system pressure, and manyother applications. The system is made of two basic components: an elastic substance that deforms when subjected to a pressured media and an electrical device that identifies the deformation.

The global pressure transducer market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 3.4% during the forecast period of 2021 to 2031. By 2031, the pressure transducer market is estimated to value more than US$ 5.61 Bn. Numerous factors are influencing the global pressure transducer market, such as increasing industrial automation and rising need for pressure transducers in the process industry. As a result, the marketis expected to grow due to the rising applications of pressure transducers in the process industry.

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Market players are ramping up the manufacturing of cellular pressure transducers that are simple to install and can connect directly to a provider's secure data portal, where they provide 24/7 customer and technicalassistance. Wireless pressure transducers with built-in cellular communication are a new entry in the globalpressure transducer market. As compared to traditional transducers, these devices make monitoring pressure andtemperature simpler. An array of sensors can be monitored only by a single system utilizing these transducers.In addition to improving and innovating in pressure transducers, manufacturers provide lower pricing and minimal inventory costs to their customers.

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Finance teams are on an exciting journey of discovery. They are finally starting to embrace the benefits of technology a move that is long overdue, according to Anish Kapoor, CEO of AccessPay, a cloud-based payment specialist.

Finance teams have lagged behind other areas of the business in the use of technology, he says. Marketing and sales have been using tech to become more efficient for 20 years.

He suggests that the decision of finance teams to accelerate their adoption of technology is due to increased compliance burdens in the face of changing requirements from regulators and greater demands placed on businesses by consumers.

They have prioritised investment in other areas over themselves, but now the biggest gains from automation are in the finance function, he says.

The benefits are clear, according to Kapoor. Automating as many tasks as possible will free up time for other revenue generating work or even to guard against future economic shocks.

Business will be under pressure to cut costs due to lower revenues or paying back loans after Covid-19, he warns. Finance functions wont be exempt from these problems.

The finance function, therefore, will need to find innovative ways to keep manage cash to ensure financial stability and monitor payment authorisations in the most cost-effective way possible.

Its important that businesses start investing for the long-term and make significant structural changes, says Kapoor. More organisations are starting to bite the bullet on these decisions.

Kapoor believes there is plenty of scope for development as many of the core financial operations have failed to keep pace with a fast-developing and more connected world.

Getting data to and from your banks is at the heart of what finance teams do and yet the technology hasnt changed in 20 years when we moved from telephone and branch banking to internet banking, he says.

This is something that AccessPay is keen to change.

We are a trusted partner to global banks, he says. Customers use our technology to create a secure, fully digital connection between banks and their ERP [enterprise resource planning], HCM [human capital management] and treasury systems.

Citing corporate customers such as ITV and Imperial College London, he insists digital connections not only result in cost savings, but also provide data in real-time.

They can save hundreds of thousands of pounds in fees, bank charges and financing costs, by managing their cash better, he says.

Driving finance forward

In recent weeks, AccessPay has become available to Sage users through their online marketplace, with it sitting alongside other approved independent software vendors to enhance back-office systems of Sage customers.

Earlier this year, it also announced a partnership with Yapily, the open banking infrastructure provider, to provide treasury solutions for corporates. The tie-up will provide real-time visibility into cash positions and transaction flows for thousands of UK businesses. Kapoor believes such agreements illustrate how technology has become a must-have for the finance function.

Five years ago, we could maintain the status quo but now all businesses are under pressure to do more with less and the only way you can do that is with technology, he says. Finance teams are under huge pressure to deliver more detailed information, with analytics, faster to the business with less resource.

The changing demands are one of the key driving factors. The sheer amount of data they need to process makes automation a crucial component of success.

An important trend within payment provision is corporate banking becoming more digitized within day-to-day operations.

More lending decisions are made using data pulled from ERPs and banks, while more services are only available digitally, such as low-cost international payment services, says Kapoor. For many firms this requires a change of mindset. Finance teams need to be moving to a more digital connection with their banks, to allow them to keep pace with these changes, he adds.

Kapoor insists this is where AccessPay can play a role. Helping to automate and digitise banking operations can free up 50 percent of a finance teams time, he says. It also gives them access to data with which to make better business decisions and allows them to access the new range of digital first financial services.

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And it is still the case that when we hear a womans voice as part of a tech product, we might not know who she is, whether she is even real, and if so, whether she consented to have her voice used in that way. Many TikTok users assumed that the text-to-speech voice they heard on the app wasnt a real person. But it was: it belonged to a Canadian voice actor named Bev Standing, and Standing had never given ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, permission to use it.

Standing sued the company in May, alleging that the ways her voice was being usedparticularly the way users could make it say anything, including profanitywere injuring her brand and her ability to make a living. Her voice becoming known as "that voice on TikTok" that you could make say whatever you liked brought recognition without remuneration and, she alleged, hurt her ability to get voice work.

Then, when TikTok abruptly removed her voice, Standing found out the same way the rest of us didby hearing the change and seeing the reporting on it. (TikTok has not commented to the press about the voice change.)

Those familiar with the story of Apples Siri may be feeling a bit of dj vu: Susan Bennett, the woman who voiced the original Siri, also didnt know that her voice was being used for that product until it came out. Bennett was eventually replaced as the US English female voice, and Apple never publicly acknowledged her. Since then, Apple has written secrecy clauses into voice actors contracts and most recently has claimed that its new voice is entirely software generated, removing the need to give anyone credit.

These incidents reflect a troubling and common pattern in the tech industry. The way that peoples accomplishments are valued, recognized, and paid for often mirrors their position in the wider society, not their actual contributions. One reason Bev Standings and Susan Bennetts names are now widely known online is that theyre extreme examples of how womens work gets erased even when its right there for everyone to seeor hear.

The way that people's accomplishments are valued, recognized, and paid for often mirrors their position in the wider society, not their actual contributions.

When women in tech do speak up, theyre often told to quiet downparticularly if they are women of color. Timnit Gebru, who holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford, was recently ousted from Google, where she co-led an AI ethics team, after she spoke up about her concerns regarding the companys large language models. Her co-lead, Margaret Mitchell (who holds a PhD from the University of Aberdeen with a focus on natural-language generation), was also removed from her position after speaking up about Gebrus firing. Elsewhere in the industry, whistleblowers like Sophie Zhang at Facebook, Susan Fowler at Uber, and many other women found themselves silenced and often fired as a direct or indirect result of trying to do their jobs and mitigate the harms they saw in the technology companies where they worked.

Even women who found startups can find themselves erased in real time, and the problem again is worse for women of color. Rumman Chowdhury, who holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego, and is the founder and former CEO of Parity, a company focused on ethical AI, saw her role in her own companys history minimized by the New York Times.

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The voices of women in tech are still being erased - MIT Technology Review