IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023 - 83

Last Word
Avoiding Bikeshedding: An Eye
Toward the Existential
Christine Perakslis
School for the Future of Innovation in Society
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85281 USA
g The bicycle-shed effecT (also known as
Parkinson's law of triviality or bikeshedding) is a
belief that humans assign disproportionate weight
to trivial issues, thus devoting excessive resources
(e.g., time, energy, money, etc.) to more insignificant
issues to the detriment of the significant [1].
Humans are believed to prefer to focus on simple
and comprehendible subjects (e.g., which color
to paint the company Bike-Shed) at the expense
of far more significant, yet often complex quandaries
(e.g., determining the location of the nuclear
power plant) [1], [2].
Analyses of emerging technologies so often
yield such readily discernable concerns as functionality,
the accuracy of outputs, and nefarious
uses. These are undoubtedly salient issues. Our
community addresses such issues as the aforementioned,
yet we do not neglect to delve into far
more existential matters.
For example, society often focuses extensively
on changes in gross domestic product (GDP) for
such purposes as predicting monetary-policy decisions,
yet our community grapples with revisions
to the underlying, longstanding, complex statistical
systems calculating GDP to take into account
historic shifts in society due to decades of rapid
growth in performance and functionality within
the digital realms. These authors challenge us to
refine and revise measures of GDP to reflect these
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2023.3241296
Date of current version: 7 March 2023.
paradigm shifts in human experience; to probe the
value of innovation (and diminution) in the often
less discernible, yet essential aspects of value creation
produced through spheres of digitalization.
Our authors also avoided bikeshedding when
addressing artificial-intelligence-enabled mental
health applications. These authors focused well on
straightforward issues such as outcomes, oversight,
privacy, and autonomy, yet also spent appropriate
time grounding us to safeguard the humanness of
humanity. They remind us: mental health issues
are not problems to be technologically solved in
the most financially and socially efficient ways, but
rather rich and diverse complexities of human experiences
that are best healed through human-to-human
connection.
WheTher assessing auTonomous systems or
challenging universal frameworks of human rights
to appropriately embed emerging digital human
rights, our authors addressed the comprehendible,
yet did not neglect to probe the complex. With
this, we can better stimulate efficacious action to
better shape and regulate technologies and therefore
better discern existential angst, dread, or existential
crisis [3], [4].
<
g References
[1] C. N. Parkinson, Parkinson's Law, and Other Studies
in Administration. USA: Stellar Classics, 2014.
[2] P. Mcfedries, " Agile words [technically speaking], "
IEEE Spectr., vol. 54, no. 6, pp. 21-21, Jun. 2017, doi:
10.1109/MSPEC.2017.7934225.
March 2023
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2023

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