Connection Between Timeliness and Technology

            The Waltham Watch Company was responsible for helping put the entire world on time back in the mid-1800s. Their pocket watches were known as the highest quality and the most accurate watches at the time. The US Railways relied on the Waltham watches for their operations, and it inspired copycats that couldn’t quite get the same accuracy. Even though it started off as a high socio-economic purchase, the 1860’s American Civil War boosted an affordable Waltham model that was used among the troops, and by the 1940’s, Waltham Watches were held with as high regard as iPhones are today (Laban, 2018).  

            I think that businesses that are built on technology and timeliness have something in common, which is the efficiency of the workflow. Technology is a means in which businesses use in order to get work done in a timelier and efficient manner, but it also has implications with human rights and privacy through the ease of acquiring information. In the Waltham Watch situation, their technological innovation allowed business to become more organized and efficient and they could hold employees more accountable since it was expected that every worker had access to the information of the current time. Even though workers at the time seemed to be happy with such a convenient piece of technology, it had ethical implications in that they had less autonomy in their daily lives. Everyone lived on a strict schedule, and you were expected to be at a certain place at a specific time, overall contributing to an unhappier state for the common worker.

            This wouldn’t be the only time that technology had such an effect on the general population. We are currently in a state where humans around the world are more interconnected than ever, you can search up any question and find the answer within minutes. Watches have become relegated to a symbol of high status or a collector’s item with the advent of smartphones. Even though many people are aware of the risks to their defensive privacy and human rights privacy (credit card information, identity theft), it has become the norm nonetheless, and people are only interacting with technology more and more, losing their rights to privacy in the process.

            Technology also has major implications in the coffee industry, both in the production process and in the methods the coffee is delivered to the consumer. Coffee harvesting and sorting is often considered a low-skill job as evidenced by overseas workers being paid as minimalist as possible, and the same could be said of point-of-sale jobs such as baristas or grocery store cashiers. If organizations get to the point in technology where these lower-skilled jobs can become completely automated for an increase in productivity, would companies choose to do so? Such an idea has a wealth of legal and ethical issues associated with it, but we are already seeing the beginning of cashier-less stores such as Amazon Go. As technology gets more and more advanced, the ease of information and the automation in production methods are going to leave a lot of workers either without a job, or their personal information so readily available that their privacy rights become near meaningless.        

References

Laban, L. (November 27, 2018). The Massachusetts City that sold time to the world. BBC. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181126-the-massachusetts-city-that-sold-time-to-the-world