TRA to TAM, Which Technology Will I choose Part 1

The advent of new technologies and the sprouting torrent of startups along with the companies that are dominating everyone's leap of imagination about the promise of a great connected future where human mind will be just one piece of the intelligence puzzle supplemented by machines,  is causing quite a stir in the everyday media. As I take stock of my thoughts, I cannot help but venture into debate with myself about which technologies will become applications that will define a new era. The thoughts led to a desire to find out how we adopt new technologies and what leads people to fall in love with some "tech" while others either wither away in shelves of thrift stores or will eventually be seen in the nostalgic corridors of companies, as also ran the race stimulating conception of an idea, for their budding employees intellectual curiosity to feed upon.

In my search for how to evaluate technology I was motivated towards the theory of reasoned action which pushed me to technology acceptance model and then to the famous diffusion of innovation curve by Everett_Rogers.  If we look at the TAM in its simplest form and its main blocks, I think the media has done a good job of creating perceived usefulness for machine learning and AI. Some good PR along with applications like the self driving cars, the face recognition locks, the voice activated home assistants and self analyzing spreadsheets have prepared the users well for the perceived usefulness of AI. Such is the hype that the perceived usefulness I would say is now anticipatory usefulness for Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Where AR/VR does have a hurdle to cross is the perceived ease of use, another important pillar of the TAM. The attitude towards using the technology and the behavioral intention vary from generation to generation. But I don't think anyone needs to prove that the generation that was born with iPhone and Facebook will be more adaptive to always on, non private world, knowing that sharing some information is volitional but life of a digital native is very transparent to data native companies.

Point in making is that except for the perceived ease of use the rest of the pillars of TAM have actually shifted toward faster technology adaption. Along with perceived ease of use there are other variables to consider that play a critical role in forming users perception. In their paper, characteristics of innovation adaption Tornatzky and Klein point out that users differ in their perceptions as they evaluate the benefits through their particular cognitive frame works resulting in subjective conclusions which the individuals believe as their truth. In similar vein Festinger in cognitive dissonance theory argues that the users are predisposed to vote for the technology that they have already adopted therefore after the adoption, look back studies of winning technologies cannot predict the future adoption of another technology. That makes for a very interesting observation, one that I am guilty of as well and that is even before the application of the technology is really available in an application we become vocal advocates of the technology and hence its application becomes unavoidable. This is the trick that successfully works for tech giants with enough media muscle to shift perception. This doesn't work all the time, the case in point will be Google glasses. But will that be the fate of Occulus Rift, Spectacles, Microsoft VR, Google day dream. All signals point to a rapidly rising adaption cycle for many of the new applications on the horizon.

Since I have (not even) barely touched on some of the studies around technology diffusion, its adoption and human psychology, I am but a slave to my desire to explore these further and bound to notate a continuation.