Building Better Relationships with Technology
Photo provided by Rampage student photographer Elei Haynes
For Robbie Smith, IT is about much more than technology. It’s about people.
“It’s really easy to dissociate technology from people, maybe because of movies like ‘The Terminator,’” said Smith, executive director for information technology (IT) at Bluefield University. “But people are technology, and technology is people. And the closer we get to understanding that and working with it, the sky is the limit.”
Smith has worked at Bluefield University for nearly seven years. When COVID-19 shut down in-person classes, Smith and other IT professionals worked hard to build systems to support online learning.
“It was cool to see everybody in the tech space come together, and over a period of like six months we made things exist that didn’t,” Smith said. “It just really shows you what can be accomplished when you have enough people focused on a problem.”
As a child, Smith was fascinated by anything with a button or a light. This fascination evolved into an interest in how systems function and eventually led him to his current position in BU’s IT department. Smith oversees the management and operation of BU’s technological systems, both on and off campus.
“When things are going well, people forget the technology’s there, which is the ideal place of existence,” Smith said. “You know you’ve made it when IT just exists in harmony with you.”
Most people interact with IT professionals when they need help. Usually, they need access to something or are getting error codes. But in IT, most things do not exist in isolation, and changing one small thing can have ripple effects. Even something as simple as changing a user’s password affects all sorts of systems, including access to printers and Canvas.
“When we make a change to a user’s profile, we have to keep all of that intact to make sure that you can still continue to log into all of the things you could before,” Smith said.
Although some effects are documented, much is learned through trial and error. Smith says interacting with systems is just as much of a challenge for IT professionals as for other people, but professionals work with those systems every day.
“A lot of humans are predispositioned to fear or maybe even get angry at the things they don’t understand,” Smith said. “Technology just has a lot of that.”
Smith says demystifying technology involves understanding what lies beneath it. At its core, “everything electronic is electricity being pushed through a rock,” says Smith.
“I would challenge anybody who maybe doesn’t have the best relationship with technology, to sit with it and force themselves to be uncomfortable for a day, a few days, a few weeks, until they really come to be comfortable with something,” Smith said. “And that will break down a lot of barriers for people.”
He puts the development of AI on par with significant technological advances like the internet and touchscreens. But he says people need to feel safe with it before they will use it.
“That’s why ChatGPT looks like just a chat box. Because it’s easy to understand,” Smith said. “What it’s doing behind the scenes is incredible. It’s a predictive system that can just calculate so fast it’s mind-numbing to even consider. But a lot of people don’t know that AI isn’t actually intelligent. It’s just a prediction engine.”
Smith is less comfortable with the artist side of AI, which he says feels “unnatural.” He says we need to be smart about AI, but he appreciates its capabilities.
Smith describes his job as taking people’s needs and translating them into technology. He says tensions can rise when something is not working, but what keeps him going is the hope for a better tomorrow – when technology will further advance society and shortcut menial tasks.