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Sometimes we love certain technologies, while we hate others. Some technologies we use without thinking much about them, like the telephone. But nowadays, many digital technologies create a lot of division among people. Why is that?There are two main reasons why we feel this way about technology: how it affects our imagined future and how it impacts our everyday lives. Cultural factors also play a role, but they don’t make the final decision.Understanding why we love or hate technology is important for us individually, as a society, and for the economy. It helps us create rules and norms around technology, and it allows us to predict the risks and benefits. For example, we didn’t really anticipate how social media would impact our global society.Looking back, we can see both the good and bad sides of social media. Now, we’re trying to figure out how to govern it in a way that minimizes harm and maximizes the benefits. This takes time because cultural changes happen slowly when it comes to technology.One of the reasons we have mixed feelings about social media is that it makes it harder to manage our reality and creates complicated imagined futures. With social media, we have to process the lives of hundreds or even thousands of people every day. Our brains aren’t designed to handle that.Before social media and smartphones made communication easy, it was simpler to understand our reality. We could effectively interact with around 150 people in our lives. Our brains can handle that number. But when we have to deal with much larger numbers, it becomes more challenging.We love social media because it helps us communicate, connect, and organize things quickly. However, we hate it because it can negatively impact our mental health, especially among young people, and it can divide our societies. It messes with our imagined futures and our understanding of reality on a scale we’ve never experienced before.The same goes for Artificial Intelligence (AI) today. We love it because it has the potential to help us tackle big problems like climate change, detect diseases, and develop better medicines. But at the same time, it also scares us because it raises concerns about our future and makes us feel like we have no control.This love-hate relationship with technology is partly why we use stories to explain what the future might be like. Stories help us find common ground and understand how different people perceive reality.Companies that create new technology can use this understanding to develop products that are more focused on human needs. They can explore the potential risks and benefits and make their products more people-centered. While they can’t predict all the unintended consequences, they can be better prepared for them. This is also important for the economy.Different societies have different attitudes towards technology too. In individualistic societies like the United States, where individual interests come first, people may have more divisive and confusing relationships with technology. In more collective societies, like those in Asia and the Nordic countries, technology is seen in a broader social context, considering how it impacts society as a whole.Digital technologies, like AI, social media, and DNA testing, have a bigger impact on our society compared to smaller innovations like a new type of hammer grip or an air fryer. They affect our imagined futures and our understanding of reality at a larger scale. That’s why they tend to create more division among people. Additionally, many of these technologies have had mixed outcomes. For example, there have been cases of privacy breaches, genetic manipulation, and harmful effects on children.All technologies are created with the intention of improving our lives or helping us in some way. We usually focus on the benefits and ignore the negatives, unless the technology is designed for harmful purposes.But whether we love or hate a technology depends on how we think it will shape our future and how it might impact our everyday lives, both positively and negatively