The round trip question: a duty to explain

Something has been bothering me: I have been designing, building and running computer systems for over thirty years, and believe that the explosive growth of information technology in that time is a net good for the world. At the same time, I have observed a growing gap in understanding between the people who build and run technology for a living and the people who use it. Information technology touches more people’s lives more deeply every day - yet is increasingly difficult to understand.

I sometimes test this feeling by asking what I call ‘the round trip question’. The question is: when you hit a button on your mobile banking app which tells it to do something (get your balance, make a payment, or some other function), what do you imagine happens? (It doesn’t have to be banking, but it’s the industry I happen to have worked in for longest.)