Contents The Bicycle-Shed Effect (also known as Parkinson’s law of triviality or bikeshedding) is a belief that humans assign disproportionate weight to trivial issues, thus devoting excessive resources (e.g., time, energy, money, etc.) to more insignificant issues to the detriment of the significant [1]. Humans are believed to prefer to focus on simple and comprehendible subjects (e.g., which color to paint the company Bike-Shed) at the expense of far more significant, yet often complex quandaries (e.g., determining the location of the nuclear power plant) [1], [2].
Analyses of emerging technologies so often yield such readily discernable concerns as functionality, the accuracy of outputs, and nefarious uses. These are undoubtedly salient issues. Our community addresses such issues as the aforementioned, yet we do not neglect to delve into far more existential matters.
For example, society often focuses extensively on changes in gross domestic product (GDP) for such purposes as predicting monetary-policy decisions, yet our community grapples with revisions to the underlying, longstanding, complex statistical systems calculating GDP to take into account historic shifts in society due to decades of rapid growth in performance and functionality within the digital realms. These authors challenge us to refine and revise measures of GDP to reflect these paradigm shifts in human experience; to probe the value of innovation (and diminution) in the often less discernible, yet essential aspects of value creation produced through spheres of digitalization.
Our authors also avoided bikeshedding when addressing artificial-intelligence-enabled mental health applications. These authors focused well on straightforward issues such as outcomes, oversight, privacy, and autonomy, yet also spent appropriate time grounding us to safeguard the humanness of humanity. They remind us: mental health issues are not problems to be technologically solved in the most financially and socially efficient ways, but rather rich and diverse complexities of human experiences that are best healed through human-to-human connection.
Whether Assessing Autonomous systems or challenging universal frameworks of human rights to appropriately embed emerging digital human rights, our authors addressed the comprehendible, yet did not neglect to probe the complex. With this, we can better stimulate efficacious action to better shape and regulate technologies and therefore better discern existential angst, dread, or existential crisis [3], [4].