Author: Roba Abbas

The IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society has launched a call for papers for an upcoming special issue on Imagining Tomorrow’s Infrastructure.

Worldwide, there are 55 million individuals living with dementia and it is projected that by 2050, this number will increase to 139 million. Technological devices and solutions that can benefit the dementia community also carry ethical implications such as privacy and issues of consent. AI-driven LBS solutions may exacerbate the marginalization of individuals living with dementia.

PIT acknowledges that technological potential can be harnessed to satisfy the needs of civil society. In other words, technology can be seen as a public good that can benefit all, through an open democratic system of governance, with open data initiatives, open technologies, and open systems/ecosystems designed for the collective good, as defined by respective communities that will be utilizing them.

Contemporary and emerging digital technologies are leading us to question the ways in which humans interact with machines and with complex socio-technical systems. The new dynamics of technology and human interaction will inevitably exert pressure on existing ethical frameworks and regulatory bodies.

As technology pervades all aspects of our existence, and Artificial Intelligence and machine learning systems become commonplace, a new era of human-computer interaction is emerging that will involve directing our focus beyond traditional approaches, to span other intricate interactions with computer-based systems.

The key question for the future is that with all the investment in new technologies, by both governments and business organizations, can regulation keep up with developments?

We define “good” technological ideas, as: sound technological designs, developed using participation-based methods, that seek to promote the beneficial uses of technology (through the harnessing of technological potential) while minimizing/potentially eliminating the undesirable effects on individuals and society. These approaches will ideally lead to the development and deployment of practical solutions that fulfill the need(s) of the intended end-user(s) and/or solve a given problem.