Category: Social Implications of Technology

In his new book, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower Mind, theoretical physicist…  Read More

Having recently relocated to a country where I know very few people, I tried looking for a local branch of…  Read More

Minsky (left) was keynote speaker at ISTAS 2013 held at the University of Toronto, Canada. (Right: Steve Mann, ISTAS ’13…  Read More

I have long pondered the issue of dehumanization through automation. I think the old adage: “no one is irreplaceable” now…  Read More

Every day as engineers and technologists we go to work teaching, developing, building, implementing, maintaining technology. Do we care about…  Read More

Autonomous weapons systems (AWS) are already here. Although some of the colloquial names for AWS may suggest science fiction (killer…  Read More

In the early 1940s, why would ten American female basketball players in the heat of competition abruptly halt a match…  Read More

Building on how the communications revolution could transform the lives of hundreds of millions of farmers in developing countries is…  Read More

Can we trust for-profit corporations to protect our privacy? Are these compatible concepts and institutions? These are difficult questions to…  Read More

Members of the “Internet Governance, Security, Privacy and the Ethical Dimension of ICTs in 2030” Panel at the 2016 WSIS…  Read More

The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. By Benjamin Peters. M.I.T. Press, 2016, 312 pages. Reviewed by Loren Graham.  …  Read More

“Can we program ethics into Artificial Intelligence?” was the topic of a keynote panel initiated by SSIT at the July…  Read More

It appears that humanity’s great challenge for this century is to extend cooperative human values and institutions to autonomous technology…  Read More

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible. — Ray…  Read More

The desire to create a sentient Artificial Intelligence (Al) as complex as a human intelligence, or one that even surpasses…  Read More

Where does wearable technology exist? The question is more complex than it might first appear, when one considers the thin…  Read More

The Paradox of Technological Potential – Part II In November 2015, as editors, we started sorting through submissions for a…  Read More

When Fantasy Turns into Obsession Craig is a banker from Iowa who became addicted to adult chat rooms. He explained,…  Read More

On the 9th of December in 2015, I set out for a camping trip with my three young children to…  Read More

The robot Bina48 is funny, and melancholy, and at times, uncannily profound. Like a human, she is complicated and contradictory,…  Read More