Category: Social Implications of Technology

When thanks to drone use soldiers rarely come home in body bags, members of the public are not often prompted to care about or even notice military activity half a world away.

Do you want to attract the best people? Give them a problem with a purpose. Give them room to work. Give them recognition for their successes — not just internally, but encouraging them to share these at conferences, or in relevant peer communities.

We are asking for AI rationale that can be used to improve operations, or attribute liability. This effort is doomed to failure, and may lead to greater problems.

One result of increased AI integration will be increased empathy for robots. This transformation has potential upsides and risks.

Orman poses “information overload” as a paradox and gives us three mechanisms through which such paradox arises. The paradox is that technologies help us know more, but in the process, we know less.

Mobile technology isn’t just in your pocket 24/7. It’s everywhere around us today, with its continual byproduct — data — trailing us everywhere we go. The great nexus of this 21st-century trend isn’t really your smartphone — it’s the city where you live, work, and play.

“Why would a Russian oil company want to target information on American voters?” Chris asks in the article. Cambridge Analytica claims to have 4000-5000 data points on 230,000,000 U.S. adults.

It is necessary to start somehow, even if you’ve got no map, no knowledge of the destination, and no milometer to measure the distance that has been covered. This can sometimes be the essence of collective action for addressing wicked problems. Sometimes human behavior defies top-down direction and even nudge, and begins instead with a single initiating event and snowballs from there.

Skilling-up for an AI-powered world involves more than science, technology, engineering and math. As computers behave more like humans, the social sciences and humanities will become even more important. Languages, art, history, economics, ethics, philosophy, psychology and human development courses can teach critical, philosophical and ethics-based skills that will be instrumental in the development and management of AI solutions.

As an IEEE technical Society whose focus on all aspects of societal implications of technology complements the technical activities of all other IEEE Societies, SSIT members have a proud history of contributions to sustainable development and humanitarian technology. We have long focused on addressing ethical implications, interdependencies, context, and socio-cultural norms that are essential to avoid unintended and unanticipated consequences. One of our core strengths as a community has been our collaborative, partnership-based approach.

Prior to 2016 there was little press with occasional hype about artificial intelligence. Somewhere in the last two years we…  Read More

Is it unreasonable for us to want more from the AI-inspired — something more than, for example, a robot that can get up off the ground, and recover from being hit with a club?

Jonathan Rees’s Refrigeration Nation has a great deal to say about the way refrigeration technology brought about profound changes in eating habits, agricultural practices, and even entire national economies over the last two centuries.

What year will we return to the Moon? When will we have our first colony there? What are the corresponding dates for Mars?

Petrick provides historic perspectives of how computer technology was developed in the United States allowing persons with disabilities full participation in their own lives and in the society.

Some cultures and many corporations have relinquished non-financial objectives to the sacred bottom line. Yet there are values beyond profit that tend to dominate our satisfaction as humans. It would be nice if some of these could become the measure of corporate return-on-investment, or the benefits of a given country.

National security issues arise when IoT reporting reveals information about troop movements and locations.

The big issue is the mass scale big data collection strategies using social media intelligence, CCTV, behavioral biometrics using facial recognition and visual analytics to monitor human activities, the keystroke-level tracking of end-users by third parties on Internet websites, the use of in-bound technology devices that conduct ICT surveillance and home monitoring, and even fitness trackers we carry alongside our mobile phone that are set to control our health insurance premiums.

I have an expectation that machine consciousness will emerge unexpected, unsought, and perhaps undetected.

In “Finding the Wonder Woman Within,” values like courage, wonder, equality, grace, and power are addressed, often in very powerful ways.