Category: Social Implications of Technology

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.

Information generated on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram are fast becoming powerful and ubiquitous new sources of time-critical data needed to aid decision making during extreme weather events and emergency situations.

The accumulation of data points for every person on earth continues at an amazing rate, and from an amazing diversity…  Read More

We must challenge ourselves to transcend our familiar notion of the IT artifact as just an inanimate tool standing by for our use like some sort of mechanical device, neatly separable and distinct from us. It is far more productive to view Information Technology as practice.
Citizen trust and confidence in the public institution and notions of the public good are, in many ways, the bottom line for the public sector.

Zuckerberg’s acknowledgement of the need to address issues related to election influence, “fake news,” and social media addiction is a significant step.

Today, over 90% of U.S. teenagers are online. When it comes to social media, 50% of all teenagers log on at least once a day, with 22% logging on more than 10 times a day. We, like our parents and their parents before them, are worried about the effect that technology is having on the development of our kids. The author discussed the five rules for teaching teens to live with technology responsibly.

The ability to grow animal muscle from a few cells into meat for the kitchen is a significant technological advance. The book Clean Meat proposes that beef and other meat be lab-grown.

As technological advances disrupt existing markets and value networks, change can outpace our ability to adapt.

The Trump administration cannot simply reject current theories of climate change based on nothing more than that it may conflict with a constituency’s self-interest or one’s sheer lack of understanding.

Cybersecurity expert Yan Shoshitaishvili joins Heather Ross to talk about the cybersecurity and social implications of the FCC’s December 2017…  Read More