Category: Societal Impact

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Twenty-five years ago we didn’t know that solar energy, including modular photovoltaic (PV) plants ranging in size from 1 kW to hundreds of megawatts, along with increasingly larger, electronically-aided wind generators (up to 8-MW offshore units), would become in just 25 years the cornerstones of a revolution in power production that is drastically changing the face and fate of power systems.

While societal change often takes place over extended periods of time, at key times in the history of human society, innovation can be accelerated by a combination of necessity and serendipity. We are currently experiencing such an accelerated transition.

Unmet local concerns related to renewable energy projects can result in costly project delays or cancellation. Strong political and financial incentives encourage state authorities and renewable energy developers to address issues of social acceptance.

Frugal innovations are all the rage. Their appeal stems from lower costs to society at large.

Video: The Next Generation of Standards (a recorded E4C Webinar) Standards remain especially important for products that address the world’s…  Read More

November 2, 2017 Sydney, Australia

The conversation about “Web Science” is becoming more urgent and more central to the future of the planet and the way we live a life worth living.

Periodically, often after a unconscionable massacre such as Las Vegas or Orlando, the United States reviews the balance between the…  Read More