Category: Societal Impact

Slavery is the coercive and controlled use of another human. Contrary to the belief that the practice ended in the…  Read More

How much stuff do you carry on your keyring? Besides keys, I mean. Some minimalists like my wife carry car…  Read More

From a feminist perspective, author Donna Haraway makes inference to a type of teleology within technology itself that displaces the…  Read More

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

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

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

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

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

A rugged male Metro Toronto police officer stares down a female protester outside the Toronto G-20 meetings in 2010. She…  Read More

When Cecilia Abadie — a Google Glass “explorer” testing out the new device — received the first ever traffic ticket…  Read More

Each year, thousands of film buffs gather at the Sundance International Film Festival in Park City, UT, U.S.A., to see…  Read More

By Ahmed S. Khan. CRC Press (Taylor & Francis), 2012. Reviewed by Karl D. Stephan   Anyone who doesn’t know…  Read More