Australian Aboriginal sovereignty is no longer just about Aboriginal communities retaining rights to their own land. The most brutal types of dispossession are the latest forms of data retention, decreased privacy, and unwarranted use of this personal data as a result of activities being collected, analyzed, and intelligently manipulated by geographically remote entities, all thanks to the Internet.
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.
The IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology announces the selection of Jeremy Pitt, Professor of Intelligent and Self-Organizing Systems at Imperial College, London, U.K., as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, beginning January 1, 2018.
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.
Using biometric technology to identify and monitor people raises human rights concerns. In particular, biometrics are often associated with intrusions into privacy.
The next generation of socio-technical system can be seen as a kind of “focal point” for the convergence of a number of current trends in computing, information systems, and information technology. These trends include the technology-driven instrumentation of infrastructure by ubiquitous computing and/or “intelligent” devices, with the prefix “smart” now taking precedence over the prefix “e-,” i.e. SmartGrids, SmartCities, SmartMotorways, etc., rather than the e-commerce. e-health, e-learning initiatives commonplace at the turn of millennium.
Mining has had an impact on many Aboriginal communities in Australia. As we move to a mining sector where dump trucks, underground excavators, loaders, and conveyor systems are transformed into partial or fully autonomous systems, there is little or no human labor required other than to maintain equipment or provide oversight using a range of distant surveillance technologies.
There is an unshakable faith in our industry that we can do anything and that everything we do must be good and beneficial to society. Our industry has had similar crises before, such as dot-com busts, that exposed our assumptions, but the ideas are still here. As an industry and society, can we continue to develop solutions that unduly amplify human behavior – so that we provide and support a way for harm to be normalized? As an industry and society, can we continue to promote solutions based on long-held and dominate theories – so that the wider community is misled by influential advocates? The answer is a clear “no” to both.
In 1997 Eduardo Kac became the first human to implant himself with a non-medical device in the performance art work titled “Time Capsule”
The effect of technologies on our lives might be less about technology and more about the priorities and parameters we set.
A new archive of material added a new historical dimension to our discussions of cybernetics at the 2016 Norbert Wiener Conference in Australia.
Graeme Clark is the inventor of the cochlear implant. He was the dinner Keynote Speaker at the 2016 Conference on… Read More
A bot (short for robot) performs highly repetitive tasks by automatically gathering or posting information based on a set of… Read More
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