positive impact of science and technology on society essays

Talking about science and technology has positive impacts on research and society

Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Science, Health, and Technology Communication, University of Waterloo

Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo

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Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher works for the University of Waterloo and is the co-director of the TRuST network. She receives funding from the Canada Research Chairs program and has received funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Early Researcher Program, and others.

Donna Strickland and Mary Wells do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Discussions around science and technology can become controversial, such as public conversations around climate science or gene-editing tools .

That might leave the impression that such conversations are best avoided. But it is important to have constructive conversations about scientific and technical subjects because of how they impact our lives.

Not having these conversations can lead to further division and strained relationships. Avoidance of such conversations could also have serious implications for scientific research support such as the continued development of life-saving vaccines or in deciding how we might regulate emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence.

Read more: Generative AI like ChatGPT reveal deep-seated systemic issues beyond the tech industry

The ancient Greeks had a term for opportune moments, or those qualitative measures of time where things just seem to be right for some action. They called these kairotic . The term kairos is a qualitative measure of time, as opposed to chronos , or linear quantitative time.

It is a kairotic moment to talk about trust — which we might think of as a very old idea but is highly important today — as we see new science emerging and technologies developing apace.

Polarizing information

The consequences of allowing issues in science and technology to be so polarized that we don’t talk about them include economic impacts , Canada falling behind in applied and basic scientific research and responsible technology development .

We need to have direct conversations about scientific research, progress, experts and expertise , and new technologies that may become critically important to society in the future .

Together, we have built a research network called TRuST at the University of Waterloo.

Our inaugural lecture series event began this conversation about trust in science, technology and health in Canada, and we hope to continue these conversations through an ongoing speaker series and collaborations with other researchers and organizations.

Our work asks the tough questions about why people do — or don’t — trust science and technology , who is found trustworthy , how trust is earned and lost and how we can have conversations about science and technology in the service of us all.

By doing so, we hope to launch conversations about these topics, not to provide definitive answers or to tell anyone what to think.

A crisis of trust?

While there appears to be a public crisis in trust, there is a good deal of complexity when we talk about concepts of trust and who is trustworthy. Trust in scientists and interest in science has remained high for a number of years, but there are some trends that raise questions about whether that is changing.

Overall, trust in medical doctors and scientists , for example, seems to have declined somewhat since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when trust was somewhat higher than normal.

Surveys and polls give us high-level insights, but we also know that there are issues that become controversial. We also know that how questions are asked in a survey or poll can influence the nature of responses. For instance, if we ask “do you trust scientists,” do you think about scientists generally or are you thinking of a specific scientist?

Sometimes controversy is manufactured , as in the case of climate change where the prevailing consensus among scientists was strategically downplayed. Sometimes the way we frame an issue can lead to confusion and mistrust.

Once an issue is controversial it can be polarizing and polarizing language can influence how we think and talk about issues.

And of course, social media influences how scientific knowledge is shared, distorted , “ironically reversed” , exploited and corrected — or not.

Communicating through disagreement

How do we talk to each other when we might not agree?

First, you need to have capacity, both emotionally and in terms of conversational skill, and some knowledge and interest in a topic to undertake this work.

Listening is a good place to begin, and by that we mean genuinely trying to hear and understand someone’s perspective. You might not agree, but you cannot engage their ideas if, for instance, you’re talking about if something actually happened and someone else is speculating about what happened.

This might seem like a subtle distinction, but these are the important distinctions. In the field of rhetoric , we might talk about this as a problem of stasis : you’re asking a question about if something is a fact and someone else is talking about the definition of what they have already taken to be a fact.

Listening means working hard to determine what someone else is talking about and while you can still disagree, calling out misinformation or otherwise challenging points, you should do so empathetically and respectfully. We can work towards building bridges that will productively move a conversation forward.

Built into this is a certain amount of respect for the person you’re talking to — even if you’re an expert , you need ethos which means character built upon goodwill ( eunoia ), good morals ( arete ) and good sense or reason ( phronesis ) — and also goodwill to understand their perspective.

Goodwill, however, goes both ways. If someone you are listening to does not seem to be coming to a conversation in good faith or with goodwill, it might be time to excuse yourself.

Read more: The U.S. Capitol violence could happen in Canada — here are 3 ways to prevent it

Better science, better technology

Improving science, our ethical processes for technology development and deployment and how we engage in conversations about how these efforts should shape our communities and everyday lives also requires work on the part of scientists, engineers and other experts.

Developing strategies to talk about our research methods and how science works and, critically, to listen to people’s concerns is a first step in responsibly and ethically communicating science . It is a step experts can take with family, friends and in their communities. Working to support knowledge sharing from a wide variety of experts that better reflect the range of people and experiences in our communities is also very important.

Because trust requires certain kinds of vulnerability, the trustworthiness of experts is important in science and technology.

Relationships between experts and non-experts are asymmetrical. Experts often have knowledge that others need, and others must trust that experts will provide that knowledge and do so with goodwill, good sense and good judgment in line with shared values. When this is perceived as not happening, trust can be reduced or lost.

Trust is critical to the advancement of science itself and science in the advancement of society.

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Promises and Pitfalls of Technology

Politics and privacy, private-sector influence and big tech, state competition and conflict, author biography, how is technology changing the world, and how should the world change technology.

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Josephine Wolff; How Is Technology Changing the World, and How Should the World Change Technology?. Global Perspectives 1 February 2021; 2 (1): 27353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.27353

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Technologies are becoming increasingly complicated and increasingly interconnected. Cars, airplanes, medical devices, financial transactions, and electricity systems all rely on more computer software than they ever have before, making them seem both harder to understand and, in some cases, harder to control. Government and corporate surveillance of individuals and information processing relies largely on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, and therefore involves less human-to-human contact than ever before and more opportunities for biases to be embedded and codified in our technological systems in ways we may not even be able to identify or recognize. Bioengineering advances are opening up new terrain for challenging philosophical, political, and economic questions regarding human-natural relations. Additionally, the management of these large and small devices and systems is increasingly done through the cloud, so that control over them is both very remote and removed from direct human or social control. The study of how to make technologies like artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things “explainable” has become its own area of research because it is so difficult to understand how they work or what is at fault when something goes wrong (Gunning and Aha 2019) .

This growing complexity makes it more difficult than ever—and more imperative than ever—for scholars to probe how technological advancements are altering life around the world in both positive and negative ways and what social, political, and legal tools are needed to help shape the development and design of technology in beneficial directions. This can seem like an impossible task in light of the rapid pace of technological change and the sense that its continued advancement is inevitable, but many countries around the world are only just beginning to take significant steps toward regulating computer technologies and are still in the process of radically rethinking the rules governing global data flows and exchange of technology across borders.

These are exciting times not just for technological development but also for technology policy—our technologies may be more advanced and complicated than ever but so, too, are our understandings of how they can best be leveraged, protected, and even constrained. The structures of technological systems as determined largely by government and institutional policies and those structures have tremendous implications for social organization and agency, ranging from open source, open systems that are highly distributed and decentralized, to those that are tightly controlled and closed, structured according to stricter and more hierarchical models. And just as our understanding of the governance of technology is developing in new and interesting ways, so, too, is our understanding of the social, cultural, environmental, and political dimensions of emerging technologies. We are realizing both the challenges and the importance of mapping out the full range of ways that technology is changing our society, what we want those changes to look like, and what tools we have to try to influence and guide those shifts.

Technology can be a source of tremendous optimism. It can help overcome some of the greatest challenges our society faces, including climate change, famine, and disease. For those who believe in the power of innovation and the promise of creative destruction to advance economic development and lead to better quality of life, technology is a vital economic driver (Schumpeter 1942) . But it can also be a tool of tremendous fear and oppression, embedding biases in automated decision-making processes and information-processing algorithms, exacerbating economic and social inequalities within and between countries to a staggering degree, or creating new weapons and avenues for attack unlike any we have had to face in the past. Scholars have even contended that the emergence of the term technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked a shift from viewing individual pieces of machinery as a means to achieving political and social progress to the more dangerous, or hazardous, view that larger-scale, more complex technological systems were a semiautonomous form of progress in and of themselves (Marx 2010) . More recently, technologists have sharply criticized what they view as a wave of new Luddites, people intent on slowing the development of technology and turning back the clock on innovation as a means of mitigating the societal impacts of technological change (Marlowe 1970) .

At the heart of fights over new technologies and their resulting global changes are often two conflicting visions of technology: a fundamentally optimistic one that believes humans use it as a tool to achieve greater goals, and a fundamentally pessimistic one that holds that technological systems have reached a point beyond our control. Technology philosophers have argued that neither of these views is wholly accurate and that a purely optimistic or pessimistic view of technology is insufficient to capture the nuances and complexity of our relationship to technology (Oberdiek and Tiles 1995) . Understanding technology and how we can make better decisions about designing, deploying, and refining it requires capturing that nuance and complexity through in-depth analysis of the impacts of different technological advancements and the ways they have played out in all their complicated and controversial messiness across the world.

These impacts are often unpredictable as technologies are adopted in new contexts and come to be used in ways that sometimes diverge significantly from the use cases envisioned by their designers. The internet, designed to help transmit information between computer networks, became a crucial vehicle for commerce, introducing unexpected avenues for crime and financial fraud. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, designed to connect friends and families through sharing photographs and life updates, became focal points of election controversies and political influence. Cryptocurrencies, originally intended as a means of decentralized digital cash, have become a significant environmental hazard as more and more computing resources are devoted to mining these forms of virtual money. One of the crucial challenges in this area is therefore recognizing, documenting, and even anticipating some of these unexpected consequences and providing mechanisms to technologists for how to think through the impacts of their work, as well as possible other paths to different outcomes (Verbeek 2006) . And just as technological innovations can cause unexpected harm, they can also bring about extraordinary benefits—new vaccines and medicines to address global pandemics and save thousands of lives, new sources of energy that can drastically reduce emissions and help combat climate change, new modes of education that can reach people who would otherwise have no access to schooling. Regulating technology therefore requires a careful balance of mitigating risks without overly restricting potentially beneficial innovations.

Nations around the world have taken very different approaches to governing emerging technologies and have adopted a range of different technologies themselves in pursuit of more modern governance structures and processes (Braman 2009) . In Europe, the precautionary principle has guided much more anticipatory regulation aimed at addressing the risks presented by technologies even before they are fully realized. For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation focuses on the responsibilities of data controllers and processors to provide individuals with access to their data and information about how that data is being used not just as a means of addressing existing security and privacy threats, such as data breaches, but also to protect against future developments and uses of that data for artificial intelligence and automated decision-making purposes. In Germany, Technische Überwachungsvereine, or TÜVs, perform regular tests and inspections of technological systems to assess and minimize risks over time, as the tech landscape evolves. In the United States, by contrast, there is much greater reliance on litigation and liability regimes to address safety and security failings after-the-fact. These different approaches reflect not just the different legal and regulatory mechanisms and philosophies of different nations but also the different ways those nations prioritize rapid development of the technology industry versus safety, security, and individual control. Typically, governance innovations move much more slowly than technological innovations, and regulations can lag years, or even decades, behind the technologies they aim to govern.

In addition to this varied set of national regulatory approaches, a variety of international and nongovernmental organizations also contribute to the process of developing standards, rules, and norms for new technologies, including the International Organization for Standardization­ and the International Telecommunication Union. These multilateral and NGO actors play an especially important role in trying to define appropriate boundaries for the use of new technologies by governments as instruments of control for the state.

At the same time that policymakers are under scrutiny both for their decisions about how to regulate technology as well as their decisions about how and when to adopt technologies like facial recognition themselves, technology firms and designers have also come under increasing criticism. Growing recognition that the design of technologies can have far-reaching social and political implications means that there is more pressure on technologists to take into consideration the consequences of their decisions early on in the design process (Vincenti 1993; Winner 1980) . The question of how technologists should incorporate these social dimensions into their design and development processes is an old one, and debate on these issues dates back to the 1970s, but it remains an urgent and often overlooked part of the puzzle because so many of the supposedly systematic mechanisms for assessing the impacts of new technologies in both the private and public sectors are primarily bureaucratic, symbolic processes rather than carrying any real weight or influence.

Technologists are often ill-equipped or unwilling to respond to the sorts of social problems that their creations have—often unwittingly—exacerbated, and instead point to governments and lawmakers to address those problems (Zuckerberg 2019) . But governments often have few incentives to engage in this area. This is because setting clear standards and rules for an ever-evolving technological landscape can be extremely challenging, because enforcement of those rules can be a significant undertaking requiring considerable expertise, and because the tech sector is a major source of jobs and revenue for many countries that may fear losing those benefits if they constrain companies too much. This indicates not just a need for clearer incentives and better policies for both private- and public-sector entities but also a need for new mechanisms whereby the technology development and design process can be influenced and assessed by people with a wider range of experiences and expertise. If we want technologies to be designed with an eye to their impacts, who is responsible for predicting, measuring, and mitigating those impacts throughout the design process? Involving policymakers in that process in a more meaningful way will also require training them to have the analytic and technical capacity to more fully engage with technologists and understand more fully the implications of their decisions.

At the same time that tech companies seem unwilling or unable to rein in their creations, many also fear they wield too much power, in some cases all but replacing governments and international organizations in their ability to make decisions that affect millions of people worldwide and control access to information, platforms, and audiences (Kilovaty 2020) . Regulators around the world have begun considering whether some of these companies have become so powerful that they violate the tenets of antitrust laws, but it can be difficult for governments to identify exactly what those violations are, especially in the context of an industry where the largest players often provide their customers with free services. And the platforms and services developed by tech companies are often wielded most powerfully and dangerously not directly by their private-sector creators and operators but instead by states themselves for widespread misinformation campaigns that serve political purposes (Nye 2018) .

Since the largest private entities in the tech sector operate in many countries, they are often better poised to implement global changes to the technological ecosystem than individual states or regulatory bodies, creating new challenges to existing governance structures and hierarchies. Just as it can be challenging to provide oversight for government use of technologies, so, too, oversight of the biggest tech companies, which have more resources, reach, and power than many nations, can prove to be a daunting task. The rise of network forms of organization and the growing gig economy have added to these challenges, making it even harder for regulators to fully address the breadth of these companies’ operations (Powell 1990) . The private-public partnerships that have emerged around energy, transportation, medical, and cyber technologies further complicate this picture, blurring the line between the public and private sectors and raising critical questions about the role of each in providing critical infrastructure, health care, and security. How can and should private tech companies operating in these different sectors be governed, and what types of influence do they exert over regulators? How feasible are different policy proposals aimed at technological innovation, and what potential unintended consequences might they have?

Conflict between countries has also spilled over significantly into the private sector in recent years, most notably in the case of tensions between the United States and China over which technologies developed in each country will be permitted by the other and which will be purchased by other customers, outside those two countries. Countries competing to develop the best technology is not a new phenomenon, but the current conflicts have major international ramifications and will influence the infrastructure that is installed and used around the world for years to come. Untangling the different factors that feed into these tussles as well as whom they benefit and whom they leave at a disadvantage is crucial for understanding how governments can most effectively foster technological innovation and invention domestically as well as the global consequences of those efforts. As much of the world is forced to choose between buying technology from the United States or from China, how should we understand the long-term impacts of those choices and the options available to people in countries without robust domestic tech industries? Does the global spread of technologies help fuel further innovation in countries with smaller tech markets, or does it reinforce the dominance of the states that are already most prominent in this sector? How can research universities maintain global collaborations and research communities in light of these national competitions, and what role does government research and development spending play in fostering innovation within its own borders and worldwide? How should intellectual property protections evolve to meet the demands of the technology industry, and how can those protections be enforced globally?

These conflicts between countries sometimes appear to challenge the feasibility of truly global technologies and networks that operate across all countries through standardized protocols and design features. Organizations like the International Organization for Standardization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and many others have tried to harmonize these policies and protocols across different countries for years, but have met with limited success when it comes to resolving the issues of greatest tension and disagreement among nations. For technology to operate in a global environment, there is a need for a much greater degree of coordination among countries and the development of common standards and norms, but governments continue to struggle to agree not just on those norms themselves but even the appropriate venue and processes for developing them. Without greater global cooperation, is it possible to maintain a global network like the internet or to promote the spread of new technologies around the world to address challenges of sustainability? What might help incentivize that cooperation moving forward, and what could new structures and process for governance of global technologies look like? Why has the tech industry’s self-regulation culture persisted? Do the same traditional drivers for public policy, such as politics of harmonization and path dependency in policy-making, still sufficiently explain policy outcomes in this space? As new technologies and their applications spread across the globe in uneven ways, how and when do they create forces of change from unexpected places?

These are some of the questions that we hope to address in the Technology and Global Change section through articles that tackle new dimensions of the global landscape of designing, developing, deploying, and assessing new technologies to address major challenges the world faces. Understanding these processes requires synthesizing knowledge from a range of different fields, including sociology, political science, economics, and history, as well as technical fields such as engineering, climate science, and computer science. A crucial part of understanding how technology has created global change and, in turn, how global changes have influenced the development of new technologies is understanding the technologies themselves in all their richness and complexity—how they work, the limits of what they can do, what they were designed to do, how they are actually used. Just as technologies themselves are becoming more complicated, so are their embeddings and relationships to the larger social, political, and legal contexts in which they exist. Scholars across all disciplines are encouraged to join us in untangling those complexities.

Josephine Wolff is an associate professor of cybersecurity policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her book You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches was published by MIT Press in 2018.

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What Makes Technology Good or Bad for Us?

Everyone’s worried about smartphones. Headlines like “ Have smartphones destroyed a generation? ” and “ Smartphone addiction could be changing your brain ” paint a bleak picture of our smartphone addiction and its long-term consequences. This isn’t a new lament—public opinion at the advent of the newspaper worried that people would forego the stimulating pleasures of early-morning conversation in favor of reading the daily .

Is the story of technology really that bad? Certainly there’s some reason to worry. Smartphone use has been linked to serious issues, such as dwindling attention spans , crippling depression , and even increased incidence of brain cancer . Ultimately, though, the same concern comes up again and again: Smartphones can’t be good for us, because they’re replacing the real human connection of the good old days.

Everyone’s heard how today’s teens just sit together in a room, texting, instead of actually talking to each other. But could those teenagers actually be getting something meaningful and real out of all that texting?

The science of connection

A quick glance at the research on technology-mediated interaction reveals an ambivalent literature. Some studies show that time spent socializing online can decrease loneliness , increase well-being , and help the socially anxious learn how to connect to others. Other studies suggest that time spent socializing online can cause loneliness , decrease well-being , and foster a crippling dependence on technology-mediated interaction to the point that users prefer it to face-to-face conversation.

It’s tempting to say that some of these studies must be right and others wrong, but the body of evidence on both sides is a little too robust to be swept under the rug. Instead, the impact of social technology is more complicated. Sometimes, superficially similar behaviors have fundamentally different consequences. Sometimes online socialization is good for you, sometimes it’s bad, and the devil is entirely in the details.

This isn’t a novel proposition; after all, conflicting results started appearing within the first few studies into the internet’s social implications, back in the 1990s. Many people have suggested that to understand the consequences of online socialization, we need to dig deeper into situational factors and circumstances. But what we still have to do is move beyond recognition of the problem to provide an answer: When, how, and why are some online interactions great, while others are dangerous?

The interpersonal connection behaviors framework

As a scientist of close relationships, I can’t help but see online interactions differently from thinkers in other fields. People build relationships by demonstrating their understanding of each other’s needs and perspectives, a cyclical process that brings them closer together. If I tell you my secrets, and you respond supportively, I’m much more likely to confide in you again—and you, in turn, are much more likely to confide in me.

This means that every time two people talk to each other, an opportunity for relationship growth is unfolding. Many times, that opportunity isn’t taken; we aren’t about to have an in-depth conversation with the barista who asks for our order. But connection is always theoretically possible, and that’s true whether we’re interacting online or face-to-face.

Close relationships are the bread and butter of happiness—and even health. Being socially isolated is a stronger predictor of mortality than is smoking multiple cigarettes a day . If we want to understand the role technology plays in our well-being, we need to start with the role it plays in our relationships.

And it turns out that the kind of technology-mediated interactions that lead to positive outcomes are exactly those that are likely to build stronger relationships. Spending your time online by scheduling interactions with people you see day in and day out seems to pay dividends in increased social integration . Using the internet to compensate for being lonely just makes you lonelier; using the internet to actively seek out connection has the opposite effect .

“The kind of technology-mediated interactions that lead to positive outcomes are exactly those that are likely to build stronger relationships”

On the other hand, technology-mediated interactions that don’t really address our close relationships don’t seem to do us any good—and might, in fact, do us harm. Passively scrolling through your Facebook feed without interacting with people has been linked to decreased well-being and increased depression post-Facebook use.

That kind of passive usage is a good example of “ social snacking .” Like eating junk food, social snacking can temporarily satisfy you, but it’s lacking in nutritional content. Looking at your friends’ posts without ever responding might make you feel more connected to them, but it doesn’t build intimacy.

Passive engagement has a second downside, as well: social comparison . When we compare our messy lived experiences to others’ curated self-presentations, we are likely to suffer from lowered self-esteem , happiness, and well-being. This effect is only exacerbated when we consume people’s digital lives without interacting with them, making it all too easy to miss the less photogenic moments of their lives.

Moving forward

The interpersonal connection behaviors framework doesn’t explain everything that might influence our well-being after spending time on social media. The internet poses plenty of other dangers—for two examples, the sense of wasting time or emotional contagion from negative news. However, a focus on meaningful social interaction can help explain decades of contradictory findings. And even if the framework itself is challenged by future work, its central concept is bound to be upheld: We have to study the details of how people are spending their time online if we want to understand its likely effects.

In the meantime, this framework has some practical implications for those worried about their own online time. If you make sure you’re using social media for genuinely social purposes, with conscious thought about how it can improve your life and your relationships, you’ll be far more likely to enjoy your digital existence.

This article was originally published on the Behavioral Scientist . Read the original article .

About the Author

Jenna Clark

Jenna Clark, Ph.D. , is a senior behavioral researcher at Duke University's Center for Advanced Hindsight, where she works to help people make healthy decisions in spite of themselves. She's also interested in how technology contributes to our well-being through its effect on our close personal relationships.

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Essay on Impact of Technology on Society

Students are often asked to write an essay on Impact of Technology on Society in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Impact of Technology on Society

Introduction.

Technology has greatly influenced society. It has changed how we communicate, learn, and even how we live our daily lives.

Communication

In education, technology has made learning more accessible. Online classes and educational apps have made it possible to learn from anywhere.

Everyday Life

In our daily lives, technology helps us do tasks more efficiently. For example, we use GPS for navigation and apps for shopping.

250 Words Essay on Impact of Technology on Society

The technological revolution has dramatically reshaped society, impacting various sectors such as communication, education, health, and business. The advent of technology has brought about significant changes, both positive and negative, that are reshaping our world.

Positive Impacts

Technology has undeniably improved our lives, providing unprecedented convenience and efficiency. In the realm of communication, digital platforms have bridged geographical gaps, fostering global connectivity and collaboration. In education, e-learning tools have democratized access to knowledge, enabling lifelong learning irrespective of location or socio-economic background. In healthcare, advanced medical technologies have improved diagnostic accuracy and treatment efficacy, enhancing patient outcomes and quality of life.

Negative Impacts

However, the pervasive influence of technology also poses challenges. The digital divide, a disparity in access to technology, exacerbates social inequalities. The over-reliance on technology can lead to sedentary lifestyles, contributing to physical and mental health issues. Moreover, the rise of digital platforms has increased the risk of cybercrimes, privacy breaches, and misinformation, posing threats to personal safety and societal harmony.

In conclusion, the impact of technology on society is multifaceted, bringing both benefits and drawbacks. It is crucial for society to harness the positive potential of technology while mitigating its negative implications. This balance requires thoughtful policy-making, education, and a collective commitment to using technology responsibly and ethically.

500 Words Essay on Impact of Technology on Society

Technology has undoubtedly become an integral part of our daily lives, influencing every sector from communication to health, education to entertainment. The advent of technology has significantly transformed society, shaping the way we interact, learn, work, and live. While the benefits of technology are numerous, it has also raised several concerns that demand careful consideration.

Enhanced Communication and Information Access

Moreover, the internet has democratized information access. Online resources and digital libraries have made it possible for anyone with internet access to learn almost anything. This has significantly reduced the barriers to education and knowledge, fostering a global culture of continuous learning.

Technology and Work

The way we work has been radically transformed by technology. Automation and artificial intelligence have replaced many traditional jobs, leading to fears of job loss. However, they have also created new roles that didn’t exist before, such as data analysts, AI specialists, and digital marketers.

Moreover, technology has facilitated remote work, allowing people to work from anywhere, thereby promoting work-life balance. However, this also blurs the line between work and personal life, leading to potential burnout.

Healthcare Advancements

Social implications.

Technology has significantly influenced our social interactions. On the one hand, it has enabled us to stay connected with friends and family, no matter where they are. On the other hand, excessive use of technology can lead to isolation and mental health issues.

Environmental Impact

Technology also plays a crucial role in addressing environmental challenges. Innovations like renewable energy technologies, precision agriculture, and digital twins are helping us combat climate change and promote sustainable development. However, the production and disposal of electronic waste also pose significant environmental threats.

In conclusion, the impact of technology on society is multifaceted, bringing both opportunities and challenges. As we continue to innovate and evolve, it is crucial to foster a culture of responsible technology use, ensuring that technological advancements contribute to societal well-being and sustainable development.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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The Impact of Science and Technology on Society with Sheila Jasanoff

In this section.

What is the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and policy of modern democracies? What difference does it make that we live in scientifically and technologically advanced societies? What is the meaning of science and technology in the everyday lives of individuals, social groups, and nations? Watch this Wiener Conference Call with Sheila Jasanoff , winner of the prestigious Holberg Prize.

Wiener Conference Calls recognize Malcolm Wiener’s role in proposing and supporting this series as well as the Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

- [Narrator] Welcome to the Wiener Conference Calls series. These one hour on the record phone calls feature leading experts from Harvard Kennedy School, who answer your questions on public policy and current events. Wiener Conference Calls recognize Malcolm Wiener's role in proposing and supporting this series, as well as the Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

- Good day, everyone. I'm Ralph Renalli, from the office of communications and public affairs and the host of the Harvard Kennedy School's "PolicyCast," podcast. And I'm very pleased to welcome you to this Wiener Conference Call, which is kindly sustained by Dr. Malcolm Wiener, who supports the Kennedy School in this and many other ways. Today we're joined by professor Sheila Jasanoff, who is the founder and director of the program on science, technology and society, and the four timer professor of science and technology studies at Harvard Kennedy School. Professor Jasanoff is a leading scholar at the intersection of science, technology, law, democratic theory and public policy. Her work has tackled pressing global challenges, including climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and biotechnology such as gene editing. Arguing for a democratization of science and technology that more fully includes society in the conversation. She's an influential writer in the field of STS having authored or co-authored 10 books and edited or co-edited eight others. She's also written more than 130 articles and book chapters. And in March, it was announced that she has been awarded the 2022 Holberg Prize, which is among the world's most prestigious awards for academic work in the humanities and social sciences. We are very fortunate that she has agreed to share her expertise today with the Kennedy School's alumni and friends, Sheila. Sheila, I believe you're on mute.

- Thank you for that introduction, Ralph, and also above all thank you for the opportunity to present to the Kennedy School's friends on this topic that is so dear to my heart. So without waiting further because I'd like to save as much time for Q and A as possible. Let me share my screen and go through the slides that I prepared for this first part of our time together. So what I've done in effect, I want to go back, screen. What I want to do in effect is to offer a little tasters choice menu because I want some positive, what aspect of our work to focus on. And I suspect that the people keying into the call will come from a variety of different angles. So I continually remember a meeting that I had when I was beginning my work on law and science. And I think I wrote the first book that sort of attempted to map out the relationships between law and science. And it was funded by the, what was then called the 20th Century Fund, and they had a cocktail party for us at a political science association meeting. And I met one of their other grantees and he said to me, "What are you writing about? Is there really anything to write about in the relationship between science, technology and law?" And so today when I begin my graduate seminar, I often just troll through the days headlines in one newspaper, I often pick the "New York Times," and just pick out headlines that in a sense answer that young man's question or he was young then and so was I. And just show people the enormous number and variety of ways in which our world throws up questions for public policy that relate to the intersections of science, technology and society, so this is literally from a last night's collection of headlines in the "New York Times," of different stories. And you see everything that you might be interested in appearing there, so there's the digital world, there's the environmental world, there's war and peace, there's international relations, there is the economy, there's, COVID, COVID, COVID, there's particular people like Bill Gates and the very bottom most one, the $200,000 facelift is a reminder that we are of course, very conscious at the Kennedy School, that is equality and inequality are phenomena that have to some extent been exacerbated by the advances in science and technology and that is something that we want to think about very seriously as well. So one could not in today's present, not to mention thinking about the future, fail to see that science and technology are terrifically important, things to understand, not just grapple with, not just to encourage, not just to push forward like we do in the school of engineering and applied science, but also for public policy to take on board and think about in very serious ways, so what is my program doing about it? So we are a very small program, we only have one faculty line and everything else is happening at the moment on soft money, so you have to understand that point about scale, as I run through the things that we're doing. Nevertheless, small things, if they're atomic and force can set big things going. And our ambition is to be a generative, but also continuing source of theory driven research on current policy problems that are associated with scientific and technological change. And there you have a series of the major grants that we are managing at the moment, the socio-technical transformations have to do with sustainability. The COVID is self explanatory. Genome editing is self explanatory. The summer school is one of our outreach programs that I'm happy to talk about later. And Trust in Science is just something that has been on everybody's lips in the last couple of years and that is something where we are heading out of our program, the Trust in Science project that is part of the Harvard data science initiative.

- [Margaret] Hi, professor, I'm so sorry to interrupt you. This is Margaret, I'm gonna share my screen because we're unable to see the slides. Is that okay with you?

- That's okay, I wonder why that is the case.

- [Margaret] Do you wanna try one more time? Sorry , sorry about this.

- Well, I think you should just go ahead and share, I don't, I mean, I did everything that I normally do, but definitely having internet problems with this interface since the beginning, so I think you'd better do it.

- [Margaret] Okay.

- But then I have to be able to see it as well.

- [Margaret] Can you see my screen?

- Yeah, thank you.

- [Margaret] Okay, yes.

- So I was looking, I just ran through these grants and I won't bother repeating that, but just to give you an idea that whether it's the climate interface or data and trust or innovation, or of course COVID and gene editing, we are there with actual research that we're carrying out. Could we have the next slide then, please? This is just a visual display of what that means in terms of the Kennedy School's outreach to different things. And so beginning with the top left, we manage a couple of different networks at different professional levels, the science and democracy network is a network of young and mid-career scholars that we sustain. But we've added to that a network of graduate researchers in the field of STS. These are anchored in the Kennedy School and they have different kinds of meetings and activities. We have connections to take move across to the top right corner with other programs around Harvard. So we are also an anchor for cross school and cross disciplinary activities. And those are the names of some of the enterprises we're connected to. We believe very much in public outreach and we have two different major programs that have been running for 15 years, at least, the STS Circle, which is a weekly seminar series and the Science and Democracy Lectures, which are sort of premier event once a semester, where we bring together very high level speakers with scholars and practitioners throughout Harvard. And that has proved to be a very engaging occasion for public involvement as well. And then of course we are deeply engaged in teaching and I'll come back to that for the end of my presentation, but our teaching also crosses lines. It reaches out to the faculty of arts and sciences. We teach in the gen ed program. We teach in the engineering school and also through the graduate school by offering a minor or secondary field in STS. And the point is that all of this is anchored in the Kennedy School with the program leadership, with the academic advising, with core instruction and increasingly with website and social media. So let's go on. So I want to give you two examples of the ways in which we have jumped onto issues, but also stayed abreast of them. I mean, so the point I want to make is that to deal with the present and the immediate future you often have to be embedded in a longstanding engagement with these issues. So with regard to the life sciences and society, which is one of the big frontiers of innovation, our ambition is, and has been to be the powerhouse of thought on science, technology and society in this era of genetic genomic and post genomic revolutions that we are seeing in society. So about 20 years ago we formed something that we called the Biology and Society Collaboratory. That thing in its turn gave way to what we have now, which is much more international, it's called the Global Observatory for Genome Editing. And we are grappling with some of the questions at the frontiers of policy in particular, should the human germ line be edited, and if so, under what conditions? But because we're a policy school, we deal with the democratic side of it, who participates in these decisions? Who decides and by what processes? So if we go onto the next slide, we were prepared to leap onto these issues, when in December, 2015, the National Academies of Sciences together with leading scientific organizations in China and in Britain formed the first international summit. And we wanted to steer the discussion away from scientific self-governance because those of us who study science, technology and society do not believe that it's adequate to govern the frontiers of technology by delegating the governance power to the scientists themselves. Other people have to be involved as well. So in April, 2017, we had a meeting in which we proved what it would mean to achieve a broad societal consensus on genome editing. And if we go on, one result of that meeting was that we had a multi-author set of articles, but one of them was this idea of CRISPR democracy. CRISPR is the name of the gene editing technology that has become almost a word of record. So inclusive deliberation, how does one include people into deliberation on these frontiers technologies? And with that, if we go to the next slide, we have held a series of very well attended at high level meetings for the last five years. So the first meeting was five years ago, that 2017 meeting that I already gave you the, pointed to, and we called it editorial aspirations. What is it that scientists and technologists, but also society at large, what we aspire to when we adopt genetic editing technologies? And then by a couple of years later in 2019, as you see in the middle poster, people had really started wondering what the limits should be and should there be a moratorium? And then in effect COVID came along and put a moratorium that we hadn't expected onto a lot of things. And now just at the end of this week, we're having a five year retrospective with some of the most prominent voices internationally and otherwise thinking about institutional bioethics. So what I want to illustrate with this progression of slides is not just that the program makes pretty pictures, but that we believe in really staying closely tied to the issues that we're studying and staying at the forefront of these debates and continually returning with other sorts of questions, who is being excluded, who is being included, what kinds of issues are being framed and are they being framed well or poorly? This is part of what we are continually engaged with. Now, if we go on, a second example I wanted to give was, how it is said that prepared minds are the best things to have because then surprises don't hit us in the same way. So when COVID landed in that extremely shocking way for us at Harvard on March 13th, 2020, in a sense our research community and we in the STS program at the Kennedy School were prepared to start doing something about it. In part, this was because we have academic networks that are very significant. And in this case what was tremendously significant was that I had deep collegial relationships with Cornell. So I know that many people believe that universities isolate themselves and do not reach out to others. This is in part a story about how outreach matters. So my colleagues, Steven Hill Gardner at Cornell, and I co-launched, and let's go on, a project that had initially only nine countries we were looking at, but then all of our colleagues in all of these other countries jumped onto the project because they recognized that we could offer a kind of leadership. And we ended up with 16 countries and two affiliates. And for the last two years we've been studying in detail the development of policies related to COVID 19 in all of these countries. And when I speak of a network, if we go to the next slide, this has been a tremendous project that has brought together 16 countries, two affiliates, as I just mentioned, 39 institutions and 59 researchers. And you might be wondering what sort of budget does all this take? Well, our budget has been in the six figures and in the modest six figures because it's the human connections that I've counted, but several of our colleagues, for example, those in Japan and those in France and in the UK have been able to raise their own parallel funding. And much of it has actually been happening on volunteer time, but people are just deeply interested in pursuing their research together because they see that the collective is more important than the individual pieces. And that has been so uplifting to me in this time of isolation that I can't even begin to tell you how much it has meant. Let's go on. So I want to discuss a little bit about the findings of this project because obviously it's not just nice to have conversations with ones colleagues, but is one discovering things. So one thing we have discovered is that it would be a problem to just look at how the health system has responded to the pandemic, that we have to look concurrently at the economic system and the political system. And our project has made some theoretical advances that I think are quite important by looking at these three systems operating together. Let's go on. So one of the first things we discovered was that there are patterned responses and they relate to the ways in which these three systems can be synchronized or not synchronized. And we identified these three broad patterns, which people found very intriguing. We found that some countries with so-called control countries, these days, I'm sure you've been reading about China's zero COVID policy and why it seems to be breaking down and perhaps not working so well. But we found that there was a cluster of countries not only in east Asia because Australia also belonged to this group. And not only authoritarian in the Chinese sense, but also in the democratic sense of Taiwan and sort of guided democracy like in Singapore and democracy like in South Korea, that these countries had tried to keep the virus up. That was the focus of their control policies and they formed one package. And for each of these columns, we identified different ways in which they had approached the health issue, the economy issue and the politics issue. And as I say, these were all intertwined. Then there were the consensus country where the epitome is perhaps Germany, where the virus could not be kept out. The virus was prevalent, but the political system and policy system as a whole came to consensus around the key findings and the key policy recommendations, especially in the first year of the coronavirus. And we can talk a little bit more about this if you're interested. And then there were the chaotic countries where the center of governance was unclear, and whether you looked at the economy or the politics or the health, there was no sense of a society marching together. And so in the second year of the crisis, we've been asking explanatory questions and we've also been deepening and enlarging our research base in various ways that I'd be happy to talk about, but mindful of the time we have let's go on. So a question right now in 2022 is where does this research reach and what is the STS program looking at in terms of where we believe breakthroughs are to be made in research that relates to public policy? So one big cluster is around our ideas of democracy and particularly as looked up with digitization, the rapid flow of information, the sharing of information on social media and one very particular focus that we have is a set of research that we're channeling for the Harvard Data Science Initiative. And again, I'd be happy to talk in detail about it, but the Trust in Science project is thus far privately sponsored program through which we are trying to build a network of inner Harvard resources. So we're trying to break down research silos within Harvard using our knowledge and our capacities for networking in the Kennedy School to create more bang for buck by putting major researchers together studying different dimensions of the trust in science problem. We're also deeply involved in studying sustainability and we have an ongoing comparative research project involving five countries, UK, Germany, Kenya, India, and the US. And we're looking particularly at energy transformations and what makes them sustainable in a similarly related way, but a bit more futuristic. We're looking at climate governance and how geoengineering factors into a world where institutions are not exactly marching in lockstep. And yet this is a planetary scale technology that is geared toward addressing some of the most pressing problems of climate change. And last but not least a project that is extremely dear to my heart is this Global Observatory and Genome Editing that I've already mentioned. And what we're exploring there, trying to probe there, is there scope for cosmopolitan bioethics? And by that we mean that people do not have to buy into exactly the same notions of what life is or what we owe to it because we will not get 100% agreement around the world, but can we find the principles on which we can coexist with people who are doing different, who have different belief systems? And given the debate that I'm sure you are all aware of around Roe V. Wade, you will notice that cosmopolitanism is not just an idea of the international discussion, but even within our own society, how do we find the ways to coexist with moralities that are profoundly different around the question of life and the image there is just to show you that our program small as it is draws strength from relationships that we have built across the Kennedy School and across the university. So this is a program that we hosted just a few days ago on May 4th, and it was titled a Right to Truth with a question mark, can we pause something like this as part of human rights that would give us a basis for regulating things like the spread of misinformation? But we collaborated there with the Carr Center for Human Rights at the Kennedy School and also with the Oxford Internet Institute. So it's an example of how we believe that small things turned into collaborative projects can achieve bang for the buck more than we actually have in the way of resources. So let me conclude with a few more things about the program and then open it up, so let's go on. So this is just a list of some of the kinds of institutions that come to the STS program at Harvard for advice, for lectures, for input of different sorts. And these are just some of the things that some of the entities that we have recently advised or spoken to, or given some of our time to, and you will see that they are very international. Some of them come to us for things about ethics, some of them come for things about risk, like the French agency for food, environmental, occupational, health and safety is very interested in risk management. Like the European Food Safety Authority, the national academies have come to us on bio-security issues and on security issues more broadly. The Thailand Institute of Justice wants us to talk to them about technology and law. Anyway, so you see a huge variety of clients for our work throughout the world, really. And then going on, I deeply believe in teaching as the center of our mission and this diagram shows you how we have been building across time. And the secondary field is a minor that we anchor in the Kennedy School, but is available to PhD students throughout Harvard. And there with the colors, you see the different schools that are sending students in effect to the Kennedy School to learn about science, technology and society. You see a little bit of COVID impact there, but it is in my view very much a growth industry. And it's a demonstration of how a minor field can really energize people that are scattered throughout Harvard and our presidents, Lawrence Bacow, now, they like to speak about one Harvard, but this is something that articulates that belief and shows you how we are tackling it. And then similarly, the courses that we offer with their different enrollments also show a similar kind of outreach across the university. And there's a huge richness from these students sitting together in the same room, different ages, different professional backgrounds talking to one another. So I hope you'll see that side as a little bit of a kind of vision of pedagogy also, accompanying the research, the training, the policy advice on the public outreach. And if we move on, there are websites, I'd be happy to share these, but these are some of the places where more information can be found. And then continuing with that, I'd like to thank you for your attention and return to full screen mode and take your questions.

- Well, thank you very much, Sheila. Now, we're gonna open the session up for your questions. So to ask a question, please use the virtual hand raising feature of Zoom and in true Kennedy School fashion, we're gonna ask you to do two things. One, keep your question brief. And two, please make sure that it ends in a question mark. You'll be notified via Zoom's chat feature when it's your turn to speak. And when it is, please make sure that you unmute yourself when you hear from the staff. Finally, I think all our participants would appreciate it if you could state your Kennedy School affiliation before you ask your question. We're gonna get things started by asking question that was submitted earlier by Sarah Spencer, who's an PP, 2006. And that question is, Sheila, "How will the race for technological dominance affect global stability? And how might the quest for strategic advantage in science and technology, particularly thinking about the US, the UK and the EU, impact the existing architecture around the constraints on state power and the systems for interstate dialogue and security cooperation?"

- So if I could really answer that question, then I would deserve some kind of place on Mount Olympus or some place where I could enjoy miraculous status. I think that the framing of a question that way is challenging, but also perhaps too broad. I mean, so technological dominance, what does it mean? I mean, does it mean control of the rare earths that we need in order to make computers? Does it mean having the kinds of populations who will not rebel against technology? Does it mean the kind of ongoing investment, like an mRNA research that resulted in one of the most rapid breakthroughs in vaccine technology that we have ever witnessed. And what are these technologies for anyway? I mean, so I think in the mind of people who worry about technological dominance is a very important concern and it is the concern for national security as it has been defined to some extent in the Pentagon's terms, I myself think that a better society to be secure has to look at the bottom end of the scale as well. How good is its governance structure, how flexible and adaptive and resilient is it as a society? So I think that the worries to me about technological dominance need to be themselves picked apart in terms of sub-fields and units. And there I think that, maybe if America were true to itself, the worries would be less than if we just think, well, who's going to get ahead in the cyber security game? I mean, as I say, these are not, I mean, it's an entwined braided world that we live in and no strand is independent of the others. You don't have a braid without all the pieces being continually woven together. But I think that thinking of it as a race where people are ahead and behind and the lanes are clearly marked, to me, understates the problem and you can only run a horse race with blinders on. I mean, so I think that is a big problem and we need to have these crosscutting conversations that may not be a satisfying answer. And I myself am involved in some of these lanes as well because I see the importance, but I see my role inside of any of these lanes as being to some degree a reminder, look to the right, look to the left, look behind where you came from and then look ahead. But as I say that is not as sufficiently targeted strategically pointed answer. I will say that people who think of solutions without looking right, left and behind often come up with the wrong solutions.

- I think our next participant is ready to ask their question. Please identify yourself, state your affiliation with the Kennedy School and ask away.

- [Pedro] Thank you, Ralph. Hi, professor Jasanoff. My name is Pedro Henrique de Cristo, and I'm the head of Navi, the Brazilian green deal together with the Labor Party and the Institute to Lula, the institute of former president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. And one of the key things, like listening to you speaking, that we worry about here in Navi, in Brazil. And also in the consortium, we are working together with South Africa and India, is the fact that we have two levels in the challenge of technological inclusion. We have the national levels between the rich and the poor as you always state, but we also have international dispute of technological inequality with a huge risk for countries like mine and the whole majority world, Latin America, Africa and Asia, of technological new colonialism. We have seen for instance that even for global problems that are interconnected like the pandemic, not breaking the patents of the vaccines, that by the way were developed, the mRNA, with public money, is a major issue that we still have to face. So I would like to ask you, how do you see the best pathway for a more inclusive and technological development within our societies, but also in the global stage between the countries in the majority world and the rich countries like the US and European Union and in northeast Asia? Thank you.

- I mean, that again is one of these million dollar questions and does not have a simple answer because I think there is no single best way, very smart minds work on these things. And if there were a best way, they would've found it, by the time the best way is found, things have often moved on and there's a new problem on the horizon. But I think that if we look at particular institutions and particular structuring elements in the system of innovation, for instance, there are places that we can point to that have deep problems in them. So we have a World Health Organization, but we have already seen that if the US pulls out of it, that organization would essentially be left without any teeth at all because the funding has come disproportionately from one country and if that country chooses to pull out, then that entire structure of global data management equalization to some extent, that is suddenly pulled apart. I mean, so we have to go to particular international institutions and revisit them if we're really serious about global governance, we have to get serious about things like the funding and not leave them vulnerable to these kinds of sudden opt in, opt out decisions that respond to national politics and not to global need. We have seen emerge in Africa a positive development of a regional sort. And you mentioned this international connection as well. So I think that part of the place of imagination is not to think of the world only in rich north, poor south terms. I mean, of course that's no longer true anyway, and Brazil is one of the big leaders in demonstrating that is not the case. But if you think about what unites, for instance, the brick countries. Today, it's also forms of governance that have not been particularly hospitable to innovation. I mean, so India, which I know a great deal about is having enormous amounts of problems with universities and free speech and these kinds of questions, but it's also inquiry. I mean, scientific and technological inquiry are known to thrive in places where it's not a popularity contest with the leadership and there are historical examples where this does not work very well. So I think we have to look at these regional coalitions and see what kinds of values they're pressing forward in science and technology. And one last thing I'll say that's not often talked about, but intellectual property regimes really need to be looked at as well because they so much constrain the flow of information. I mean, in theory we all buy into this idea that information is free flowing and we have a free market of ideas and so forth, but in practice people are continually, I mean, even within this country, we have not fully resolved the patent disputes over CRISPR technology between the east coast and the west coast. I mean, it's not just an international problem, it's a problem that goes deeper. So again, it's too bad that my answer to many questions is pull apart the question into its component parts or constituent parts and you'll find that we need to tackle several systems concurrently. But unfortunately that is the case in our multisystemic, polycentric world. And I think an awareness of that is kind of essential.

- Great, well, we have a question that was submitted in the chat, which I will read. And that question is from Jonathan Wiener of Duke University, "Could you say more about your work on geoengineering governance and democratization? What issues or options are you exploring? Thanks." And he has a parenthetical note. "We have recently published a paper on solar radiation modification and risk, risk analysis."

- Well, Jonathan, welcome, and thank you for being in the audience and I'm happy to see that your risk, risk interests which go, I think even further back than your affiliation with the Kennedy School, are still propelling you to this day. So the governance challenges that we are exploring to some extent relate to the ways in which questions have been framed and what structures are there are, or not there. So one of the things that concerns me particularly as an STS scholar is the kind of boundary drawing by which certain things are taken out of discussion, out of democratic discussion. One of these is a kind of force segmentation between what is pure research and what is applied research. I happen to think that everything related to geoengineering falls, if anywhere on the applied side of the boundary, but I also think that boundary doesn't make intellectual sense. And most people these days are undertaking research because they think it will lead to some kind of betterment for humanity down the line. But if we are thinking about, this goes back to the rich country, poor country point, if we're talking about research that is very advanced in some parts of the world, but we'll have their impact largely in other parts of the world, what does accountability look like? Now, you are an environmentalist, but you are also a lawyer. And I think you are very versed in the challenges of international law and the absences of international institutions. So I think very specifically, one of the things we are looking at is how do accountability systems get created when the power to frame questions and to develop technological responses to questions as framed when that power is very unequally large. I'm not, simply through lack of time and resources, I'm not the person who creates the institutional spaces that are experimental. I mean, you have to turn to a John Dryzek and the case of genome editing, or perhaps a Martin Hyer for sustainable technologies and Australia and the Netherlands respectively. But we at the Kennedy School at some extent supplying the ideas that those colleagues who are more into the hands on implementation side of things are put into use in various ways. So I hope that's the beginning of an answer.

- Great, well, we have some pre-submitted questions from members of the audience who had registered for this call and I'd like to turn to one of those now, it's a little bit long, so you're gonna have to bear with me, but I actually quite like it. "In my lifetime," and this is the participant's voice, not mine, "In my lifetime, the digital revolution brought forth technologies that few in our generation either anticipated or desired, far from granting us greater leisure, devices and platforms and interconnectivity have complicated our lives in the name of convenience to the point where a few, if anybody understands how they function alone or together, I doubt we can escape the matrix with or without pills. Given our near total dependency on the digital domain, does this signify a user patient of human agency by this cult, AI ridden, all embracing substrate. What hope do you hold out for human agency and civil society in a technocratic multiverse in which our technocratic capitalist society, no one assumes accountability or will be held responsible for events and decisions that rule our faiths?"

- That is a pessimistic take on the world, but it is a take that is something that I take extremely seriously. So my work has been in a kind of social science that is not the dominant one in the Kennedy School. So in the Kennedy School the science of economics is the one that is most represented. And in general around Harvard, what we call the interpretive social sciences are not that well represented. So just a very quicky definition, the interpretive social sciences are the ones that look at how we attach meaning to things, whereas the sort of positive social sciences are the ones that try to create data and draw from the ways in which people behave, regularities and laws, and then cluster solutions around those laws. Now, it turns out that the positive social sciences are continually bumping up against the fact that they modeled society wrong because they misunderstood the actual drivers, motivations, where people are coming from. The most famous example may be Francis Fukuyama's end of history idea in 1990, when he thought that now that the two big political systems, capitalist and communist had dissolved in favor of capitalism, there would not be struggle. So I think at the very least we would have to say that judgment was premature. So interpretive social sciences try to take the question of what we believe and how we respond to things and their agency, which was at the core of this question, becomes deeply significant, who has agency, who feels they can and who has the resources with which to change the world? As a humanist by confession, I worry very much about that question and the sort of story that was embedded in the question that these technologies are out of control and nobody can understand them, I think was part of the question. And there's huge train that we have set in motion and there's no way to stop it. Partly we have to remember that this all happened in a very short span of time. It's a little bit like ozone depletion, that also happened in a very short span of time. Everybody thought that chlorofluorocarbon were really incredibly safe, stable. They did not seem to be toxic. And then guess what? It turned out that they were not toxic to us as far as we know, but they certainly were toxic to the ozone layer and suddenly the ozone layer began to be depleted and it took us a while to figure this out and see it. But when I was saying before that I think you have to look to the right and left and not just straight down the alley that you're on. This was a big reminder and I think similarly with the internet, we've had this sort of sudden burst of concealed toxicity that we should have been actually smart enough to foresee and we didn't, so what is the answer now? Well, first of all, people have got to agree on what is toxic and not continually carry on in fundamentalist, I am the first amendment person and I believe in full speech and therefore I will acquire a social media platform as the sole owner of it and have whoever wants to speak in it speak in whatever ways. What does that actually do to human agency? What does it do to human agency if some people have the capacity to reach 83 million people in one day and the rest of us have no followers or 123 followers. I mean, this power is not equally distributed. So I think we have to take the question of the human seriously. Where is it that our technologies are depriving us of the capacity to act as humans? This is not a new question. This is something that the industrial revolution forced upon philosophers of technology and subsequently STS scholars like myself and people have been thinking about it for a very long time. I think we should be thinking about it more centrally inside of the Kennedy School. I think that there should be a much more integrated approach to thinking about policy itself as a technology and whether it is empowering people or disempowering people. Do we have alternatives in various places of technological solutions that maybe fast, but disempowering or slow, but empowering? How would we even measure those things? How would we describe them? So these are some of the questions that I think are at the heart of what sometimes seems to be a losing battle. I mean, I will tell you the humanities and the humanistic social sciences are not the places where money is flowing to, these are not the things that people build buildings for. They're not the places where they give half billion dollar research grants, they give that to studies of artificial intelligence. I personally think that non-artificial intelligence needs a lot more attention before we decide to go whole hub for the artificial kind.

- Well, Sheila, I'm glad you brought up the dominance of economics in our discourse because I have a question of my own. I recently recorded an episode of "PolicyCast," with your STS colleague, Dani Rodrik, who is of course an economist, but also one who is a very critical at times of his own discipline. And one of the things we talked about was reconnecting economics to democracy. And I've always been fascinated about the place that democracy holds in STS studies. And I'm interested in your thoughts on the ongoing threats to democratic governance both here in the United States and abroad and how they're affecting our ability to have an informed society that's appropriately skeptical of science and technology and a scientific community that's responsive to skepticism and human considerations?

- Well, I can say that, first of all, that question is at the heart of every one of the research projects that I've described at the STS program is undertaking. But it goes pretty deep, I mean, one of the things that I have argued is that today we don't really have a full blown theory of democracy unless we look at the ways, and this goes back to the previous question as well, to what extent and in what ways have we actually delegated power to the technological systems without even hardly recognizing it? So ever since the Europeans adopted their GDPR, their regulation on data protection, there's much more of the time that you visit a new site and something pops up saying, something about privacy settings. But in those privacy settings, the presumption is that you will give up your information unless you are restricted. So one of the things that we do in the Kennedy School and people who are associated with us have developed, like and the law school, is nudge theory, in which one major conclusion that has emerged is that whether you opt into a system or opt out of the system is deeply consequential. So tell me why we have to opt out of the system in which all our information is available? Why don't we rather have to opt into a system where we can selectively decide which information we choose to give up or not? I don't think it's possible to have agency, and without agency, no democracy. If our minds are made transparent, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were geared toward protecting something that in my language I'll call interiority. The idea that there is an interior, the chief justice even decided that cell phones are part of that interiority when he said, when he wrote the opinion saying that cell phones may not be searched without a search warrant. I think he acknowledged something quite deep there that what is being protected is not the cell phone, it's the connection of the cell phone to our minds in such a way that we've made it the repository of a bunch of different things. So to get democracy back and away from this kind of runaway sense, I think we have to rediscover the tools and use them intelligently and passionately to ask questions about why policy looks a certain way and not a different way. Now, my economist friends often say to me that they don't frame the questions, that they are tool makers. You come to them with a question, any question, they will tell you the efficient way, sometimes the fair way of allocating resources so that you can get answers. So I guess, what I say is that my kind of science says I'm not content with the questions as framed. Give me a question and I'll restate for you and then maybe we'll go to the economist and build up bridges.

- Thank you, well, I think we have time for just about one more question and this one comes from Juan Santa Cruz, he is in our audience and he is an alum of the MPA program. And his question is, "A few years ago you wrote an article called Technologies of Humility, highlighting the idea of bringing everyone's view, especially the less advantaged to a particular decision, that requires time and a technology for conversation like what we have now in any Congress. Nonetheless, traditional institutions for conversation in liberal democracy seems outdated. In light of the imediacy of today's world, do you think we need a new way of organizing liberal democracies?"

- Juan, for those of you who may not know is one of those rare people who decided that he would take his Kennedy School education, but converted into the work of liberal democracies in a sense by engaging in active politics in Chile. And it is a challenging yet friendly question. So Juan, you were speaking from a country in which the answer to that question has been emphatically, yes. I mean, you've had one of the most vibrant civil demonstrations month after month to say that we need to recon, Chileans need to reconstitute their particular democracy. And you've also had a new constitution and you've also had an election. So I don't think, in the US we are a bit complacent, we think that our Constitution was perfected at the moment that it was written. And I think that to some degree an answer to your question is that we have to take the liberal democracies of the world of where they are at, diagnose the particular pathologies and not try to come up with a one size fits all answer to liberal democracy. There are different flavors of liberal democracy and ours does well at certain kinds of things and not so well at certain other kinds of things. And we have to get serious about that. One thing we haven't done very well at is distribution. This is why many people feel left out of what, in GDP terms looks great. I mean, and many economists will agree, but then the hard question is, well, why didn't our laws of economics take on board the distributive question? So in my article, Technologies of Humility, one of the things I say is that we often get really hung up on prediction. But when we are looking at prediction, we are not looking at winners and losers necessarily, we don't say, in the aggregate, supposing this moves forward in this way, who will be the winners and who will be the losers and what will the losers say and how do we bring them into the equation? So that may be a slow process, but if you don't even begin to ask who the winners and losers will be when you innovate policy, then there is a serious problem. And I will say that, a book, a science fiction book that is praised by a lot of people, including former president Obama, "Ministry for the Future," by Kim Stanley Robinson. To me, it was provocative in a way because it begins with a scenario that touches me very closely. It begins with a scenario in which there is impossible heat in India, which is happening right this moment as we speak, parts of India are scorching. And in this, Kim Stanley Robinson book, 20 million people die in India of a heat wave and people are like boiled fish in a swimming pool where they go to escape and it's a horrifying scenario. But by aggregating, by turning all those people dying in India into a population of 20 million, I think to some extent undercut a responsibility issue. And I think for me, Technologies of Humility means something that people like Juan as politicians understand that you have to have the empathy to put yourself in the position of the things that you're analyzing. And what my job is as somebody who is blessed with the power of language and a certain amount of skill in articulation, as well as a mathematicians and a lawyer's analytic cost of mind, is to keep reminding, is to keep reminding people we are humans, we are connected to other humans, we owe things to our future generations and to each other on the planet. And my contributions for as much time as I have left will be towards finding any opportunity to make that sort of set up questions about responsibility and what we owe to one another, come to the forefront in vivid ways.

- Well, the time has flown by, but the clock says we need to wrap it up. We apologize to anybody who's question we did not get to, but thank you to all of you who called in to listen to this last Wiener Conference Call of the spring semester. And of course a very special thank you to professor Jasanoff for this fascinating conversation. We look forward to having you all back on the line with us for more Wiener Conference Calls in the next academic year. Have a great day, everyone.

- Thank you again, Ralph, for inviting me and thanks to everybody for being there and for your questions.

June 9, 2024

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Exploring the Positive Impact of Technology on Society

In this rapidly evolving world, technology has become an inseparable part of our daily lives, shaping the way we live, work, and communicate. The positive impact of technology on society has been undeniable, revolutionizing various aspects of human existence. From enhancing communication to transforming industries, technology has been a catalyst for progress and development. This article delves into the myriad ways in which technology has positively influenced society, making our lives better and more efficient.

Table of Contents

Improved communication and connectivity .

The advent of technology has revolutionized communication, breaking down barriers of time and distance. With the rise of smartphones, social media platforms, and messaging apps, people can now connect instantly with friends and family across the globe. Businesses can also communicate effortlessly with their customers, improving customer service and building stronger relationships. The positive impact of technology on society is evident in the way it has fostered global connections, encouraging cultural exchange and understanding.

Advancements in Healthcare

Technology has played a pivotal role in transforming the healthcare industry, leading to better patient outcomes and improved quality of life. Medical advancements, such as telemedicine, electronic health records, and medical imaging technologies, have made healthcare more accessible and efficient. Patients can now receive consultations from specialists remotely, reducing the need for travel and saving time. Moreover, technological innovations in surgical procedures and medical devices have increased precision and minimized risks. The positive impact of technology on society’s health cannot be overstated, as it continues to save lives and alleviate suffering.

Education and Learning 

The positive impact of technology on society’s education sector has been profound. E-learning platforms, interactive educational software, and online courses have made learning more engaging and accessible to a broader audience. Students from different backgrounds can access educational resources and pursue knowledge at their own pace. Additionally, technology has empowered teachers with advanced tools to create dynamic and personalized learning experiences. This has led to improved learning outcomes and greater student engagement, fostering a generation of lifelong learners.

Enhancing Economic Growth 

Technology has been a driving force behind economic growth and prosperity. Automation and digitalization have streamlined business processes, leading to increased productivity and efficiency. E-commerce platforms have expanded market reach, enabling businesses to connect with consumers globally. Moreover, technology has facilitated the rise of startups and entrepreneurial ventures, stimulating innovation and job creation. The positive impact of technology on society’s economy is evident in its ability to create new markets and industries, generating opportunities for growth and development.

Environmental Sustainability 

Technology has emerged as a powerful tool in the fight against environmental challenges. From renewable energy solutions to smart grid systems, technology has enabled the efficient use of resources and reduced carbon emissions. IoT devices and sensor technologies have been employed to monitor environmental conditions, aiding in better conservation efforts. The positive impact of technology on society’s environment has led to increased awareness and sustainable practices, paving the way for a greener and more sustainable future.

Empowerment and Inclusivity 

Technology has democratized information and empowered individuals from all walks of life. Access to the internet and digital tools has opened up opportunities for marginalized communities and provided them with a platform to voice their concerns and aspirations. Social media has played a crucial role in mobilizing social movements and driving positive change. The positive impact of technology on society’s inclusivity is evident in the way it has bridged gaps and empowered individuals to participate in social and political discourse.

Transportation and Mobility  

Technological advancements have revolutionized transportation and mobility, making it faster, safer, and more convenient. The development of electric vehicles and autonomous driving technologies has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve road safety. Furthermore, ride-sharing and mobility-as-a-service platforms have enhanced transportation options, reducing the dependence on private vehicles. The positive impact of technology on society’s transportation sector is evident in the way it has transformed urban mobility and made transportation more sustainable.

The positive impact of technology on society cannot be overstated. From revolutionizing communication to enhancing healthcare, education , and economic growth, technology has brought about transformative changes in various spheres of human life. It has connected people across the globe, improved healthcare outcomes, made education more accessible, and stimulated economic development. Moreover, technology has contributed to environmental sustainability, empowering individuals and promoting inclusivity. As we move forward, it is essential to harness the potential of technology responsibly, ensuring that its positive impact on society continues to shape a brighter and more prosperous future for all.

Conclusion – the positive impact of technology on society

In conclusion, the positive impact of technology on society has been transformative and far-reaching. From communication to healthcare, education, the economy, the environment, and empowerment, technology has brought about positive changes that have improved our lives significantly. As we embrace technological innovations, it is crucial to continue exploring ways to leverage technology for the greater good, while also addressing potential challenges and concerns. By harnessing the power of technology responsibly and ethically, we can build a brighter and more inclusive future for all, where the positive impact of technology on society continues to shape a better world.

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Kate Billingsley

introduction

Technology is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry. Technology is a tool that can be used to solve real-world problems. The field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) “seeks to promote cross-disciplinary integration, civic engagement, and critical thinking” of concepts in the worlds of science and technology ( Harvard University, n.d.). As an aspect of everyday life, technology is continuously evolving to ensure that humanity can be productive, efficient, and follow the path of globalization . STS is a concept that encompasses countless fields of study. “Scientists, engineers, and medical professionals swim (as they must) in the details of their technical work: experiments, inventions, treatments and cures. “promotes cross-disciplinary integration, civic engagement, and critical thinking” It’s an intense and necessary focus” ( Stanford University , n.d.). On the opposite side of the spectrum is STS, which “draws attention to the water: the social, political, legal, economic, and cultural environment that shapes research and invention, supports or inhibits it — and is in turn shaped by evolving science and technology” ( Stanford University , n.d.). Technology is a crucial part of life that is constantly developing to fit the changing needs of society and aiding humanity in simplifying the demands of everyday life.

According to Oberdan (2010), science and technology share identical goals. “At first glance, they seem to provide a deep and thorough going division between the two but, as the discussion progresses, it will become clear that there are, indeed, areas of overlap, too” (Oberdan, 25). Philosophers believe that for a claim to be considered knowledge, it must first be justified, like a hypothesis, and true.  Italian astronomer, physicist, and engineer, Galileo Galilei , was incredibly familiar with the obstacles involved with proving something to be a fact or a theory within the scientific world. Galileo was condemned by the Roman Catholic church for his beliefs that contradicted existing church doctrine (Coyne, 2013). Galileo’s discoveries, although denounced by the church were incredibly innovative and progressive for their time, and are still seen as the basis for modern astronomy today. Nearly 300 years later, Galileo was eventually forgiven by the church, and to this day he is seen as one of the most well known and influential astronomers of all time. Many new innovations and ideas often receive push back before becoming revolutionary and universal practices.

INNOVATION IN TECHNOLOGY

Flash forward to modern time where we can see that innovation is happening even more around us. Look no further than what could be considered the culmination of modern technological innovation: the mobile phone. Cell phone technology has developed exponentially since the invention of the first mobile phone in 1973 ( Seward , 2013). Although there was a period for roughly 20 years in which cell phones were seen as unnecessary and somewhat impractical, as society’s needs changed and developed in the late 1990s, there was a large spike in consumer purchases of mobile phones. Now, cell phones are an entity that can be seen virtually anywhere, which is in large part due to their practicality. Cell phones, specifically smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone , have changed the way society uses technology. Smartphone technology has eliminated the need for people to have a separate cell phone, MP3 player, GPS, mobile video gaming systems, and more. Consumers may fail to realize how many aspects of modern technological advancement are involved in the use of their mobile phones. Cell phones use wifi to browse the internet, use google, access social media, and more. Although these technologies are beneficial, they also allow consumers locations to be traced and phone conversations to be recorded. Modern cell phone technologies collect data on consumers, and many people are unsure how this information is being used. Additionally, mobile phones come equipped with virus protection which brings the field of cybersecurity into smartphone usage. The technological advances that have been made in the market for mobile phones have been targeted towards the changing needs of consumers and society. As proven by the rise in cell phones, with advancements in the field of STS comes new unforeseen obstacles and ethical dilemmas.

​Technology is changing the way we live in this world. Innovations in the scientific world are becoming increasingly more advanced to help conserve earth’s resources and aid in the reduction of pollutants . Transportation is a field that has changed greatly in recent years due to modernization in science and technology, as well as an increased awareness of environmental concerns. The transportation industry continues to be a large producer of pollution

due to emissions from cars, trains, and other modes of transportation. As a result, cars have changed a great deal in recent years. A frontrunner in creating environmentally friendly luxury cars is Tesla, lead by CEO Elon Musk. Although nearly every brand of car has an electric option that either runs completely gas free, or uses significantly less fuel than standard cars, Tesla has taken this one step further and created a zero emissions vehicle. However, some believe that Tesla has taken their innovations in the transportation market a bit too far, specifically with their release of driverless cars.

“The recent reset of expectations on driverless cars is a leading indicator for other types of AI-enabled systems as well,” says David A. Mindell,  professor of aeronautics and astronautics, and the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing at MIT. “These technologies hold great promise, but it takes time to understand the optimal combination of people and machines. And the timing of adoption is crucial for understanding the impact on workers” ( Dizikes , 2019).

As the earth becomes more and more polluted, consumers are seeking to find new ways to cut down on their negative impacts on the earth. Eco-friendly cars are a simple yet effective way in which consumers can cut back on their pollution within their everyday lives.

THE INTERSECTION OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

The way in which energy is generated has changed greatly to benefit consumers and the environment. Energy production has followed a rather linear path over time, and is a prime example of how new innovations stem from old technologies. In the early 1800s, the steam engine acted as the main form of creating energy. It wasn’t until the mid-late 1800s that the combustion engine was invented. This invention was beneficial because it was more efficient than its predecessor, and became a form of energy that was streamlined to be used in countless applications. As time has progressed, this linear path of innovation has continued. As new energy creating technologies have emerged, machinery that was once seen as efficient and effective have been phased out. Today, largely due to the increased demand for clean energy sources, the linear path has split and consumers are faced with numerous options for clean, environmentally friendly energy sources. Over time, scientists and engineers have come to realize that these forms of energy pollute and damage the earth. Solar power, a modern form of clean energy, was once seen as an expensive and impractical way of turning the sun’s energy into usable energy. Now, it is common to see newly built homes with solar panels already built in. Since technology develops to fit the needs of society, scientists have worked to improve solar panels to make them cheaper and easier to access. A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously, which is more than 10,000 times of the world’s total energy use ( Chandler , 2011). This information may seem staggering, but is crucial in understanding the importance, as well as the large influence that modern forms of energy can have on society.

Technology has become a crucial part of our society. Without technological advancements, so much of our everyday lives would be drastically different. As technology develops, it strives to fulfill the changing needs of society. Technology progresses as society evolves. That being said, progress comes at a price. This price is different for each person, and varies based on how much people value technological and scientific advancements in their own lives. Thomas Parke Hughes’s Networks of Power “compared how electric power systems developed in America, England, and Germany, showing that they required not only electrical but social ‘engineering’ to create the necessary legal frameworks, financing, standards, political support, and organizational designs” ( Stanford University ). In other words, the scientific invention and production of a new technology does not ensure its success. Technology’s success is highly dependent on society’s acceptance or rejection of a product, as well as whether or not any path dependence is involved. Changing technologies benefit consumers in countless aspects of their lives including in the workforce, in communications, in the use of natural resources, and so much more. These innovations across numerous different markets aid society by making it easier to complete certain tasks. Innovation will never end; rather, it will continue to develop at increasing rates as science and technological fields becomes more and more cutting edge.

Chapter Questions

• True or False: Improvements in science and technology always benefit society
• Multiple Choice : Technology is: A.   The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry B.  Tools and machines that may be used to solve real-world problems C.   Something that does not change D.   Both A and B
• Short Answer: Discuss ways in which technological progression over time is related and how this relationship has led to the creation of new innovation.

Chandler, D. (2011). Shining brightly: Vast amounts of solar energy radiate to the Earth constantly, but tapping that energy cost-effectively remains a challenge.  MIT News. http://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026 

Coyne, SJ, G. V. (2013). Science meets biblical exegesis in the Galileo affair.  Zygon® ,  48 (1), 221-229. https://doi-org.libproxy.clemson.edu/10.1111/j.1467-9744.2012.01324.x 

Dizikes, P., & MIT News Office. (2019). MIT report examines how to make technology work for society. http://news.mit.edu/2019/work-future-report-technology-jobs-society-0904

Florez, D., García-Duque, C. E., & Osorio, J. C. (2019). Is technology (still) applied science? Technology in Society.  Technology in Society, 59.   doi: 10.1016/j.techsoc.2019.101193

Groce, J. E., Farrelly, M. A., Jorgensen, B. S., & Cook, C. N. (2019). Using social‐network research to improve outcomes in natural resource management. Conservation biology , 33 (1), 53-65. https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cobi.13127

Harvard University. (n.d.) What is STS? .  http://sts.hks.harvard.edu/about/whatissts.html .

Union of Concerned Scientists. (2018). How Do Battery Electric Cars Work?   https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/how-do-battery-electric-cars-work .

Oberdan, T. (2010). Science, Technology, and the Texture of Our Lives. Tavenner Publishing Company.

Seward, Z. M. (2013). The First Mobile Phone Call Was Made 40 Years Ago Today . The Atlantic.   https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/the-first- mobile-phone-call-was-made-40-years-ago-today/274611/ .

Stanford University. (n.d.). What is the Study of STS? . https://sts.stanford.edu/about/what-study-sts .

Wei, R., & Lo, V.-H. (2006). Staying connected while on the move: Cell phone use and social connectedness. New Media & Society, 8 (1), 53–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444806059870

Winston, B. (2006). Media Technology and Society: A History From the Telegraph to the Internet . London: Routledge.

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Building bridges between science and society for a better future. | Nadine Bongaerts | TEDxSaclay

“Tesla Model 3 Monaco”  is licensed under  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

To the extent possible under law, Kate Billingsley has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Science, Technology, & Society: A Student-Led Exploration , except where otherwise noted.

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17 experts share technologies making a positive impact on society.

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In the realm of science fiction, there are plenty of stories focused on technology that ends up having a sinister effect on humankind. And as technology continues to play a greater role in our work and personal lives, cautionary tales have arisen that remind us that even tools created with the best intentions can cause unexpected problems.

However, there’s no doubt technology has also added significant improvements in the lives of people around the globe, including recent, rapidly deployed health, workplace and commerce technologies. Below, experts from Forbes Technology Council share their selections for technologies that have had a truly positive impact on the greater good.

1. Home Fitness Tech

The pandemic has caused an entire cottage industry to spring up around the concept of the home gym. Many startups have launched innovative new products in the digital gym arena that focus on ease of use and space-saving design. Artificial intelligence has added features to these products that bring all the benefits of a personal trainer without having to step out of your home. - Greg Bhatia , ShoreWise Consulting

The world has been reshaped by technology, and nothing is more due for an update than the current educational system. This era of hyperconnectivity is allowing educators to tap into the digital era and adopt new technologies to help students reach their full potential. Edtech is having a truly positive impact on the greater good by democratizing access to education. - Julian Torres , Ontop

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3. AI-Powered Healthcare

Artificial intelligence applied to healthcare has already been a game-changer. AI can be applied throughout the entire patient journey, including monitoring individual health through the use of wearable devices, using devices that provide alerts for specific events and supporting doctors and patients with virtual assistants. The benefits will be even more evident as this technology advances. - Antonio Giarrusso , Userbot

4. Mental Health Apps

Mental health and resilience are critical elements of success and have a major impact on all aspects of our life. Meditation and wellness apps have become a lifeline in the age of remote work and hyperproductivity. They’re not only making an impact on people's performance at work but also on their health and happiness at home. - Joanna Riley , Censia Talent Intelligence

5. Tech That Promotes Inclusivity

Using augmented intelligence for inclusion purposes—such as voice-assisted devices to help people with certain disabilities and improve quality of life—can be positively transformational if made widely accessible. Harvesting open-source data and intelligence to model the environmental impact (that is, hidden costs) of the digital age is another emerging application of technology that could lead to significant global benefits. - Simone Steel , Nationwide Building Society

6. Online Learning Platforms

Online learning platforms will have a tremendous effect on global society. Massive open online course companies not only make world-class education attainable for people in developed nations; even more impacted are the citizens of developing nations, who have limited access to leading academic institutions. The democratization of education could lead to rapid progress in global innovation and advance humanity as a whole. - Mischa Steiner , Awesense, Inc.

7. Blockchain

When people hear “blockchain,” they think cryptocurrency—but really, blockchain technology is about transparency. Used right, it ensures trust and accountability. With so much attention shifting to environmental, social and governance issues there’s a rising need for companies to quantify their emissions and sustainability efforts so investors can verify their data. Because of this, blockchain is going to play a pivotal role in addressing climate change. - Chris Romer , Project Canary

8. Water Technology

Affordable water-treatment technologies such as solar water disinfection (SODIS) and ceramic and biosand water filtration help to provide drinkable water for many of the estimated 2.3 billion people living in water-scarce areas. - Thomas Jensen , Milestone Systems

9. Digital Payment Technology

Digital payment technologies such as Venmo and Square have revolutionized the way businesses and consumers send and receive money. These apps have enabled access for those without traditional payment methods. Amid the pandemic, businesses can continue serving customers safely and securely by pivoting to digital platforms, which also mitigate the environmental costs associated with paper-based methods. - Kali Durgampudi , Zelis

10. No-Code Technology

No-code technologies push the boundaries of product development and enable functions outside of engineering to make better, faster decisions at higher velocities. They expedite the application development process and make building products accessible to a broader set of professionals across an organization. This is accelerating innovation across the board, giving rise to a new crop of startups. - Rick Song , Persona

11. Genomics

Genomics is the science focused on the structure, function, evolution and mapping of genomes using genetic engineering technology. With ever-increasing computer processing speeds (think quantum), DNA sequencing and advanced analytics have led to amazing progress in agricultural production, greenhouse gas reduction and even the ability to “fix” human genetic conditions. - Frederick John , Diebold Nixdorf

12. 3D Printing

Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, is making many new and exciting things possible. The processes involved enable highly flexible development through manufacturing techniques that use less material while creating stronger, more durable products thanks to input from sophisticated AI programs. - Ron Cogburn , Exela Technologies

While working for the U.S. Government in the ’90s, I had the opportunity to work on the Global Positioning System (GPS) as it started to commercialize. The value of knowing, with high accuracy, where you are located anywhere on earth has transformed transportation and created huge efficiencies in everyday life. Today it’s a service expected on any smart device—and it’s a free service. That’s good! - John Walsh , Red Summit Global

14. Agricultural Technology

Intelligent and connected agricultural technology is of paramount importance when it comes to increasing farm production yields around the world. The capability to scout, farm, treat, collect and provide early detection and response to diseases and threats through automation and robotics will enable both increased production and wider distribution to remote and poorer locations, increasing life expectancy and minimizing starvation. - Spiros Liolis , Micro Focus

15. Messenger RNA

Messenger RNA (mRNA) technology has tremendous potential beyond the success of the Covid vaccines. The ability to quickly and cheaply produce individualized, “designer” medicine has been science fiction for decades. Now, it’s not only within reach but has also been proven to be effective on a global scale. We’re at the first wave of a revolution in medicine that will change all of our lives for the better. - Alexander Hill , Senseye

16. Solar Cells

Solar (PV) cells have created meaningful disruption across all industries, showing how renewable tech can change the fundamentals of our shared world. They’ve ushered in an era of awareness and innovation, creating a bankable and cost-effective industry that businesses and individuals can utilize while making the world a better place. Now, we can all be active participants in energy conservation. - Michael Anderson , Expeto

17. Collaboration Tools

During the recent shutdowns, collaboration tools—including FaceTime, WhatsApp, Signal, Microsoft Teams and, of course, Zoom—have helped us stay connected not only with colleagues, professionals and customers but also our families, grandparents and grandchildren, and friends all over the world. When we were bound to our homes, many of us alone, these tools helped keep us connected, social and, most surely, sane. - Juliette Rizkallah , A Cloud Guru

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Positive and Negative Impacts of Science and Technology on Society

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Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Impact of Technology — Positive And Negative Effects Of Technology On Society

Positive and Negative Effects of Technology on Society

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Published: Feb 8, 2022

Words: 939 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Works Cited:

• Ali, A. (2017). 10 Mysterious Places That Science Cannot Explain. ScoopWhoop.
• Amusing Planet. (n.d.). The Moeraki Boulders of New Zealand.
• Atlas Obscura. (n.d.). Magnetic Hill.
• Discovery. (n.d.). Blood Falls, Antarctica.
• Fernandez, M. (2020). Surtsey: The Birth of an Island. Geology In. https://www.geologyin.com/2020/06/surtsey-birth-of-island.html
• Fradkin, P. L. (2009). Daylight comes to Longyearbyen. Polar Research, 28(2), 338–347.
• National Park Service. (n.d.). Old Faithful. Yellowstone National Park.
• Owlcation. (2020). The Mystery of Moving Rocks on Racetrack Playa, Death Valley. Owlcation. https://owlcation.com/stem/The-Mystery-of-Moving-Rocks-on-Racetrack-Playa-Death-Valley
• Tours by Locals. (n.d.). Pamukkale: The Travertine Terraces of Turkey. https://www.toursbylocals.com/Pamukkale-Turkey-Tours
• Wojtal, A. Z. (2022). Eternal Flame Falls. Atlas Obscura.

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Impact of Science and Technology on the Natural Environment Essay

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Introduction

Nature in its broadest and original use refers to the biological, chemical and physical worlds whereas natural environment includes all things naturally found on earth, both animate and inanimate. Man is an integral part of nature and cannot live outside the natural environment as he depends on it for virtually everything. He “is constantly aware of the influence of nature in the form of the air he breathes, the water he drinks, the food he eats, and the flow of energy and information” (Spirkin, 3).

As such most of man’s activities has been and is in response to natural processes in an effort to get maximum utility from nature and enhance its productivity to meets the many human needs. In the human evolution, nature played a pivot role in either advancing it or impeding it. Spirkin further notes that man’s direct reliance to the nature lessens as the society develops and becomes more enlightened. For instance, the society ceases to entirely rely on land for their household food such that man can live on processed food.

The technological advancement results in man indirectly becoming more dependence on nature as most of his activities are focused on matter, energy and information. A classic example is the over reliance by the affluent populations on the electric power for lightning, cooking, refrigeration and for use in all other electric appliance. Yet electricity is produced from nature i.e. water, dynamo etc.

Positive impact of science and technology on nature

“Science and Technology have also been the greatest forces for beneficent social change in human history and will continue to be needed to solve the economic and social problems of the future.” (Baez, 1). Man has not only colonised the habitable part of natural environment, earth, but he has also transformed it over the years. This has resulted in the current natural environment which is due to a history of numerous action and reactionary outputs of man-nature relationship.

The green and industrial revolutions were big milestones in the human development as man could then have his needs better met by nature, without having to gather or hunt. Since that time man has innovatively come up with better ways of enhancing productivity of the land and reducing waste of natural resource.

This has been occasioned by significant scientific and technological strides in biological, physical and chemical fields. As such man’s dominion over nature has amplified significantly; thus more species have emerged while others have vanished, sophisticated structures are built from natural materials like stones, new substances made from existing chemical elements, effective drugs made from naturally occurring herbs, value addition of agricultural products etc.

The acceleration of economic development in the industrialising countries as a result of science and technology has been enormous. Of major importance is the contribution of agricultural technology to food security of developing nations of the world.

Through crop breeding its now possible to develop high breed varieties of crops with superior characteristics to the original varieties, such as;

• early maturing crops which grow fast before the adverse weather conditions set in, as well as outgrowing weeds which would compete with the crop for nutrients,
• high yielding plants that produce more than original varieties in the same conditions,
• drought resistance, a trait that enables the crop to survive harsh weather conditions without significant decrease in yield, and
• Disease and pest resistance, which means the crop is not susceptible to pest and disease infestation, therefore the harvest will be plenty and of good quality.

The contribution of technology to the communication industry has resulted in significant economic and social gains. Computer evolution has played a major part in the ushering in of the information age, where access to wide range of information has been eased.

The world has been transformed into a global village where people from different regions of the world can communicate freely and clearly, exchanging ideas either through: internet, cell phones, faxes, etc. The wide accessibility of information has lead to a more enlightened society, organized institutions and firms, ease of doing business, as well as consumer knowledge as he gets information about various products and goods.

Education institutions have not been left behind. More than ever before e-learning has gained popularity, with a majority of tertiary students opting for this module. Scholars have been able to post their research articles to the internet for public to easily and cheaply access. Further still institutions have also cut down the cost of managing hard copy libraries.

Negative impacts of science and technology

Technological progress has also had some drastic impact on the environment, which is threatening the natural survival of fauna and flora in the ecosystem. The World watch Institute puts it that “Our generation is the first to be faced with decisions that will determine whether the earth our children inherit will be habitable (Brown et al, 256).

Unless man is cautionary on his degradation actions in exploitation of natural resources the environment will remain under siege. The long term effect is even more disastrous as it poses a danger to the survival of man himself. Industrialisation has resulted in greenhouse effect that is characterised by significant increase in the atmospheric temperature. It is caused by increase of greenhouse gases (water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and ozone), in the atmosphere.

These gases absorb and produce thermal infra red radiations – ones responsible for increased temperature. The water vapour account for the greatest percentage of green house effect but its concentration in the atmosphere is not directly affected significantly by man’s activity.

However, according to Clausius-Clapeyron theory, increase in atmospheric temperature results in more water being held in the air. Methane has a much stronger greenhouse effect than even carbon dioxide but its concentration in the atmosphere is small therefore, its overall contribution is little as well. Combustion of fossil fuels resulting in emissions of carbon dioxide is a major human activity that causes significant effect of the environment.

Carbon dioxide is emitted through either burning of coal to produce electricity or combustion of petroleum products mainly used in motor transport. It is these carbon dioxide emissions that are the biggest cause of global warming and it is the global warming which will potentially change the world into a hostile and inhabitable environment. The second major challenge is the genetic engineering. This refers to the deliberate alteration of the genetic composition of an organism from its natural being to a more improved one.

This technology has been adopted and it’s being employed in many parts of the world, especially in the field of agriculture and medicine. There has been lots of controversy on the whether to allow genetic modification of food crops and animals or not. While it is evidenced that genetic modification would increase the yields and quality of the crops thereby alleviating the world’s food insecurity, its effect on human being is not very clear.

Some countries have fully adopted this technology, other have only allowed its partial adoption, while others have put in place stringent measures and policies against it. Human cloning has been another contentious issue amongst the scientists as well the general public. Many people are at crossroads of whether to accept therapeutic cloning or reproductive cloning; while others reject both on the ground that acceptance of the former form of cloning will open an opportunity for the later.

According to Association of Reproduction Health Professionals (7,8), reproductive cloning involves using of any human cell to get a clonal embryo which is then implanted into the uterus of a woman to create a living child- human clone, whereas therapeutic entails using of the clonal embryo to produce stem cells such as organs. In this case the clonal embryo is not implanted in the woman womb, but rather it is developed into an organ like liver, heart etc.

While therapeutic cloning is morally acceptable to some extent, reproductive cloning is controversial as it is likely to cause confusion amongst human beings. For instance, every child is expected to have two biological parents, but in the case of a clone child, he will only have a cell donor, who could either be a man or a woman, but not both. The fact that such a child naturally does not have either a biological father or a biological mother further weakens the family unit which is the fundamental unit of a society.

Intervention measures to mitigate the impact of science and technology on the natural environment

Global warming, an environment menace has become an important issue among the scientists and all interested in environmental conservation. Reduction of carbon dioxide emission is the key to the shielding of the ozone layer from depletion.

This can be achieved by employing the following three strategies: one is to increase the energy efficiency so that less carbon dioxide is emitted, second is the use of bio fuels instead of petroleum oils which emit carbon dioxide. Most of petroleum oils among other fuels are imported from Middle East and are shipped to other countries and transported in heavy tankers thus adding to the carbon dioxide levels. The shift from fossil fuels to bio fuels and the localization of production of fuel in the area it is used would greatly alleviate the problem.

The third important thing that man should consider is to adopt preservative methods of utilizing natural resources such as, forestation, agro-forestry and rehabilitation of water catchments areas among others. The trees and other vegetative plants will use up the carbon dioxide in the air to photosynthesise their food thus purifying the air and reducing carbon dioxide levels. This will not only conserve the environment but it will also enhance the productivity of the land.

Genetic Engineering is a breakthrough in the medicine science as it provides an opportunity to treat terminal conditions like cancer illness and it makes it easy to do organ transplants.

However the technological advancement in the field of genetics has had myriad of disadvantages, some of which include the change of the original species of the fauna and flora into genetically modified organisms. The future of the modified organisms is not very clear. The modified organisms lose vigour with time, thus modification of all species might result in their gradual extinction.

Human cloning is another contentious issue, with proponents arguing that therapeutic cloning be employed to solve several medical conditions while opponents viewing it as an opportunity for mankind to turn to reproductive cloning where he will start ‘improving’ human beings.

The result will be a society of hybrid human beings, lots of confusion as the clone will resemble the mother cell hence not easy to tell one clone being from another. Further still, the success of a clone organism from the clone procedure is not 100%, therefore lots of human clones will be killed or destroyed before a successful clone is arrived at.

Statement of other relevant facts and the consequences of each option

The shift from petroleum oils to bio fuels has had it own share of challenges. First, to meet the huge demand for fuel requirement, we would require lots of biomass such as agricultural vegetative matter. The farmers will produce more agricultural crops for bio fuel industries as opposed to food because the prices of bio fuel feedstock will be a premium.

As a result unprecedented famine and food insecurity would befall the society, defeating the very rationale of turning to bio fuels. Further the current bio fuel; ethanol absorbs water making it impossible to pipeline it as it will rust the pipes. This adds to its cost of transportation and carbon emission by the ship and the heavy trucks that transport it to various parts of the world.

Genetic modification of food crops and animals is the way to go if we are to meet the high demands of food requirements for the rapidly growing human population and solve the perennial food insecurity in the developing countries. Sticking to the convention methods pf plant breeding will limit farmers from getting the best quality and abundance yield in the shortest time.

Enforcement and implementation of policies that prohibit therapeutic human cloning closes all the windows for the infertile couples who through this technology would be able to get their own child. This technology enables patients with terminal illness such as cancer to be treated by organ transplants. The organ will be grown from stem cell and the patients will not have to wait for long to get an organ donor. Usually many patients die of their conditions while still waiting.

Statement of relevant moral principles

The effect of technological advancement has both positive and negative impact to the natural environment. If you consider the modern methods of agricultural production, they will lead to more food of high quality but will have adverse effect on the environment. Nuclear weapons render better protection at the expense of the environment. With technology man’s power over nature has tremendously increased, and he is now exercising it to even his fellow mankind.

It is evidenced that man’s interference with the nature has resulted in many of the global challenges we are facing with today; economic downturn, global warming, and wars among others. “Environmental factors are among the main, if not the sole, factors shaping culture.” (Sobouti, 2) These factors determine the way people dress, their economic activities, their lifestyle in general and a people’s technological advancement among others.

Before adoption of a new technology it is of essence to analyse and assess its impact to the nature as well as the humanity. Technology should only be employed to the extent that it is in consistent with the moral laws of the society, if man has to maintain order on earth and reduce conflict with nature and fellow man. The indiscriminative use of science and technology, without considering its impact is both careless and immoral.

Statement of the decision made

Historically, industrial revolution contributed greatly to the development of man. Given, the great economic gains realised from advancement of science and technology, we cannot totally disregard its use. It also follows that if the futurist challenges are to be solved, science and technology have the keys to the solutions.

However it should be employed in line with set development goals and moral ethics of the society. Governments should make policies and laws to regulate how science is being used. The policies and laws to regulate the use of science and technology should be publicised and the public thoroughly educated on them.

With the public understanding on what is legally acceptable, then the laws can be implemented and enforced. One of the mandates of every government is to protect its citizenry from exploitation of any form by individuals, private sector, civil servants, etc. Therefore, governments should neglect this important duty of protecting the citizens from technology abuse, as that will be an injustice.

Justification of the decision

Science and technology has opened many doors for manipulations of nature including mankind. It is only through comprehensive policies that the major risks of adoption of science and technology can be mitigated, whereas reaping the numerous gains of it. Nations and states should come together to formulate international policies on the same. Otherwise the negative technological impact from one region will affect the entire world as the earth is a single mass composed of many units.

The fight against human activities that cause climatic change requires concerted efforts from all persons; rich and poor, governments and non-governmental organisations, and nations and their leaders. Reverting climatic change is very costly compared to preventing it from happening. It is in the hands of every human being, me and you, to conserve and preserve the natural environment before the backlash of our exploitive activities hit on us. It is only through this that we can make earth a home fit for human habitation.

Works Cited

Association of Reproduction Health Professionals. “Human Cloning and Genetic Modification.”N.d. Web.

Baez, Albert V. “Teaching Youth about the Environmental Impact of Science and Technology.” N.d. Web.

Brown, Lester R. Worldwatch Institute “State of the World.” W.W. Norton: New York, USA, 2, 1989. Print.

Spirkin, Alexander, “ Dialectical Materialism .” N.d Web.

Sobouti, Yousef. The Academies Press, “ The Morality of Exact Sciences ,” Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences. N.d Web.

• The Case of Human Cloning at Kyunghee University
• Counterarguments to Human Cloning
• The Cloning Controversy
• Greenpeace Organization Efficiency and Reasonability
• Energy Resource Plan: Towards Sustainable Conservation of Energy
• Australian, Perth Water Supply Crisis
• Effects of Global Warming on Human Health
• At which Stage Can Centralized and Decentralized Cities Meet to Create a Design that is Essential in Maintaining a Healthy Mind and Body?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, February 20). Impact of Science and Technology on the Natural Environment. https://ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-science-and-technology-on-the-natural-environment/

"Impact of Science and Technology on the Natural Environment." IvyPanda , 20 Feb. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-science-and-technology-on-the-natural-environment/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Impact of Science and Technology on the Natural Environment'. 20 February.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Impact of Science and Technology on the Natural Environment." February 20, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-science-and-technology-on-the-natural-environment/.

1. IvyPanda . "Impact of Science and Technology on the Natural Environment." February 20, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-science-and-technology-on-the-natural-environment/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Impact of Science and Technology on the Natural Environment." February 20, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/impact-of-science-and-technology-on-the-natural-environment/.

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