Technologies are becoming increasingly complex and interrelated. Cars, aeroplanes, medical gadgets, financial transactions, and power systems all rely on more computer software than ever before, making them appear more difficult to understand and, in some situations, tougher to regulate. Government and corporate surveillance of individuals and information processing is heavily reliant on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, resulting in 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 be able to identify or recognise.
Bioengineering developments are creating new opportunities to address philosophical, political, and economic issues concerning human-natural connections. Furthermore, the cloud is being used to manage these huge and small devices and systems, resulting in control that is both remote and divorced from direct human or societal control. The study of trying to make technologies like artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things “explainable” has become its own field of inquiry since it is so difficult to understand how they work or who is to blame when anything goes wrong.
(Gunning & Aha 2019).
This increasing complexity makes it more difficult than ever—and more important than ever—for scholars to investigate how technological advancements are altering life around the world in both positive and negative ways, as well as what social, political, and legal tools are required to shape the development and design of technology in beneficial directions. This may appear to be an impossible task given the rapid pace of technological change and the belief that continued advancement is unavoidable, but many countries around the world are only now beginning to take significant steps towards regulating computer technologies and are still in the process of radically rethinking the rules governing global data flows and technology exchange across borders.
These are exciting times not only for technological advancement, but also for technology policy—our technologies may be more complex and complicated than ever before, but so are our understandings of how to best leverage, protect, and even constrain them. The structures of technological systems are largely determined by government and institutional policies, and those structures have far-reaching implications for social organisation and agency, ranging from open source, distributed, and decentralised systems to tightly controlled and closed systems structured according to stricter and more hierarchical models. And, just as our understanding of technology governance evolves in novel and intriguing ways, so does our understanding of the social, cultural, environmental, and political elements of emerging technologies.
Promises and Pitfalls of Technology.
Technology has the potential to inspire immense optimism. It has the potential to help tackle some of our society’s most pressing concerns, such as climate change, starvation, and disease. Technology is a critical economic engine for people who believe in the power of innovation and the promise of creative destruction to accelerate economic progress and improve quality of life. However, technology can also be used to instill fear and oppression by embedding biases in automated decision-making systems.
Information-processing algorithms, increasing economic and social inequities inside and between countries to unprecedented levels, or developing new weaponry and assault vectors unlike anything we’ve seen before. Scholars have even argued 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 risky, view that larger-scale, more complex technological systems were a semiautonomous form of progress in and of themselves (Marx 2010).
More recently, technologists have strongly criticised what they see as a movement of new Luddites, persons who want to restrict technological growth and turn back the clock on innovation in order to mitigate the societal effects of technological change (Marlowe 1970).
At the heart of debates over new technologies and their resulting global changes are frequently two opposing visions of technology: one that is fundamentally optimistic, believing that humans use it as a tool to achieve greater goals, and one that is fundamentally pessimistic, believing that technological systems have progressed beyond our control. Technology philosophers have argued that none of these perspectives is entirely accurate, and that a solely optimistic or pessimistic view of technology fails to convey the nuances and complexities of our relationship with technology.
Politics and Privacy:
Nations around the world have chosen quite varied methods to controlling emerging technologies, as well as adopting a variety of various technologies in order to achieve more modern governance structures and processes (Braman 2009). In Europe, the precautionary principle has guided considerably more anticipatory regulation, with the goal of addressing the risks posed by technologies before they are fully realised. For example, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation focusses 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 only to address existing security and privacy threats, such as data breaches, but also to protect against future developments and uses of that data for artificial intelligence.
