Technological Advancement & Ethical Implication 

What I'd like to do  now is talk a bit about Technology Innovation in general and focus in on  generative AI and modern computer Technologies in the internet and the web.

Recognize that technology innovations have long had ethical impacts:

1st thing to note is that Technology Innovation have long had ethical impacts you don't have to look much further than the work of JRR  and his views on modernization ,  if you read Lord of the rings to see that this has been a topic that people have covered in many different contexts for a very long time.

Technology Innovations and their Ethical Implication



So let's take a look over the past 1,000 years and see what has had some of the biggest impacts of the World with respect to Technology Innovations and we'll see how each innovation that came out was a double-edged source with respect to ethics. 

Printing Press (15th Century ) :

In 15th century Gutenberg invents the printing press which has all kinds of wonderful consequences information was able to be disseminated . Much more broadly you didn't have to rely on little Stables of monks doing writing with a quill pen and illuminations ,  which of course were very creative but have many people had the opportunity to do that so it sort of the democratized the ability to communicate and provide information and disseminate information  that sounds like a good thing , however believe it or not. 




  1. Fake News:

One of the big problems with printing press was fake News. We tend to think that fake news is a recent thing but fake news has been going on for quite a long time and in fact if you want to amuse yourself there was a great Moon hoax  of  1825. Where someone claimed to have discovered creatures living on the moon and so they were able to disseminate that far and wide through the influence of printing and quote mass media back-in those days which was largely black and white print printed material. So this information got out and people got all worked up and thought you know the little on Mars were going to come down and invade. Other problems or opportunities depending on your perspective of this , is the ability to spread ideas that had great disruption on social order .

 If you are a student of History  and especially a student of modern Technology Innovation and the Industrial  Revolution and what spurred it one of the things that happened was the Protestant Reformation , which was largely disseminated through the printing press this is good old Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the wall and I think it was the Wittenberg church and they were able to get the word out again through the ability to print and disseminate the information , So we'll leave it as a discussion for the technology department and the historical department what the consequences of the Protestant Reformation.


Steam Engine ( 18th Century ):

After a couple hundred Years in 18th century Steam Engine was invented by Thomas Newcomen. Steam engine was like one of the key events that people used to Herald in the industrial revolution , the ability to power things through Steam was opposed to by hand or Ox cart or horses or whatever else they were using up to that point once again through a double-edged sword. So widespread use of steam engines increased coal consumption , if you go back and look at the history of places like London in that period of time they often had very gray skies there's a really interesting episode of the crown from one of the first couple seasons , where London is deluged with fog and people are dying from all the problems with Lungs and so on.


Obviously  that was contributing to air pollution and other environmental issues that to some extent continued to this day , there was also other issues which we should be aware of given where we are is, the unprecedented  un-leashing of economic growth , however not everybody benefited equally so some people the Robert Barons like our good namesake Cornelius Vanderbilt the Commodore ended up becoming incredibly wealthy and of course they were also somewhat philanthropic at least at some level , which was why we're here today at VAB University but not everybody benefited and there's a whole bunch of interesting things you can learn about people like Andrew Carnegie who also made a lot of his money with the railroad Cornelius Vanderbilt made a lot of money through the railroad 

Electricity ( 19th Century ):

After another 100 years  the invention and widespread distribution and dissemination of Electricity , wow what a gamechanger .I remember talking  to my parents and to my grandparents about how they use to learn , they would learn by either candle light or gas light at night because it would be dark not very good on the eyes. Electricity had lot of  great things to replace the use of open Flame as a lighting source , but it also has some downsides ,  so of course the conventional methods of generating electricity have been a big contributor to pollution . This remains a tricky issue everybody out there how loves their Electrical Vehicles , however those things have to get power from somewhere and ironically they often get power from coal or nuclear energy. 

Problems by Nuclear Energy:


The problem in Japan , where risk of accidents from nuclear power can have catastrophic consequences much larger consequence than an open flame burning down your house .So this can have a much bigger impact so again pros and cons double-edged sword .

                                                                                                                                                                      

         Computer & Internet/Web ( 20/21th Century ):
       
Now we're moving to modern days and now we're getting to topics that are nearer to our Collective Hearts which is Computers the Internet and the Web . What a great example of unleashing productivity many of us wouldn't be where we are today without these Technologies especially if you are a computer science major undoubtedly you're using computation in almost everything you do you're communicating probably to much with your mobile devices and all the things we do to entertain ourselves through social media infotainment and so on and so forth sounds pretty cool right , well there's a bunch of issues not the least of which is this ability to collect and store and analyze data on a massive scale has raised all kinds of  very serious concerns about privacy .
There's a great quote by Eric Schmidt:
"No relationship to me who says we know where you  are we , we know where you've been we know more or less what you're thinking about and he's not talking about Santa Claus"                                        Santa Claus knows if you've been bad bad and good and so on and so forth but GOOGLE has an amazing amount of information about you as do other companies that collect data Tik-Tok and  so on and that rise a lot of very significant issues and you can take a look here, I wrote a well cited article about five years ago that talks about Google data collection likewise going back to the Robber Baron era "The ability to leverage all this technology with Computing and internet and web is also not distributed evenly and this lead of course to the digital divide and we're going to talk about that a little bit more when we are getting into generative AI because there's both threats to create a digital Chasm with AI as well as a good opportunity a level the playing field and we'll talk about both of those things so some people benefit from this and some people don't .