The rapid evolution in Information Technology (IT) over the past few years has been tremendous. The computer alone has progressed at a remarkable pace, and updates are continually occurring. Along this progress came the transformation of the virtual world through the Internet. It is a fairly recent concept that has profoundly affected our daily lives such in the cases of communication, commerce, elections etc.
Technology is more important than ever, deeply affecting culture, politics and society. Given all the time we spend with our gadgets and apps, it’s imperative here to understand the principles that determine how technology affects us. Having said this, there are things we need to understand about technology;
Technology is poorly documented and understood, while we’re still early enough in the computing revolution that many of its pioneers are still alive and working to create technology today, it’s common to find that tech history as recent as a few years ago has already been erased. People who learn to create tech can usually find out every intimate detail of how their favorite programming language or device was created, but it’s often near impossible to know why certain technologies flourished, or what happened to the ones that didn’t. That being said the historical view of the tech world can have serious consequences when today’s tech creators are unable to learn from those who came before them, even if they want to.
There is never just one single genius creator of technology, in reality, tech is always informed by the insights and values of the community where its creators are based, and nearly every breakthrough moment is preceded by years or decades of others trying to create similar products. Those lone geniuses that are portrayed in media are seldom from backgrounds as diverse as people in real communities, while media outlets may benefit from being able to give awards or recognition to individuals, or educational institutions may be motivated to build up the mythology of individuals in order to bask in their reflected glory, the real creation stories are complicated and involve many people.
Some big technological company today go as far as buying off other competitive companies in the market, getting lots of money from venture capital investors, making an interesting or useful product that transforms a big market and so on. Companies that follow this new model can grow much larger, much more quickly, than older companies that had to rely on revenue growth from paying customers. But these new companies also have much lower accountability to the markets they’re entering because they’re serving their investors’ short-term interests ahead of their users’ or community’s long-term interests. In recruiting or employing software engineers or hiring coders, they pump the vast majority of their investment money into doing this and retaining the programmers who’ll build their new tech platforms.
Technology is all about its functionalities, in reality, the choice of things like programming languages or toolkits can be subject to the particular codes or functionality of the application. Just as often, the process or methodology by which tech is created can follow trends that are in vogue. Technology creators most of the time tend towards originality, they can also afford to go back to what they have done before, but their choices are influenced by what is trending in the technological world.
Technology and ethical training, with explicit requirements for ethical education the level of familiarity with ethic concerns gives those fields a broad fluency in the concepts of ethics so they can have informed conversations. And more importantly, it ensures that those who want to do the right thing and do their jobs in an ethical way have a firm foundation to build on. There are still very few programs aimed at upgrading the ethical knowledge of those who are already in the workforce, nowadays education is largely focused on acquiring new technical skills rather than acquiring social ones. For technologists to continue to have the widespread support they currently enjoy today they have to come up with a plan of solving the ethical concerns associated with technology.
Technological companies should not take the public for granted, these days when tech companies or institution start exploiting their customers, they will be criticised by people or journalists who are against their actions. Technology opens up new challenges for society, lawmakers lag tremendously behind the state of the art when creating appropriate laws. Without the corrective force of journalistic and legislative accountability, tech companies often run as if they’re completely unregulated, and the consequences of that reality usually fall on those outside of tech. Perhaps, if we know that the biggest cost for the tech giants is attracting and hiring software engineers or programmers, we can encourage programmers to collectively advocate for ethical and social advances from their employers.
