TECH THINKERS
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In her academic work Jenny Bulstrode researches the history of industrial technology and science, with a particular interest in materials and cross-cultural encounters. Her projects include a study of what the Industrial Revolution in Britain owed to metallurgy in West Africa; she has researched the use of glass balance-springs in 19th-century timepieces; in 2020 she was awarded a Maurice Daumas Prize for the latter study, undertaken in collaboration with the British Museum in London. As a historian at the Royal Institution, she is developing the Centre for Science and Culture and its associated Ri Freer Prize Fellowships for postgraduate research. In the course of her PhD, completed in 2019 at the University of Cambridge, she worked on a project to reverse-engineer bronzes recently attributed to Michelangelo.
Benedict Evans is an independent technology analyst with a huge following, and he talks about how he thinks about whether a technology might end up being just a niche product or something that everybody uses. We also discuss some hot-button tech topics of today, including crypto, Web3, and the impact of regulation on technology.
Then I worked doing various strategy roles in media and telecoms companies. Worked for a boutique consultancy in London for a few years. And then went to Andreessen Horowitz at the beginning of 2014, which is a big Silicon Valley venture firm with, now, $20 billion or something under management. And was there until the end of 2019 working at software companies and internet companies and technology startups of various kinds.
Benedict Evans is an independent commentator on tech. Michael Chui is a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, where Janet Bush is an executive editor.
Such a framework would need to fundamentally shift how we develop and deploy new technologies. It would have to revamp existing processes. Any framework should reflect that this is a team effort, not just the job of engineers and managers: It should cut across disciplines. It should open doors to new ways of thinking about the challenges. The goal here is to describe a framework that can do these things.
Consider, for instance, the development of a VR training tool that immerses the user in a difficult or dramatic emergency response situation. As the technology evolves, VR simulations are becoming so realistic that the possibility of actual trauma from a virtual experience might need to be addressed. The team would want to have a psychologist involved, working side by side with the software engineers, to tap into the body of knowledge about what can cause trauma or how it might be identified and addressed.
The tendency is to think of tech ethics in the context of the issues that have already surfaced, such as discriminatory bias in social media marketing or talent acquisition systems. But this is a flawed way of thinking, because it can make us stop short of seeing other, potentially far greater, ethical risks, and it fails to consider the nuances that cut across organizations, industries, customers, and products.
It can also be clarifying to ask, early on, who would be accountable if an organization has to answer for the unintended or negative consequences of its new technology. Accountability should be considered when documenting the approach to potential impacts during the strategic planning process.
When a company is called to account for the technology it developed or deployed, someone could end up testifying to Congress, appearing in court or answering questions from the media. Will that person be the CEO or the CIO, a data scientist, a founder, or somebody else?
With a chief technology ethics officer in place, it remains important to involve specialists from a number of different disciplines, as discussed previously. These people may come from the fields of anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and other areas. Depending on the issues presented by a specific technology or application, it may be necessary to seek out people who bring knowledge of law, politics, regulation, education, or media.
CNN is honoring the visionaries whose ideas are shaping our future by highlighting 10 of our favorite thinkers in science and technology. These are people who have shoved conventional wisdom aside and are changing the world with their insights and innovations.
A mechanical engineer by trade, Dugan has unique experience with big technological innovations. Before coming to Motorola last year, she was director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the government arm that develops cutting-edge technology -- including the precursors to GPS and the Internet itself -- for the Pentagon.
Applying the DARPA model for churning out breakthrough innovations to a large corporation is no easy task. Her Motorola team hires technical project leads for two years only, creating a built-in timeline for getting results.
The South Africa-born serial entrepreneur, who first sold computer code for a video game when he was 12, is CEO and chief technical officer of the first company, the CEO of the second and chairman of the third.
It took Ng four years of prototyping the technology for Coursera in his living room before he thought it was good enough to launch. Soon, the site was offering classes in a variety of disciplines by top professors at Stanford, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and other leading universities.
Pahlka is spending a year as the deputy chief technology officer at the White House. She manages the presidential innovation fellows program, which brings in sharp minds from outside Washington to help improve the U.S. government's use of technology and make federal agencies smarter and more efficient. In this way, she brings a lean, startup-like style of thinking to intractable government bureaucracy.
Pahlka has experience straddling the worlds of technology and government. She also founded Code for America, a nonprofit organization that connects tech professionals with local governments to improve basic services.
CNN honors 10 young companies we think you'll be hearing a lot more about in the coming months. All these startups have the potential to shake up the consumer-tech landscape, help address global problems or just make our lives easier.
One strand of the work at the K12 Lab Network focuses on implementing school-based innovation. We ran 4 design sprints with Design Tech High School, resulting in a series of school improvements. The d.tech Playbook is a comprehensive guide to how d.tech used design sprints to realize their mission and suggestions for how other schools and organizations can do the same.
Technological thinking has played a role in science throughout history. During the ancient period mechanical devices served as ways to investigate mathematical and scientific ideas. In the medieval period the mechanical clock provided scientists with a new way to conceive of time. By the period of the Scientific Revolution the clock came to play an important role in the development of the mechanical philosophy and new devices, like the air pump served as the basis for the experimental philosophy. During that period technology also came to provide a new ideology for science. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the emergence of the engineering sciences played an important role in scientific thinking with thermodynamics serving as a new way to understand all scientific processes. Engineering concepts such as strain, elasticity, and vortex motion provided a way to think about electromagnetism and theories of the aether. The scientification of technology during the second half of the nineteenth century led to science-based industries which in turn led to industry-based science emerging from the industrial research laboratories. By the twentieth century the military-industrial-academic complex and the emergence of big science combined to create technoscience in which the distinctions between science and technology became blurred. The role of technological thinking in science culminated in the computer replacing the heat engine, and the clock before that, as a new model to understand scientific phenomena.
Neo-Luddism or new Luddism is a philosophy opposing many forms of modern technology.[1] The term Luddite is generally used as a pejorative applied to people showing technophobic leanings.[2] The name is based on the historical legacy of the English Luddites, who were active between 1811 and 1816.[1]
Neo-Luddism is a leaderless movement of non-affiliated groups who resist modern technologies and dictate a return of some or all technologies to a more primitive level.[3] Neo-Luddites are characterized by one or more of the following practices: passively abandoning the use of technology, harming those who produce technology harmful to the environment, advocating simple living, or sabotaging technology. The modern neo-Luddite movement has connections with the anti-globalization movement, anarcho-primitivism, radical environmentalism, and deep ecology.[3]
Neo-Luddism is based on the concern of the technological impact on individuals, their communities, and/or the environment,[4] Neo-Luddism stipulates the use of the precautionary principle for all new technologies, insisting that technologies be proven safe before adoption, due to the unknown effects that new technologies might inspire.
Neo-Luddism distinguishes itself from the philosophy originally associated with Luddism in that Luddism opposes all forms of technology, whereas neo-Luddism only opposes technology deemed destructive or otherwise detrimental to society.[5][6]
Neo-Luddism calls for slowing or stopping the development of new technologies. Neo-Luddism prescribes a lifestyle that abandons specific technologies, because of its belief that this is the best prospect for the future. As Robin and Webster put it, "a return to nature and what are imagined as more natural communities." In the place of industrial capitalism, neo-Luddism prescribes small-scale agricultural communities such as those of the Amish and the Chipko movement in Nepal and India[7] as models for the future. 2b1af7f3a8