Technology and Its Impact on Society

Technology and the Environment

• Internet-connected water sprinklers that check weather forecasts, saving water in California and other dry areas.
• Water conservation is a pressing issue in Jordan, being one of the poorest countries in water resources.

The Digital Divide

• Gap exists between levels of internet access and availability of technical tools.
• Prevents utilizing all minds to solve global problems.

Technology and Collaboration

• Web 2.0 allows easy contribution and facilitates connections.
• Cognitive surplus combines leisure time with tools to be creative.
• Crowdfunding allows projects to receive small donations from many people.

Artificial Intelligence

• AI systems perform tasks associated with human intelligence.
• Early AI goals focused on mimicking human thinking.
• Current goals emphasize intelligent systems that generate results without mimicking human thought processes.
• Major developments contributing to functional AI systems include Artificial Neural Networks, Big Data, Cloud Computing, and advancements in machine learning.

AI Systems and their Developments

• Expert systems, which mimic human experts, were among the first AI attempts.
• Rules-based systems were early expert systems that relied on preprogrammed algorithms.
• Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are modeled after the human brain's structure.
• Machine learning (ML) analyzes data patterns to make conclusions and adapt system actions.
• Deep learning (DL) is a subset of ML that allows systems to learn from mistakes, encompassing unsupervised learning.

AI in Different Industries

• Banking and finance utilize AI for fraud detection.
• Transportation industries apply AI in autopilots, autonomous vehicles, robots, and embodied agents.
• Education uses AI for personalized learning plans, grading speedup, plagiarism checkers, and dashboards.
• Law enforcement benefits from AI in crime solving, database searches, and computer forensics.
• Medicine utilizes AI for diagnosis, integration into patient information systems, prosthetic design, and implantable microchips for information transmission to doctors.
• Psychology uses AI in forms like "MACH" for automated conversation coaching and affective computing.

Ethics and Technology

• Ethics is the study of morals and moral choices.
• Laws are formal and written standards for everyone.
• Unethical behavior contravenes acceptable standards.
• Amoral behavior lacks a sense of right and wrong.
• Identifying personal ethics involves self-description, listing key principles, identifying external influences, considering why they apply, and preparing a statement of values.

Areas of Ethical Concern in Technology

• Intellectual property, protected by copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
• Privacy, a balance between control and information privacy.
• Social justice, including predictive policing and the release of secrets.
• Liability, with potential quality control issues in 3D printing.
• Censorship, including global differences in website blocking.
• Social activism, such as hacktivism for subversive use of computer networks, often manifesting as denial of service (DoS) attacks.
• Automated robotic machinery faces ethical dilemmas, such as navigating between sets of undesirable choices, especially in self-driving cars.