[Music] foreign [Music] so let's start with a very fundamental question what role does technology play in social change and let's let's be self-critical let's ask if technology is really the most important thing out there and I invite you to please make make a list please take a pen and paper it's always good to have a pen and paper close by I've been watching stuffed and stuff like that and make a list of what is more important than technology please go ahead what is more important than technology well we need to eat still cannot eat computers
that that is very true shelters very important well for some uh more than less but hey there's some trade-offs there's certainly a degree of freedom in in the inter can be so that's a very important water jeez actually water should have come before the shelter right in clean water I mean clean water I mean how how many days are we going to make it health in general like the pandemic showed us the vaccine I mean that was more important security safety safety is also very important not going to make it very fine and and if
something happens hopefully there's somebody close by who can fix and hopefully not a lot of things happen I mean the thing with the safety if anybody ever lived in a war zone and I can attest to that too it's not I mean like what does technology actually oh education of course a friendship yeah of course and of course love all you need is love that's what they say right I mean many of us seem like we are married to our phone but that I hope I hope it's clear that is an evolutionary dead end right
that does that won't get us very far as a species just to be extremely clear if it just stays at the level of the phone right we then have other responsibilities as as a species so yes love is very like whoa and that was just by how quickly was that so why do we want to spend all these hours talking about technology of all these other things are are more important than technology like what are we doing here well let's think about it why does technology matter well with technology we can and hopefully will create
enough food for everybody it will help us to become more productive it will help us to to finally still the hunger all over the world and be also for the water and not we can also go more advanced during the pandemic we made this graph it shows you the trade-off between when people go to work or stay at home and when restaurants sign up for an online food delivery service and you can see a very nice trade-off right so the restaurant sign up this is a Latin American food delivery service in Latin America sign up
for the service when there were lockdowns and not everybody is a great cook I mean gotta be honest right so some of us really like I mean this has been going on for many weeks and and it's been very important technology helped us to get through that also in education for example so the pandemic started here in March 2020 schools get shut down this is this black line and then well took a nice break a two-month break but then what are we gonna do at home sitting on our hands without any school schools or colleges
and then you can see like boom how these countries in Latin America again how they signed up actually to Educational Services of another country this is an American a North American Educational Service online Educational Service and well like after a good two-month break started to study again online and some schools and some countries were shut down for for two years so technology helped us to keep a minimum going and we learned a lot about online education and the same for healthcare like talking about the covet pandemic here you can see like digital mapping digital tracing
helped us a lot to get over it especially before we we had a vaccine and safety being very honest not everybody is a great driver well really self-driving cars artificial intelligence if one car learns to drive really well just it's just copy paste right right Mouse buttons and all cars can it's inevitable that self-driving cars will become much better drivers than humans and AI will not go over the speed limit if you don't tell it to there is hopefully you know no volition in Ai and why should it go if it's that that's the speed
limit there will be no you know like why would we have a speed limit if we go over it so that is it it the promise is that the accumulative growth of driving knowledge will inevitably make our roads safer and way too many people lose their lives or or lose their biological abilities in in traffic accidents and of course talking about love yes yeah many many of us found their significant other online with their help of intelligent recommender engine so the idea here is that technology is a means to an end an information communication and
knowledge Technologies are also means to ends they are not the end in itself and that is actually a very old concept that the academic definition of of this concept what I'm trying to explain here is called technological determinism versus social construction what is this discussion about technological determinism versus the social construction of Technology well it says that technology itself is not inherently good nor bad technology doesn't have a predetermined outcome so while maybe a few decades ago we would say the internet is a tool for freedom and to Foster democracy well the oldest vision of
the information or knowledge Society actually comes from being a 1948 from and fictional author called George Orwell which in who in 1948 wrote a novel called 1984 where the big brother is watching you that's where that comes from and it was basically an informational dictatorship so we said well if you have observation techno surveillance technology you can build surveillance capitalism he said it's a mix between governments and industries which takes away all the privacy and base well quite some foresight we know now you know several decades later and so what is it now is the
internet tool for democracy or Freedom or is the internet a tool for informational dictatorship well the internet technology is neither good nor is it bad technology does not have a predetermined outcome think about a more traditional technology a hammer back when we were homo habilists the handyman sorry to distinguish ourselves from from from other animals because we started to use tools and we if we wanted to protect ourselves from the elements or also wanted to go hunting in a more sophisticated way we needed to use tools not that monkeys don't use no some sticks or
hammers but we really made a science out of it and art out of it using something akin to and Hammer to build ourselves something as akin to a shelter now once you have something similar to a hammer you can also do a lot of damage you can really damage and hurt also others of your peers with that it's also a weapon now that's not the fault of the hammer a hammer is just a tool and the internet is is just the internet so whenever somebody says the technology has or is has a property has something
then is something then that is technologically determinism that means the technology determines the outcome so if I say the internet is a tool for Freedom the internet is a tool for surveillance then that would be technological determinism and we need to reject technological determinism because it is not this or that and if you read the newspaper it's full of technological terms and also out of my mouth it sometimes comes out but technology doesn't actually have a property technology has agency so the internet can be used as a tool for democracy and equality the internet can
be used by humans as a tool for surveillance and you know the end of privacy it can be used so this is the social construction of Technology that's so it's it's it's it's very fine the reformulation but we have to be careful because it does sneak in and it's a really false friend to assume that it's the fault of technology to do this or to to be this or or that there you see how fine the lion is now it's also not that easy because you know guns are technology that are made to shoot something
life to to make life dead basically that's what I mean why would you have a gun or bombs are made to blow stuff up to destroy things and that's why you have bombs now they can be used for useful things I mean if you want to build a road or or you want to like you have to get over the mountain I mean it's it's useful but it's still like it's still there to destroy things so that's why they say technology is neither good nor bad nor is it neutral what a headache right so it
is true that social construction of Technology also says that it's not guns that kill things it's humans that kill things with a gun so that's also part of the social construction so but also that gun is made for so okay so there's a fine line but we won't go as deep into that what what is really important to me here is that we humans understand that we have a responsibility in it but that this responsibility is also a two-way road to use the words of Marshall mcluhan a communication scholar from from my discipline he is
attributed of saying we shape our tools and then our tools shape us so be careful what you bring into this world and accept the responsibility that we need to align this technology be it a hammer be it the internet or be it generative AI it's the same challenge of social construction of Technology
