Demanding More From Technology: Technology for Society Project Seeks Answers
Professor Todd Pittinsky of the Department of Technology and Society in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University (SBU) has launched the Technology for Society project. The goal of this multidisciplinary effort is to demand more from the explosion of new technology.
“We need to ask not what technology can do,” says Pittinsky, “but what it can do for us.” The conferences and books that make up the project will marshal the breadth, depth, and rigor of academic scholarship to make sure that technology will not just amaze and revolutionize society, but will also serve our most worthy desires for safety, health, well-being, companionship, community, peace, and justice.
The project was specifically named Technology for Society by Pittinsky because technology should be for society, as opposed to existing within society.
“This will not be one of the many conferences concerned with speed, efficiency, and business opportunities—important as those may be,” Pittinsky explains. “It will be concerned with how technology can help us be healthier, happier, wiser, and kinder.”
Pittinsky acknowledges that “the Technology Revolution is a mixed bag of marvels and aggravations.” For example, although cell phones save lives, their presence is not always helpful. Pew estimates that 67 percent of US cell owners keep checking even when the phone isn’t ringing and 44 percent have slept with their phone next to their beds to make sure they didn’t miss anything.
“One might argue that it’s the users who are out of control, not their technology,” observes Pittinsky. “But the premise of the project is that we can design technology to serve us better, to make that onrush more encouraging than daunting.”
So far, Pittinsky observes, the Technology Revolution has been largely guided by business and military interests. Of course, individual brilliance and ambition are central, but they are typically channeled into business or defense. “Twitter,” Pittinsky notes, “became a commercial enterprise, not a public utility.”
As a society, we find ourselves playing catch-up, especially when a successful (defined as profitable in most cases) new technology bumps up against something that deeply matters to us, such as our pride, our privacy, our morals, or our very livelihoods.
Starting in May 2016, as part of this project, colleagues from around the world will gather annually at SBU for a day of interdisciplinary research presentations, discussions, and plenty of opportunities to share ideas. Although each conference will have a topic, such as “Technology for Compassionate Healthcare” or “Dying in a Digital World,” year to year the approach will be the same.
“First,” explains Pittinsky, “we will ask ourselves what is the greatest good we seek. What do we want to improve most about our collective human life? Then we will ask how technology can help us have it. Never mind how many terabits can be processed per second. What can technology do to give us the most important things in life? Love, friendship, and community. Long life and good health. Peace and security. A safe and healthy environment. Freedom and justice.”
“It is a tall order,” says Pittinsky with a smile. “Much will be asked of the participants on behalf of all of us. They will be asked to set an example of thinking rigorously and productively about technological innovation, not for its own sake or for business or defense purposes, but to make life fundamentally better. They will be asked to apply their expertise to create roadmaps—however preliminary—for the technologists. They will be asked to collectively apply their interdisciplinary casts of mind to the whirlwind of emerging technologies, constant human values, and scientific method in order to stimulate not just radical change, but radical positive change.”
Each year’s conference will result in a volume of the Technology for Society series which Professor Pittinsky is developing in collaboration with Oxford University Press. Volumes currently under consideration include Child Development in a Digital World, Dying in a Digital World, Religion in a Digital World,Technology for Compassionate Healthcare and Drones in Society. Contributors will be chosen for their originality, rigor, and guidance in making wise, practical, and compassionate contributions to the future of humanity.
To build on the the momentum of these conferences, Professor Pittinsky is also putting together a new reference volume, The Handbook of Science, Technology and Society, in collaboration with Cambridge University Press. This will be a first-of-its-kind effort, merging the traditional topics and methodologies of Science and Technology Studies with those of the many new fields of technology studies emerging within the social sciences and humanities, such as education technology and virtual work.
Pittinsky is joined in the project by three Stony Brook doctoral students: Nicole Diamante, focusing on gender and technological change; Phuong Nguyen, specializing in technology, healthcare, and the intimae decisions that clinicians and patients must make; and Ahmed Belazi, examining how young adults seek help online versus face to face.
“As academics,” Professor Pittinsky stresses, “we can bring our specialized knowledge, research, logical discipline, and imaginations to bear on two questions: What do we want our lives and society to be like, and how can this geyser of technical innovation help us move towards those goals and not away from them? The Technology Revolution is going to happen with or without such guidance. But this way, we are not just playing whack-a-mole with our civilization.”