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John Weckert: Technology - Are we going in the right direction? (SES Webinar Series 3)


Technology: Are we going in the right direction?

Dr. John Weckert, Charles Sturt University

This talk will focus on four aspects of technology: technological optimism, the technological fix, the technological treadmill and the technological imperative. I will argue that we are overly optimistic about technology and this causes an overreliance on technology to fix problems, which in turn leads to the necessity of even more technology, the treadmill. This state of affairs gives us reason to consider carefully our development and use of technology and whether we are headed in the right direction. Using nanotechnology as an example, I will suggest that there are good grounds of reassessing the way we look at technology. Perhaps we need a new technological imperative.

Ethics and Social Media

Dr. Christopher Ryan Maboloc, Ateneo de Davao University

Social media in the next decade will determine how big tech firms will control politics and society, making states and governments less significant. The burning issues now include the right to privacy, surveillance and cyber-security, online profiling and hate speech. The question to ask is, should the future of human society be left to Facebook, Google or Twitter to decide? The threat to democracy is apparent with machine learning and algorithms influencing online behavior and our mobile devices taking over our lives in the technological world. It is for this reason that an ethics must identify a democratic direction and strategy for social media. Technological innovation is inevitable but the applications of modern devices must conform to good and acceptable ethical standards.

Date of Webinar: April 17, 2021 (Saturday), 2PM to 5PM. For the Zoom link, please email Dr. Roger Bayod at roger.bayod@gmail.com. This event is jointly sponsored by the Notre Dame of Marbel University and the Social Ethics Society.

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