Social implications of technology: Introductory words

This special issue of Health and Technology is a tribute to the life and work of Lodewijk Bos. Dr. Bos was especially interested in this topic and served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of this Journal together with Luis Kun. The importance of technology’s impact on society has previously been considered (see for exampleMarcuse [1]). At the center of the social implications of technology are humans – it is humans who make the technology and humans who benefit, or are harmed, by it. That is not to say that other species do, or do not, benefit from, or are harmed by, human technologies, just that they are not contributors to what we term technology. Technology, per se, is amoral, apolitical and irreligious. It is neither capable of doing good nor doing evil. Only human use of technology for good or evil is possible. Human use of technology for good is laudable. The capacity, however, for humans to use technology for evil is frightening; and yet it appears daily on our information delivery systems. Perhaps by looking at one technology that has been developed over time we can see the possible ramifications of the social impact of technology on human behavior. Let us take the simple remote control as an example. In 1950, the Zenith Radio Corporation introduced the BLazy Bones^ remote to control the television by wire. This was an attempt by humans to control a device without having to stand up, walk over to the set to change the channel and then walk back to the comfort of a nice chair or sofa. I imagine the wire could be annoying and served as impetus for the invention of the wireless remote by Eugene Polley in 1955 [2]. The development of the modern remote involved many turns and twists of technologies – mechanical, electrical, ultrasound, light, infrared, and now Bluetooth. The desire of humans to control objects at a distance wirelessly is satisfied by this technology. To the average person, however, the mechanisms of this action-at-adistance is no more understood than the wand action by Harry Potter or his magical friends and enemies. In fact, understanding the myriad complexities of modern devices can be daunting even for many highly educated people, including those in the sciences and engineering. Interacting with modern technology can be a mystical and magical affair. It is cliche for parents to need to ask their children to program their remotes. Indeed, televisions are not the only objects we wish to control. Consider garage doors, gas fireplaces, fans, video games, computers, robots, drones, etc.; all need to be controlled remotely. We do not even need to be located physically near the controlled devices; now we can control our home appliances, lights and locks far from our home from the other side of the world with our smart phones. These are the toys of our modern society. It is not too difficult to go from the modern remote control to driverless automobiles and the goal of eliminating many of the estimated 1.24 million deaths worldwide in the year due to road accidents (data from 2010) [3]. All of us reading this are affected by technology every day, and yet about 2.4 billion people on Earth do not have access to toilets [4]. In which of C.P. Snow’s two cultures do these folks belong [5]? Snow referred to the growing gap emerging between the culture of Science and the culture of the Humanities. Although both groups are considered highly educated, those in the humanities would scoff at scientists who did not know about Shakespeare and scientists would scorn humanists who did not understand the laws of thermodynamics. I do not think This article is part of the Topical Collection on Social Implications of Technologies