What does impact on humanity mean?
Tags: technology, machinelearning
Published: 2020-08-21 14:54:01

Impact on humanity is a broad term that cuts across various points of origin. I acknowledge that Humanity can also be the originator of impact. But I will solely focus on the context of technology and at its most essential, intelligence is just intelligence, whether artifact or animal. 

With the place of a form of computation, and as such, a transformation of information. The cornucopia of deeply personal information that resulted from the willful tethering of a huge portion of society to the internet has allowed us to pass immense explicit and implicit knowledge from human culture via human brains into digital form.  

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The impact of Tim Berners Lee’s internet and the DARPA funding has changed the entire future and the way we view the past in unquantifiable ways. This is one way to look at the impact and while it unleashed the plethora of human nature at a scale of influence beyond regular reach.

Here we can not only use it to operate with human-like competence but also produce further knowledge and behavior by means of machine-based computation.

This is an unprecedented impact that affects the wiring of the way we interact with the world.

However, while technological advances are already changing society at a faster pace than we realize, but at the same time, it is not as novel or unique in human experience as we are often led to imagine. 

Other artifactual entities, such as language and writing, corporations and governments, telecommunications, and oil, have previously extended our capacities, altered our economies, and disrupted our social order—generally though not universally for the better. 

The evidence assumption that we are on average better off for our progress is ironically perhaps the greatest hurdle we currently need to overcome: sustainable living and reversing the collapse of biodiversity.

AI and ICT more generally may well require radical innovations in the way we govern, and particularly in the way we raise revenue for redistribution. We are faced with transnational wealth transfers through business innovations that have outstripped our capacity to measure or even identify the level of income generated.

Further, this new currency of unknowable value is often personal data, and personal data gives those who hold it the immense power of prediction over the individuals it references.

But beyond the economic and governance challenges, we need to remember that technology allows us to first and foremost extend and enhance what it means to be human, and in particular our problem-solving capacities. 

David Lillienthal's T. V.A.: Democracy on the March, for example, found this promise in the phosphate fertilizers and electricity that technical progress was bringing to rural Americans during the 1940s. 

Three decades later Daniel Boorstin's The Republic of Technology extolled television for "its power to disband armies, to cashier presidents, to create a whole new democratic world-democratic in ways never before imagined, even in America." Scarcely a new invention comes along that someone doesn't proclaim it as the salvation of a free society.

It is no surprise to learn that technical systems of various kinds are deeply interwoven in the conditions of modern politics. The physical arrangements of industrial production, warfare, communications, and the like have fundamentally changed the exercise of power and the experience of citizenship. 

But to go beyond this obvious fact and to argue that certain technologies in themselves have political properties seems, at first glance, completely mistaken. 

We all know that people have politics; things do not. To discover either virtues or evils in aggregates of steel, plastic, transistors, integrated circuits, chemicals, and the like seems just plain wrong, a way of mystifying human artifice and of avoiding the true sources, the human sources of freedom and oppression, justice and injustice. 

Blaming the hardware appears even more foolish than blaming the victims when it comes to judging conditions of public life.
Hence, the stern advice commonly given those who flirt with the notion that technical artifacts have political qualities: What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded. 

This maxim, which in a number of variations is the central premise of a theory that can be called the social determinants of technology, has obvious wisdom. It serves as a needed corrective to those who focus uncritically upon such things as "the computer and its social impacts" but who fail to look behind technical devices to see the social circumstances of their development, deployment, and use. 

This view provides an antidote to naive technological determinism the idea that technology develops as the sole result of an internal dynamic and then, unmediated by any other influence, molds society to fit its patterns. 

Those who have not recognized the ways in which technologies are shaped by social and economic forces have not gotten very far.

Impact is a function of power and power finds expression through politico human interactions.