Does the Technological Age Require Too Much Work?

We all know it's easier to take a selfie than to do math homework. Yet this age of rapid technological advances and big data requires close attention.

    But there is a temptation to blindly accept accelerated technological developments, because understanding the pros, and especially the cons, of vaccines, smartphones, and other scientific and engineering marvels is more difficult than doing math. It even is difficult for human subjects of a drug experiment to read, much less understand, things like the side effects they might develop.

     Blind acceptance is a major mistake, especially for kids around the world who have an aptitude and interest in asking questions to help them understand how things work and for kids who want to control what Wendell Wallach calls technology: A Dangerous Master.

     Even without reading Wallach's new book, parents, teachers, and young people can begin observing proposed and implemented new technological developments:

•  self-driving cars
• genetic engineering
• virtual reality
• 3D printers, some of which can create human tissue and bone 
• stem cells
• military robots
• drones
• nanomaterials

What are these gadgets and breakthroughs expected to do? How will they affect each of us? How will a complex sociotechnical system function successfully when it requires technological components to work together with people, institutions, environments, values, and existing social practices?

     Wallach points out how humans are responsible for making the correct responses when a piece of space junk is about to hit the International Space Station or when automated stock trading systems and safety controls for nuclear reactors fail. The trouble is: pressure to derive economic benefits from growth hormones or the desire for political, personal, and other payoffs can cause scientists and engineers to underestimate the probability of unanticipated events and even to have no idea of what the probability of something like an oil spill from drilling in the Arctic might be.

     Wallach stresses the necessity of creating a critical mass of informed citizens and scholars willing and able to raise concerns about technological developments, their impact on society, and the time needed to design adequate safety mechanisms. Informed young people are living at a time when they have opportunities to make their concerns known: in classrooms, at town meetings, through their social media networks, in contacts with political representatives, through call-in programs, in surveys and polls, by writing letters to editors, at science fairs, and by writing blogs.