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Technologies are becoming increasingly complicated and increasingly interconnected.
Cars, airplanes, medical devices, financial transactions, and electricity systems all rely on more
computer software than they ever have before, making them seem both harder to understand
and, in some cases, harder to control. Government and corporate surveillance of individuals and
information processing relies largely on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, and
therefore involves less human-to-human contact than ever before and more opportunities for
biases to be embedded and codified in our technological systems in ways we may not even be
able to identify or recognize. Bioengineering advances are opening up new terrain for
challenging philosophical, political, and economic questions regarding human-natural relations.
Additionally, the management of these large and small devices and systems is increasingly
done through the cloud, so that control over them is both very remote and removed from direct
human or social control. The study of how to make technologies like artificial intelligence or the
Internet of Things “explainable” has become its own area of research because it is so difficult to
understand how they work or what is at fault when something goes wrong (Gunning and Aha
2019).
This growing complexity makes it more difficult than ever—and more imperative than ever—for
scholars to probe how technological advancements are altering life around the world in both
positive and negative ways and what social, political, and legal tools are needed to help shape
the development and design of technology in beneficial directions. This can seem like an
impossible task in light of the rapid pace of technological change and the sense that its
continued advancement is inevitable, but many countries around the world are only just
beginning to take significant steps toward regulating computer technologies and are still in the
process of radically rethinking the rules governing global data flows and exchange of technology
across borders.
These are exciting times not just for technological development but also for technology policy—
our technologies may be more advanced and complicated than ever but so, too, are our
understandings of how they can best be leveraged, protected, and even constrained. The
structures of technological systems as determined largely by government and institutional
policies and those structures have tremendous implications for social organization and agency,
ranging from open source, open systems that are highly distributed and decentralized, to those
that are tightly controlled and closed, structured according to stricter and more hierarchical
models. And just as our understanding of the governance of technology is developing in new
and interesting ways, so, too, is our understanding of the social, cultural, environmental, and
political dimensions of emerging technologies. We are realizing both the challenges and the
importance of mapping out the full range of ways that technology is changing our society, what
we want those changes to look like, and what tools we have to try to influence and guide those
shifts.
Promises and Pitfalls of Technology

Technology can be a source of tremendous optimism. It can help overcome some of the
greatest challenges our society faces, including climate change, famine, and disease. For those
who believe in the power of innovation and the promise of creative destruction to advance
economic development and lead to better quality of life, technology is a vital economic driver
(Schumpeter 1942). But it can also be a tool of tremendous fear and oppression, embedding
biases in automated decision-making processes and information-processing algorithms,
exacerbating economic and social inequalities within and between countries to a staggering
degree, or creating new weapons and avenues for attack unlike any we have had to face in the
past. Scholars have even contended that the emergence of the term technology in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked a shift from viewing individual pieces of machinery
as a means to achieving political and social progress to the more dangerous, or hazardous,
view that larger-scale, more complex technological systems were a semiautonomous form of
progress in and of themselves (Marx 2010). More recently, technologists have sharply criticized
what they view as a wave of new Luddites, people intent on slowing the development of
technology and turning back the clock on innovation as a means of mitigating the societal
impacts of technological change (Marlowe 1970).

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Technologies are becoming increasingly complicated and increasingly interconnected.

Promises and Pitfalls of Technology

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