Technology: dilemmas, ethics, and communities

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to develop a catalogue of technology enabled sociological transformation in areas of politics, public administration, social and power relations, both intended and inadvertent. The thesis limits its scope to the latest manifestations of the technological epoch i.e. Artificial Intelligence & ICT. The thesis progresses as a compendium of three interrelated papers. The first paper examines the power and knowledge displacements created by algorithms through literature review. The salient findings are the purported efficiency of algorithms is often a make belief because during the development process, the correctness of algorithms is judged by proximity of its predictions to a preconceived normal. Similarly, algorithms constrain social discourses within their logics instead of expanding the scope of debate by utilization of better computational capacity. The second papers grapples with the essential normative question of justice and fairness in current climate where different permutations and combinations of human and machine agencies are increasingly hybridizing. The paper develops a taxonomy of machine agency and utilized John Rawls theory of justice to examine how conditions of fairness can be met for each hybrid technological agency. The third paper examines the role of ICT in processes of social and civil capital formation by utilizing case of Burmese civil resistance against Tatmadaw. The important findings are that ICT does evolve the repertoire of techniques both for civil activists but also expands the range of suppressive techniques available to repressive regimes. Important takeaways are that technology is not a mere instrument of human intentionality and given its tremendous scaling capabilities, it can strategically alter the power and social relations between various groups by augmenting or curtailing the existing delicate balance. The question, therefore, what transformations we want to take place, depends on challenging the techno-optimist and techno-fatalist view points by examining the impacts of technologies.