A few days back, I heard Jonathan Murray, Worldwide Technology Officer, Microsoft Corporation, who gave a lecture titled " Tech. society and the new society transformation", at Dubai School of Government ( www.dsg.ae). He spoke at length about the way the world is shaping up and how technological changes are transforming human effort.
Personally, i was reminded of my days at Engineering school, and Industrial Engineering lectures in particular, where we lived and breathed work measurement and efficiency.
The lecture focused largely on how our society has transformed from a labour intensive one to a service one in the last 200 years. Post industrial revolution society has struggled with the questions posed by replacement of human effort by machines. We continue to debate these issue even today, with recession, job lay-offs and the slowing down of economies world-wide.
Some of the major trends in technology transformation around us include increase in storage capacity, doubling of processing speeds as well as reduction in power usage of processors. These are having a big impact on the way the service industry is shaping up.
The moral and ethical components of this transformation which will lead to wider distributed storage platforms including 'cloud platforms' include issues of liability and responsibility. for example, if a person meets with an accident caused by a faulty processor in the Car, is it the fault of the driver or the chip ?
The real challenge for policy makers will be to take cultural and social context and decide where do you want to intersect . Eg. Reasons why u can’t access flickr in a society as free as Dubai ?
What are the moral implications??? If policy makers create the right environment, then the implications can bring more people into the chain of greater wealth creation. These would create social systems which will be healthy, and create high value for all the people involved.
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