On this page, you will consider various ways that computing technologies have improved society.
In this course, when we talk about the social implications of computing, most of the focus is on the risks and challenges of new technologies. That's because you mostly know about the good implications: the ability to communicate with friends worldwide, the explosion in creative expression, information at your fingertips, and so on. The risks and challenges need attention, but we shouldn't completely neglect the benefits of computing, as it has inspired advances in a wide range of fields, including the arts, science, engineering, and communications.
One purpose of the computing innovations is creative expression. Music synthesizers, for example, are electronic musical instruments that allow musicians to simulate the sound of dozens of different kinds of instrument without actually having or being able to play them. When synthesizers were first invented, some artists considered this cheating. The 1975 Queen album A Night at the Opera, the one with "Bohemian Rhapsody" on it, for example, had the words "No synthesizers!" featured in the liner notes. Today, of course, digital synthesizers (as well as more specialized computerized instruments such as drum machines) are commonplace in popular music. The new technology often changes people's expectations and expands the reach of human creativity.
People also create computing innovations to solve problems; every branch of science has been transformed by modern computers. In biology, the central example is DNA sequencing. DNA, the fundamental "blueprint" for all living organisms, consists of very long molecules; human DNA includes over three billion tiny building blocks. Modern supercomputers make it possible for human researchers to perform computations to analyze these sequences.
Early Minimoog synthesizer image by Wikipedia user Magnus Manske; protein folding image by Wikipedia user DrKjaergaard
Another important topic in biochemistry is protein folding. When your body needs to produce a protein molecule, it "folds" another molecule into the right shape. Certain diseases are the result of proteins folding incorrectly, and researchers want to find the correct folding (the correct shape) for every protein. But trying every possibility requires enormous amounts of computer time. So, the Folding@home group at Stanford University asks people to download a protein folding program that will run on your computer or phone only when you're not doing something else with it. Working together, tens of thousands of computers are like a very large supercomputer, except that supercomputers are expensive, while putting your computer's idle time to work doesn't cost anything.
Folding@home is just one of several citizen science projects. The first one was the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which uses volunteered computer time to search for large prime numbers, which are of importance in public key cryptography. Another early citizen science project, probably the most famous, is SETI@home, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, created by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley. This project searches the pictures produced by large telescopes for radio signals that could be produced by intelligent life on a faraway planet. (SETI@home hasn't found any signs of intelligent aliens so far, although it has found candidate radio signals for further study.)
All of these projects require nothing from their volunteers other than installing a program. But after some Folding@home users declared that they could find protein folds faster than a computer could do it, biochemists at the University of Washington collaborated with computer scientists in the UW Center for Game Science to create a video game, Foldit, in which you get points for folding proteins correctly. People carry out computations much more slowly than computers, but people can look at a picture, such as a picture of a protein, and take in the whole shape at once, instantly seeing possible folds. Computers, so far, can't do that instant analysis of a picture as a whole.
They didn't have to make Foldit a game; they could have just presented it as an opportunity to help science. But turning it into a game sparks some people's competitive spirit and gets them to try harder and for a longer period of time than they might without the "gamification" of the task.
Another kind of crowdsourced collaboration involves money. When a natural disaster leaves many people homeless, websites such as gofundme.com let large numbers of people contribute small amounts of money that add up to enough to make a difference. The contributors don't expect anything back for their contributions. Similarly, small businesses can post notices at kickstarter.com encouraging supporters to buy a product before it exists; the developers use the money to pay the initial development and manufacturing costs, and then give the supporters their purchases.
Advances in technology have also allowed widespread access to information and public data, which facilitates the identification of problems, the development of solutions, and dissemination of the results. In medicine, for example, some combinations of medicines can be very dangerous, and doctors have to know whether the any new medication they prescribe is safe in combination with the ones the patient is already taking. There are thousands of prescription medications available in the United States, and there are medicines available without a prescription that may interact as well. Doctors can't possibly remember the drug interactions for every pair of medicines, but they can use medical databases to check for drug interactions online. Another example that's designed for the public is websites like opensecrets.org, which collect and summarize information about major contributors to political candidates' campaign funds so that people look up who has privileged access to the people who are supposed to be representing you.
What are some ways that you have used technology to solve problems or for creative expression? Make a list and compare it with others'. Do any ways surprise or inspire you?
Sometimes the impacts of a computing technology can be viewed as both beneficial and harmful. Whatever the intentions of the programmers, they don't always anticipate all the consequences—good and bad. Here's an oversimplified chart of some of the implications of Facebook:
| Facebook Consequences | Intended | Unintended |
|---|---|---|
| Good | finding old friends | organizing protests and aid |
| Bad | privacy violation for targeted advertising | "fake news" to influence elections |
Facebook started as a way for college students to find their friends (their in-person friends, initially) when they go away, for example to a different college. But it turned out also to be good for organizing group activities, such as political protests and disaster support; computing innovations often have unintended beneficial effects in other fields. Facebook's ability to make money could have been based on charging a fee for a Facebook account, but instead they chose to make the accounts free and to make money by using people's data to provide advertising targeted to that user's interests. You learned about how Facebook collects personal data even without users' knowledge in Unit 1 Lab 4 Page 2: Examining Privacy, and this information gathering was intentionally designed into Facebook. But one thing Facebook didn't intend was the ability of political campaigns and foreign countries to post content lying about opposing candidates that spreads rapidly throughout the network. This is a harmful impact on society. Technological innovations can also have harmful effects on economy or culture in addition to the many possible benefits.
When Facebook started, it was available only to Harvard students. If that were still the case, neither its good nor its bad effects would matter very much. When Facebook expanded to include almost everyone with a computer or a smartphone, its impact expanded, and now dishonest political messages can spread around the world very quickly.
A single effect of an innovation can be viewed as both beneficial and harmful by different people, or even by the same person. You might not like your personal data being collected and shared with other companies, but violating people's privacy isn't bad for Mark Zuckerberg; on the contrary, it made him one of the richest people on Earth. And you might appreciate seeing advertisements that are relevant to you and still dislike the privacy violation.