essay on humanity and technology

Essay on Technology And Humanity

Students are often asked to write an essay on Technology And Humanity in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Technology And Humanity

Introduction.

Technology has become an integral part of our lives. It has revolutionized the way we live, work, and communicate. Technology affects our lives in countless ways.

Communication

Technology has made it easier for us to stay connected with friends and family who live far away. We can use phones, email, social media, and video chat to communicate with them.

Technology is also changing the way we learn. Online learning and educational apps make it possible for students to learn at their own pace and in their preferred style.

Technology has also had a major impact on healthcare. New medical technologies have helped us diagnose and treat diseases more effectively.

Technology has both positive and negative effects on humanity. It has made our lives easier and more convenient, but it has also created new challenges. It is important to use technology wisely and responsibly.

250 Words Essay on Technology And Humanity

Technology and humanity: a conjoined path.

Technology and humanity are inseparable, and their relationship is constantly evolving. Technology has the power to shape our lives in many ways, both positive and negative. It can make our lives easier and more convenient, but it can also lead to problems such as unemployment and addiction.

The Positive Impacts of Technology

Technology has brought many positive changes to our lives. It has made communication easier and faster, connecting people from all over the world. It has also made it easier to access information and learn new things. Additionally, technology has revolutionized the way we work, making many tasks more efficient and productive.

The Negative Impacts of Technology

However, technology also has some negative impacts on humanity. One of the biggest problems is that it can lead to unemployment. As machines become more intelligent and capable, they are taking over jobs that were once done by humans. This can lead to job losses and economic hardship. Another problem is that technology can be addictive. People can become so engrossed in their devices that they neglect their real-life relationships and responsibilities.

The Future of Technology and Humanity

The relationship between technology and humanity is likely to continue to evolve in the future. As technology becomes more advanced, it is important to consider the potential consequences and to find ways to mitigate the negative impacts. We need to find a way to use technology to improve our lives without letting it control us.

500 Words Essay on Technology And Humanity

What is technology, and how did it originate.

Technology began with the earliest people making tools to hunt and gather. The first tools were simple stones, sharpened sticks, and bones. Over time, people learned to make more complex tools, such as wheels, plows, and irrigation systems. These tools made life easier for people and allowed them to build civilizations.

Technological Advancements and Its Impact on Human Life

Technology has evolved rapidly in recent centuries. The Industrial Revolution, which began in the 18th century, led to the development of machines that could do the work of many people. This led to a great increase in productivity and a dramatic change in the way people lived and worked.

In the 20th century, the development of computers and the internet led to a new era of technological innovation. Computers have made it possible to do things that were once impossible, such as communicating with people all over the world in an instant and accessing a vast amount of information. The internet has also made it possible for people to connect with each other in new ways, creating online communities and social networks.

Technology’s Influence on Human Society and Culture

Technology has profoundly affected human society and culture. It has changed the way people communicate, work, and learn. It has also changed the way people interact with each other and the world around them.

Technology has made the world a smaller place. People can now communicate with each other instantly, no matter where they are in the world. They can also learn about different cultures and perspectives through the internet.

Technology has also made it easier for people to start businesses and reach a global audience. This has led to a more diverse and vibrant economy.

Challenges and Risks Associated with Technological Advancements

While technology has brought many benefits, it also poses some challenges and risks. One challenge is the potential for job loss, as machines can do the work of many people. Another challenge is the need to protect people’s privacy and personal information online. There is also the risk of technology being used for malicious purposes, such as cyberwarfare or terrorism.

Conclusion: Technology and Humanity’s Future

The relationship between technology and humanity is complex and ever-changing. Technology has the potential to make the world a better place, but it also poses some challenges and risks. It is important to use technology wisely and ethically to ensure that it benefits all of humanity.

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Promises and Pitfalls of Technology

Politics and privacy, private-sector influence and big tech, state competition and conflict, author biography, how is technology changing the world, and how should the world change technology.

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Josephine Wolff; How Is Technology Changing the World, and How Should the World Change Technology?. Global Perspectives 1 February 2021; 2 (1): 27353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.27353

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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.

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) .

At the heart of fights over new technologies and their resulting global changes are often two conflicting visions of technology: a fundamentally optimistic one that believes humans use it as a tool to achieve greater goals, and a fundamentally pessimistic one that holds that technological systems have reached a point beyond our control. Technology philosophers have argued that neither of these views is wholly accurate and that a purely optimistic or pessimistic view of technology is insufficient to capture the nuances and complexity of our relationship to technology (Oberdiek and Tiles 1995) . Understanding technology and how we can make better decisions about designing, deploying, and refining it requires capturing that nuance and complexity through in-depth analysis of the impacts of different technological advancements and the ways they have played out in all their complicated and controversial messiness across the world.

These impacts are often unpredictable as technologies are adopted in new contexts and come to be used in ways that sometimes diverge significantly from the use cases envisioned by their designers. The internet, designed to help transmit information between computer networks, became a crucial vehicle for commerce, introducing unexpected avenues for crime and financial fraud. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, designed to connect friends and families through sharing photographs and life updates, became focal points of election controversies and political influence. Cryptocurrencies, originally intended as a means of decentralized digital cash, have become a significant environmental hazard as more and more computing resources are devoted to mining these forms of virtual money. One of the crucial challenges in this area is therefore recognizing, documenting, and even anticipating some of these unexpected consequences and providing mechanisms to technologists for how to think through the impacts of their work, as well as possible other paths to different outcomes (Verbeek 2006) . And just as technological innovations can cause unexpected harm, they can also bring about extraordinary benefits—new vaccines and medicines to address global pandemics and save thousands of lives, new sources of energy that can drastically reduce emissions and help combat climate change, new modes of education that can reach people who would otherwise have no access to schooling. Regulating technology therefore requires a careful balance of mitigating risks without overly restricting potentially beneficial innovations.

Nations around the world have taken very different approaches to governing emerging technologies and have adopted a range of different technologies themselves in pursuit of more modern governance structures and processes (Braman 2009) . In Europe, the precautionary principle has guided much more anticipatory regulation aimed at addressing the risks presented by technologies even before they are fully realized. For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation focuses on the responsibilities of data controllers and processors to provide individuals with access to their data and information about how that data is being used not just as a means of addressing existing security and privacy threats, such as data breaches, but also to protect against future developments and uses of that data for artificial intelligence and automated decision-making purposes. In Germany, Technische Überwachungsvereine, or TÜVs, perform regular tests and inspections of technological systems to assess and minimize risks over time, as the tech landscape evolves. In the United States, by contrast, there is much greater reliance on litigation and liability regimes to address safety and security failings after-the-fact. These different approaches reflect not just the different legal and regulatory mechanisms and philosophies of different nations but also the different ways those nations prioritize rapid development of the technology industry versus safety, security, and individual control. Typically, governance innovations move much more slowly than technological innovations, and regulations can lag years, or even decades, behind the technologies they aim to govern.

In addition to this varied set of national regulatory approaches, a variety of international and nongovernmental organizations also contribute to the process of developing standards, rules, and norms for new technologies, including the International Organization for Standardization­ and the International Telecommunication Union. These multilateral and NGO actors play an especially important role in trying to define appropriate boundaries for the use of new technologies by governments as instruments of control for the state.

At the same time that policymakers are under scrutiny both for their decisions about how to regulate technology as well as their decisions about how and when to adopt technologies like facial recognition themselves, technology firms and designers have also come under increasing criticism. Growing recognition that the design of technologies can have far-reaching social and political implications means that there is more pressure on technologists to take into consideration the consequences of their decisions early on in the design process (Vincenti 1993; Winner 1980) . The question of how technologists should incorporate these social dimensions into their design and development processes is an old one, and debate on these issues dates back to the 1970s, but it remains an urgent and often overlooked part of the puzzle because so many of the supposedly systematic mechanisms for assessing the impacts of new technologies in both the private and public sectors are primarily bureaucratic, symbolic processes rather than carrying any real weight or influence.

Technologists are often ill-equipped or unwilling to respond to the sorts of social problems that their creations have—often unwittingly—exacerbated, and instead point to governments and lawmakers to address those problems (Zuckerberg 2019) . But governments often have few incentives to engage in this area. This is because setting clear standards and rules for an ever-evolving technological landscape can be extremely challenging, because enforcement of those rules can be a significant undertaking requiring considerable expertise, and because the tech sector is a major source of jobs and revenue for many countries that may fear losing those benefits if they constrain companies too much. This indicates not just a need for clearer incentives and better policies for both private- and public-sector entities but also a need for new mechanisms whereby the technology development and design process can be influenced and assessed by people with a wider range of experiences and expertise. If we want technologies to be designed with an eye to their impacts, who is responsible for predicting, measuring, and mitigating those impacts throughout the design process? Involving policymakers in that process in a more meaningful way will also require training them to have the analytic and technical capacity to more fully engage with technologists and understand more fully the implications of their decisions.

At the same time that tech companies seem unwilling or unable to rein in their creations, many also fear they wield too much power, in some cases all but replacing governments and international organizations in their ability to make decisions that affect millions of people worldwide and control access to information, platforms, and audiences (Kilovaty 2020) . Regulators around the world have begun considering whether some of these companies have become so powerful that they violate the tenets of antitrust laws, but it can be difficult for governments to identify exactly what those violations are, especially in the context of an industry where the largest players often provide their customers with free services. And the platforms and services developed by tech companies are often wielded most powerfully and dangerously not directly by their private-sector creators and operators but instead by states themselves for widespread misinformation campaigns that serve political purposes (Nye 2018) .

Since the largest private entities in the tech sector operate in many countries, they are often better poised to implement global changes to the technological ecosystem than individual states or regulatory bodies, creating new challenges to existing governance structures and hierarchies. Just as it can be challenging to provide oversight for government use of technologies, so, too, oversight of the biggest tech companies, which have more resources, reach, and power than many nations, can prove to be a daunting task. The rise of network forms of organization and the growing gig economy have added to these challenges, making it even harder for regulators to fully address the breadth of these companies’ operations (Powell 1990) . The private-public partnerships that have emerged around energy, transportation, medical, and cyber technologies further complicate this picture, blurring the line between the public and private sectors and raising critical questions about the role of each in providing critical infrastructure, health care, and security. How can and should private tech companies operating in these different sectors be governed, and what types of influence do they exert over regulators? How feasible are different policy proposals aimed at technological innovation, and what potential unintended consequences might they have?

Conflict between countries has also spilled over significantly into the private sector in recent years, most notably in the case of tensions between the United States and China over which technologies developed in each country will be permitted by the other and which will be purchased by other customers, outside those two countries. Countries competing to develop the best technology is not a new phenomenon, but the current conflicts have major international ramifications and will influence the infrastructure that is installed and used around the world for years to come. Untangling the different factors that feed into these tussles as well as whom they benefit and whom they leave at a disadvantage is crucial for understanding how governments can most effectively foster technological innovation and invention domestically as well as the global consequences of those efforts. As much of the world is forced to choose between buying technology from the United States or from China, how should we understand the long-term impacts of those choices and the options available to people in countries without robust domestic tech industries? Does the global spread of technologies help fuel further innovation in countries with smaller tech markets, or does it reinforce the dominance of the states that are already most prominent in this sector? How can research universities maintain global collaborations and research communities in light of these national competitions, and what role does government research and development spending play in fostering innovation within its own borders and worldwide? How should intellectual property protections evolve to meet the demands of the technology industry, and how can those protections be enforced globally?

These conflicts between countries sometimes appear to challenge the feasibility of truly global technologies and networks that operate across all countries through standardized protocols and design features. Organizations like the International Organization for Standardization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and many others have tried to harmonize these policies and protocols across different countries for years, but have met with limited success when it comes to resolving the issues of greatest tension and disagreement among nations. For technology to operate in a global environment, there is a need for a much greater degree of coordination among countries and the development of common standards and norms, but governments continue to struggle to agree not just on those norms themselves but even the appropriate venue and processes for developing them. Without greater global cooperation, is it possible to maintain a global network like the internet or to promote the spread of new technologies around the world to address challenges of sustainability? What might help incentivize that cooperation moving forward, and what could new structures and process for governance of global technologies look like? Why has the tech industry’s self-regulation culture persisted? Do the same traditional drivers for public policy, such as politics of harmonization and path dependency in policy-making, still sufficiently explain policy outcomes in this space? As new technologies and their applications spread across the globe in uneven ways, how and when do they create forces of change from unexpected places?

These are some of the questions that we hope to address in the Technology and Global Change section through articles that tackle new dimensions of the global landscape of designing, developing, deploying, and assessing new technologies to address major challenges the world faces. Understanding these processes requires synthesizing knowledge from a range of different fields, including sociology, political science, economics, and history, as well as technical fields such as engineering, climate science, and computer science. A crucial part of understanding how technology has created global change and, in turn, how global changes have influenced the development of new technologies is understanding the technologies themselves in all their richness and complexity—how they work, the limits of what they can do, what they were designed to do, how they are actually used. Just as technologies themselves are becoming more complicated, so are their embeddings and relationships to the larger social, political, and legal contexts in which they exist. Scholars across all disciplines are encouraged to join us in untangling those complexities.

Josephine Wolff is an associate professor of cybersecurity policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her book You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches was published by MIT Press in 2018.

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Technology and Its Impact on Humanity

Introduction, technology and discoveries, the internet, what does the term ‘human’ mean, internet’s contribution to loss of human qualities, delegation of certain aspects of our lives to technology, people’s reactions to advancement of technology, reference list.

In this paper, new technological developments have been discussed with special focus to the internet. Effects of the use of internet on what is truly human have been addressed and especially the negative effects. This has mostly arisen as a result of the delegation of certain aspects of peoples lives. There have been different reactions to the modern technology and specifically the use of internet with some embracing the use of internet to carry out different functions, others having a negative opinion about it while others holding a neutral opinion.

People have throughout the ages tried to simplify life through different means. More ways of improving the quality of life on earth are being discovered. A very common way that has been used is the use of technology. There have been a lot of technological discoveries recently and the rate at which more inventions are being made is still very high (Berg, 2009).

More new gargets are being fabricated and the existing ones are also being refurbished making the world more and more developed technologically. The issue of technological discoveries is not a very new concept because there have been numerous discoveries throughout history. From discovery of medicine like penicillin, cars, electricity and many other things which were non existent in the old age period.

Most of the technological discoveries have been applauded by people because of their ability to make life a better (TheQuestionConcerningTechnlogy, n. d ) . For example the invention of mobile phones has made communication to any part of the world very easy. This is a lot easier and faster compared to the use of letters and telephones were used before this discovery. The invention of cell phones is one of the major successes in technology. Many homes today do not see a need for the telephones which were not portable because all members of the family own cell phones which they carry everywhere.

Technology is a common term in this age with too many possible definitions. According to Heidegger, it can mean a way that is used to achieve something. It can also be used to mean a human action (Adeline, 2009). The two definitions are however related because human actions are involved in achieving a certain intended goal. Part of technology is also the things which have been invented to help improve the human life by making work easier, faster and more efficient.

In the past, the use of simple stone or metallic tools was employed in carrying out certain tasks as there were no complex tools. More discoveries have continued to be made throughout generations from inventions of simple things like fire to complex things like robots. Recently, there have been a lot of discoveries which are a threat to humanity.

For example, the latest discovery by scientists of ‘Home Assistant Robot’ (HAR) was designed to help in household tasks. They can carry out the not so complex tasks like cleaning and arranging furniture. It is amazing how the robots work because they have been made as human like as they can learn and even rectify their own mistakes (Purdy, n. d).

There are also those robots which are capable of making breakfast and serving one the breakfast in bed. This is a step forward technologically and with this trend, we are left to wonder what scientists are going to make next. The accuracy with which these robots perform tasks that could only be done by human beings is amazing and scaring at the same time.

According to Adeline (2009), the rising trend of numerous discoveries some which are completely or partially replacing human activity has led to some fundamental questions: has technology made our lives better or it has made us worse off? Have we been doing the right thing by allowing most of our lives to be driven by technology? Is this trend leading us to be liberated or it is going to be our undoing in the long run? In this paper, these questions will be tackled as we examine a very common technological instrument that is being used by almost everyone who can access the computer, the internet.

This is one of the most outstanding discoveries in human history. The record of existence of internet dates back to the 19 th century when the computers were invented.

A series of interconnected networks is basically what internet is all about. Some services available on the internet are World Wide Web, and other communication services for example messaging services and electronic mails. The internet has been a useful tool to many people ranging from the students, researchers, business people and even ordinary people seeking for information or entertainment. By use of internet services, one can access any material required at the click of a button.

This has come with a lot of advantages and disadvantages too. With the ever increasing information available in the internet, it is threatening to become a source of destruction for what is essential in life. The major threat caused by the internet is the threat of separating people from what is truly human. In the rest of the paper, we shall examine how internet has threatened to rob people of what is truly human after understanding what ‘truly human’ exactly mean.

The human nature is a term that can have different definitions from different perspectives. The definition differs from one religion to another and also is defined differently by philosophers. In this discussion, we will consider the human nature as those unique features found in human beings. They comprise of how an individual reasons, feels or does things.

These unique features occur naturally in all human beings. What is essentially human therefore include characteristic features like being able to communicate with each other, socialization, ability to think and invent new things, reasoning capability among other distinctive features common to human beings only.

Internet has undoubtedly contributed massively to loss of important human qualities. One of the ways is by increasing the distance between how people communicate and how they interact (Berg, 2009). The current trend is pointing towards a direction that physical interaction and seeing face to face as a communication strategy will be very rare or even impossible.

This is due to over reliance on the social sites like Facebook, Twitter and other electronic messaging and mail services for communication. This is a dangerous trend because socialization at a personal level is slowly being replaced by communication through the available social networks. Since socialization is one of the distinct qualities of human beings which make them distinct from animals, it becomes an issue when the quality is robbed from them by technology.

Facebook and other social networks are not entirely bad and especially when communicating with people and friends one meets but has no other way of reaching them. It becomes a menace when one uses it as a means of communicating with people who one has access to and can use other more interactive ways to communicate for example verbal communication. Meeting with people and talking to them is better than the use of internet.

Another quality that is slowly but surely being eroded by technology and especially the social networks sites is that of truthfulness and honesty Heidegger, 1977). It is not an uncommon phenomenon for people to lie when using social networks. People are comfortable lying about any aspect of their lives and mostly concerning their marital status. This has led to the disintegration of the family unit which is a very important part of the human being. The quality of being honest is therefore on the verge of disappearing from the human beings because of the use of the internet.

Although internet has been an important source for people seeking for new knowledge and information, it has been blamed for other serious problems related to generation of new information. Creativity among individuals is slowly disappearing and is being replaced by the internet to search for any material one may need even if one is in a position to generate his/her original ideas.

Due to this growing trend and especially among the scholars, the use of human mind to think and come up with useful information is declining hence fewer discoveries or copying from the already existing inventions. The question that therefore comes to mind is the fate of human beings in the coming years if things do not change (Wright, n. d). Such a way of doing things also limits the creative minds that could have come up with great inventions if they were not limited by the use of internet.

People wonder why they should go to the pains of thinking about certain important concepts when they can easily and readily find them in the internet. Everything can now be goggled and information availed immediately. Important things like birthdays, anniversaries and appointments can also be found on social networks sites like the Facebook. This has contributed to the loss of our capability to think and come up with new things as human beings which are essential qualities of being truly human.

It is odd how people would think of any one who does not have an account with the social networks as being backward. People consider such connections as big achievements and especially when one has many friends in his/her account. The question however is the importance and the value that such adds to ones life. On the contrary, one spends a lot of time in updating and commenting on peoples’ statuses instead of doing other productive works.

This reduces an individual’s productivity in the area of work because it is very common for people to open their social networks accounts at the place of work. Cases of addiction to accessing these sites are also very common. Some people spend excessively long hours chatting with friends or doing other unimportant things in the internet or using the social networks. Again, this is harmful both to the individual and the people around him/her because it reduces the time for interaction with others gradually and makes one live in isolation and interpersonal skills and other skills necessary for living are not acquired.

It is also common for people to meet friends and start relationships through the internet. Many people are turning to the internet as a site for meeting spouses and even getting married. This is because the time one spends on the internet is too much and there is hardly enough time left for one to visit social places where there are high chances of meeting new people and interacting face to face.

The problem with relationships formed through the internet is that most of them are based on lies and many people end up being deceived into marrying the wrong people or end up losing valuables or even their lives. Since marriage is supposed to be based on fundamental human qualities like love and companionship, marriages established between people who meet through the internet are likely to lack these important human qualities.

Children have also suffered from the problems that technology has brought (Eisenstein, chapter 2). This is because parents have left the responsibility of bringing up children to technology and they hardly spend enough time with them. The strong bond that is supposed to exist between the parents and their children is longer there.

There is too much reliance on the internet for the children to learn what they should otherwise have learnt from their parents. Because of easy access to the internet by the children, moral decadence has been on the rise (Dreyfus, 1999). Cases of children accessing pornographic and other harmful information are very common. The internet therefore corrupts the good morals of the children because of the unlimited access to these sites by them.

The internet can be used as a means of getting money. This depends on the complexity of the job one does use the internet services. It is therefore possible for people to work from their homes at their convenience with many people preferring doing this. In attempt to earn more, one ends up spending more time on the internet than with the family. One also becomes separated from other people because one just works alone without any interaction with clients.

Initially, technological discoveries were designed to make life easier and better. For example, the internet was majorly used for research purposes and communication through emails. This was done moderately and there were few cases of misuse of these services.

No doubt these services served a very important role in communication industry by making it faster and cheaper and still do have a vital role in communication. It is very easy to reach any one in any part of the world cheaply and very conveniently (Dreyfus, 1999). Important information for any one intending to research a particular topic is also available in the internet.

However certain important aspects have been left entirely to the internet. When things which make us human, like socialization are entirely left to the internet, it becomes a major problem that needs to be addressed without delay. Internet in itself is not a problem per se, but the problem arises when there is misuse of it, which has been the case in the recent past. Such misuse is what, if not addressed promptly would lead to a technological calamity on humanity.

When vital aspects of human life are delegated to machines, we are left to wonder what would happen in case the machines fail to follow the commands given to them by human beings (Montalbano, n. d ) . If ever such a thing happens, it would be catastrophic for the human race which has not been so keen in addressing this problem. The dangers of such delegation are therefore very real and something needs to be done before a problem of greater magnitude than there is now arises.

People have put a lot of trust and confidence in technology and have forgotten to take care of what makes them truly human. Ignoring aspects of importance like creativity and leaving them to the internet to get any information shows great negligence and is a threat also to new inventions which are very necessary in this age.

It is important to note that this delegation is already having many negative effects on people. For example, the use of internet has been associated with increase in the rate of crimes. People have been conned and others have lost many valuables through internet crimes (Wright, n. d). There have been cases of people accessing confidential information from companies or even government agencies through the internet. Worse still, important information has been lost in some cases never to be recovered again.

These are just some of the possible problems that could arise when important aspects are delegated to technology. Other worse problems could arise if people continue with the trend of having a lot of trust in the internet and using it to carry out human activities that could be done by people themselves. This is a wake up call to the people to rethink about their opinion on the internet services and other technological advancements that are a threat to the future.

There have been different reactions to modern technology. Some are pessimistic about the different discoveries for example some philosophers like Herbert Marcuse see technology as having adverse effects on the society. He therefore views technology as a hindrance to people’s liberty and a cause of psychological ill health.

Other philosophers like Martin Heidegger hold the view that technology is not entirely bad but it depends with how an individual applies it (Eisenstein, chapter 2). He is of the opinion that people should not overly rely on technology to the point of it enslaving them. On the other hand, people should not shun technology and try to do things without using it because it is a helpful tool to achieving a certain desired goal and efforts to avoid it may be futile. According to Kuang, 2002), there should be a balance in the use and also in how people view technology so that it becomes a useful tool in their hands instead of being a source of destruction and enslavement.

The other question that has been raised is whether computers then can be programmed to behave like human beings. This is because it seems that this is the direction that latest developments have been heading. Otherwise how else can one describe the efforts of scientists to come up with robots which can carry out human activities very efficiently?

Programming computers to be more human may be a great challenge because computers can not perform all human functions. They can only be fed with data and commands they are supposed to obey (Wright, n. d). It is human beings who come up with facts as they try to create new things that are beneficial to them.

People are therefore responsible for organization of their world by using their creative minds to improve it. It is impossible then to achieve this kind of organization done by the human beings through other means like the use of technology. Human beings and technology need to work together to achieve a balance instead of leaving things to be done by technology alone or by use of human efforts alone which may be futile in the end.

Technology is a useful tool in the hands of people which helps to achieve a lot that can not be done by human means only. When used appropriately, modern technology and especially the internet can be said to be one of the best discoveries in the human history. On the contrary, technology if not used well as a servant and not a master can have devastating effects on people.

The internet for example can be very dangerous and can bring about negative effects on the society and vital values and morals. Caution needs to be taken when dealing with the modern technology, particularly the internet to avoid future problems.

Adeline, A. (2009). Discoveries of Technologies: information about world’s latest and Smart Technologies. Web.

Berg, K. K. (2009). The Impact Of The Internet On Human Behavior . Redding: Third Door Media. Web.

Dreyfus, H. L. (1999). What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Web.

Eisenstein. C. (2008). The Ascent of Humanity. Web.

Heidegger, M. (1977). ‘‘the Question Concerning Technology,’’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt . New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977, pp. 25–6.

Kuang, W.T. (2002). Technology, Humanity, Conscience . Philadelphia: Missionary Institute. Web.

Montalbano, D. (n. d) Humanity among Technology. Web.

Purdy, R. (n. d). The Internet: Boon or Detriment to Society? Web.

TheQuestionConcerningTechnlogy . (n. d). Web.

Wright, C. (2007). Technology could soon replace human beings on frontline . Web.

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Relation Between Humans and Technology, Essay Example

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Technological determinism is a theory that the development of both social structures and cultural values driven by the society’s technology. The term is believed to have been invented by an American Sociologist, Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929). Technological momentum is also a theory that states the relationship between the society and technology over a period. It was coined by Thomas P. Hughes a Historian of technology. Hughes believes in having two distinct models to see how technology and society interact, he claims that the new, upcoming technologies are the one that affects the society. These technologies are brought up in ways that they are lasting and irremediable, and the society has to change to be able to survive.

Technology and the human community have drastically grown together given the fact that, technology puts the human community on its toes each and every second. Time is the unifying factor between the social and technological determinism. Social claims that the societies have the power to control how technology will develop and uses are true. When technology is still young, the society has control over it and can easily mould it to fit its suitability. Although, when it has matured, the society will be the one to adjust to accommodate to the new technology. The current technology has increasingly improved the education sector. According to Thomas Edison State College “technology has improved the ability to do research and elevates our knowledge on contemporary problems and extends our ability to address those issues with scope and depth”. Education research has become easier, and fun to do with the new technology, which makes it faster to acquire required materials for use. However, technology cannot work independently it requires knowledge on cultural values to be able to compliment it (Murphie & Potts 19).

In relation to cultural values and history, technology had to be there even in the ancient time where hunting tools, sculptures and jewelry were being shaped and decorated either by curving or painting.

Currently in leadership, technology has demonstrated a great deal of importance in numerous occasions, like in the case of Second World War. Nazi Germany with the use of technology like new rockets and jet planes achieved technological innovations, although he did not change the fate of the war. It would have been different if the innovation had come earlier and would have determined the momentum (Feenberg 2003). Technology has also improved the communication standards, accountability and accessibility. Leaders can be easily reached through the availability of Internet, telephones and fax machines. Therefore, it is imperative for leaders to gain knowledge and understanding of vast technological advancements and how they help in managerial and decision making processes.

Technology and human interaction are things that need to be advocated in institutions and professions because they have changed thinking patterns and mode of presentation. This accommodates the needs and preferences of individuals in the society, which includes the disabled and physically challenged. Technology influence on humanity has affected all sectors in marketing (private, public, off line and or on-line). This intersection has disrupted old models of business, industrial theories and systems of belief underpinning ancient knowledge and concepts (Croteau & Hoynes 305). This has promoted movement comprehension curves and results in the creation of meaning and significance from changes emerging in technology and human interaction.

Technology, on the other hand, can also affect negatively in other cases, for example, in a war, where destructive technology is used by the major technological powers of Soviet Union and United States in the cold war. They could not achieve clear victories because it would destroy everything and nothing would be left to win. In other cases, executive members of a given firm use this media (Croteau & Hoynes 306) in confronting sub-ordinate staff members and harass female counterparts’ sub-ordinate staff members and harass female counterparts sexually. This has affected working conditions negatively and hence, production is hampered.

Civilization and technology work hand in hand. Therefore, in order to achieve some of the civilization, technology has to be in place first. Some historians believe that the higher the technology the influential the civilization will be to the neighboring cultures (Murphie & Potts 21). Technology has made life easier like in the availability of ATM’s, which has made society able to access the banking services faster and conveniently. The changes currently seen in the society is due to the arising technology. For example, in the ancient history, communication used to be in the form of signs (smoke, sounds among others). Unlike today, where people communicate through email thus, negatively affecting the social life of the human community since people rarely meet.

In conclusion, technology has brought both positive and negative effects in the human community. Although it has some negative factors, we cannot do without it because it has become a requirement. In the current world, one cannot live without a mobile phone. Although, having it also have some negative factors like wave radiation, which can affect the human health after using it for long. This has also brought forth the use of other technology to reduce radiation of the wave to the human body to allow him use the mobile phone more. This shows that technology and humanity co-exist with each other.

Works Cited

Croteau, D & Hoynes, W. Media Society: Industries, Images and Audiences. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2003. Print

Davies, F. Technology and Business Ethics Theory. Business Ethics: A European Review vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 76-80, 2002. Print

Feenberg, A. (2003). What Is Philosophy of Technology ? Retrieved 26 April, 2012 from <http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/books/What_is_Philosophy_of_Technology.pdf >

Murphie, A and Potts, J. Culture and Technology . London: Palgrave, 2003. Print

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How technology and humanities intersect

By | Linda B. Glaser , Cornell Chronicle

Technology has changed all aspects of our lives, even ancient fields of study in the humanities. The College of Arts and Sciences’ fourth Big Ideas Panel, part of its  New Century for the Humanities  celebration, explored technology in the humanities March 15 in Klarman Hall’s Groos Family Atrium.

David Mimno , assistant professor of information science, brought a unique perspective to bear on the topic. His course,  Data Mining for History and Literature , introduces students to research methods in computer-assisted scholarship, including representing text documents in computational forms.

Computation is about abstraction, Mimno told the audience, while the humanities are about specifics and things “being more complicated.” His goal is to find a synthesis between these different ways of seeing the world. “Abstraction is useful but not necessarily accurate when you get down to the details,” he added.

Mimno offered the example of research he’s doing on folklore from 19th- and early 20th-century Danish stories, which were sorted into categories for publishing. His team created an algorithm to compare words across stories and within categories, a way to reverse engineer into which category each folk tale should go. The computer allowed the researchers to find the stories that cross boundaries and demonstrated uncertainty in their categorization.

This is the same type of computation used in spam filters and Google searches, Mimno noted. “It’s the humanities perspective that makes a very standard, simple tool interesting. I believe that that humanities perspective is incredibly valuable.”

Because the skills needed to do this kind of computation are specialized, most computational humanities work is collaborative, said  Jeremy Braddock , associate professor of English.

But Braddock pointed out that the book itself is a form of technology – and a very consequential one. “Addressing media and technology, therefore, engages with very old questions as well as very new ones,” he said.

Braddock focused his presentation on research he’s conducting on a group of collaborative writers whose primary medium was the multitrack recording studio and the long-playing vinyl album: the Firesign Theater. The group formed at the height of 1960s counterculture and “invented a form of aural art so fully realized and so unique that even among the vast proliferation of audio work in the early 21st century, there is nothing that comes close to matching it for its ambition, complexity or sonic range,” he said.

“Rather than entering into the listener’s world and talking to them – as has become the convention of virtually all radio and podcasting – the listener is drawn into multiple worlds, multiple soundscapes,” said Braddock, demonstrating with audio clips from Firesign productions. He said that in the recording studio the group found a way of making the complex techniques of modernist literature available to a mass audience.

Anindita Banerjee , associate professor of comparative literature, is writing a book exploring the complex relationship between energy and art in Russia today, “Fuel Fictions, Energy, Art and Power in Modern Russia.” She said her residency last semester at the  Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future  illuminated “the urgent need to place energy studies as a transdisciplinary whole in the webs of relations among humans and between humans and nonhuman entities, including technology, ‘nature’ (elemental, animal, vegetable or mineral) and what we call things – including waste.”

Banerjee also spoke about her previous research on science fiction, which she said is “a place from which to work out different ways of being, thinking and acting what it is to be modern: that is, in relation with the present with a view to the future. … Far from being just the realm of fiction writers, filmmakers and lately game developers, science fiction has always been co-created and co-produced by an astonishingly large community that includes scientists and engineers, philosophers, social and political activists, journalists, artists, illustrators, politicians and policymakers.

“Science fiction is not just a crucible of future thinking, but a technology of participatory futuremaking,” she added.

Linda B. Glaser is a staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.

This article originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle .

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200-500 Word Example Essays about Technology

Got an essay assignment about technology check out these examples to inspire you.

Technology is a rapidly evolving field that has completely changed the way we live, work, and interact with one another. Technology has profoundly impacted our daily lives, from how we communicate with friends and family to how we access information and complete tasks. As a result, it's no surprise that technology is a popular topic for students writing essays.

But writing a technology essay can be challenging, especially for those needing more time or help with writer's block. This is where Jenni.ai comes in. Jenni.ai is an innovative AI tool explicitly designed for students who need help writing essays. With Jenni.ai, students can quickly and easily generate essays on various topics, including technology.

This blog post aims to provide readers with various example essays on technology, all generated by Jenni.ai. These essays will be a valuable resource for students looking for inspiration or guidance as they work on their essays. By reading through these example essays, students can better understand how technology can be approached and discussed in an essay.

Moreover, by signing up for a free trial with Jenni.ai, students can take advantage of this innovative tool and receive even more support as they work on their essays. Jenni.ai is designed to help students write essays faster and more efficiently, so they can focus on what truly matters – learning and growing as a student. Whether you're a student who is struggling with writer's block or simply looking for a convenient way to generate essays on a wide range of topics, Jenni.ai is the perfect solution.

The Impact of Technology on Society and Culture

Introduction:.

Technology has become an integral part of our daily lives and has dramatically impacted how we interact, communicate, and carry out various activities. Technological advancements have brought positive and negative changes to society and culture. In this article, we will explore the impact of technology on society and culture and how it has influenced different aspects of our lives.

Positive impact on communication:

Technology has dramatically improved communication and made it easier for people to connect from anywhere in the world. Social media platforms, instant messaging, and video conferencing have brought people closer, bridging geographical distances and cultural differences. This has made it easier for people to share information, exchange ideas, and collaborate on projects.

Positive impact on education:

Students and instructors now have access to a multitude of knowledge and resources because of the effect of technology on education . Students may now study at their speed and from any location thanks to online learning platforms, educational applications, and digital textbooks.

Negative impact on critical thinking and creativity:

Technological advancements have resulted in a reduction in critical thinking and creativity. With so much information at our fingertips, individuals have become more passive in their learning, relying on the internet for solutions rather than logic and inventiveness. As a result, independent thinking and problem-solving abilities have declined.

Positive impact on entertainment:

Technology has transformed how we access and consume entertainment. People may now access a wide range of entertainment alternatives from the comfort of their own homes thanks to streaming services, gaming platforms, and online content makers. The entertainment business has entered a new age of creativity and invention as a result of this.

Negative impact on attention span:

However, the continual bombardment of information and technological stimulation has also reduced attention span and the capacity to focus. People are easily distracted and need help focusing on a single activity for a long time. This has hampered productivity and the ability to accomplish duties.

The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies has been one of the most significant technological developments of the past several decades. These cutting-edge technologies have the potential to alter several sectors of society, including commerce, industry, healthcare, and entertainment. 

As with any new and quickly advancing technology, AI and ML ethics must be carefully studied. The usage of these technologies presents significant concerns around privacy, accountability, and command. As the use of AI and ML grows more ubiquitous, we must assess their possible influence on society and investigate the ethical issues that must be taken into account as these technologies continue to develop.

What are Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning?

Artificial Intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence in machines designed to think and act like humans. Machine learning is a subfield of AI that enables computers to learn from data and improve their performance over time without being explicitly programmed.

The impact of AI and ML on Society

The use of AI and ML in various industries, such as healthcare, finance, and retail, has brought many benefits. For example, AI-powered medical diagnosis systems can identify diseases faster and more accurately than human doctors. However, there are also concerns about job displacement and the potential for AI to perpetuate societal biases.

The Ethical Considerations of AI and ML

A. Bias in AI algorithms

One of the critical ethical concerns about AI and ML is the potential for algorithms to perpetuate existing biases. This can occur if the data used to train these algorithms reflects the preferences of the people who created it. As a result, AI systems can perpetuate these biases and discriminate against certain groups of people.

B. Responsibility for AI-generated decisions

Another ethical concern is the responsibility for decisions made by AI systems. For example, who is responsible for the damage if a self-driving car causes an accident? The manufacturer of the vehicle, the software developer, or the AI algorithm itself?

C. The potential for misuse of AI and ML

AI and ML can also be used for malicious purposes, such as cyberattacks and misinformation. The need for more regulation and oversight in developing and using these technologies makes it difficult to prevent misuse.

The developments in AI and ML have given numerous benefits to humanity, but they also present significant ethical concerns that must be addressed. We must assess the repercussions of new technologies on society, implement methods to limit the associated dangers, and guarantee that they are utilized for the greater good. As AI and ML continue to play an ever-increasing role in our daily lives, we must engage in an open and frank discussion regarding their ethics.

The Future of Work And Automation

Rapid technological breakthroughs in recent years have brought about considerable changes in our way of life and work. Concerns regarding the influence of artificial intelligence and machine learning on the future of work and employment have increased alongside the development of these technologies. This article will examine the possible advantages and disadvantages of automation and its influence on the labor market, employees, and the economy.

The Advantages of Automation

Automation in the workplace offers various benefits, including higher efficiency and production, fewer mistakes, and enhanced precision. Automated processes may accomplish repetitive jobs quickly and precisely, allowing employees to concentrate on more complex and creative activities. Additionally, automation may save organizations money since it removes the need to pay for labor and minimizes the danger of workplace accidents.

The Potential Disadvantages of Automation

However, automation has significant disadvantages, including job loss and income stagnation. As robots and computers replace human labor in particular industries, there is a danger that many workers may lose their jobs, resulting in higher unemployment and more significant economic disparity. Moreover, if automation is not adequately regulated and managed, it might lead to stagnant wages and a deterioration in employees' standard of life.

The Future of Work and Automation

Despite these difficulties, automation will likely influence how labor is done. As a result, firms, employees, and governments must take early measures to solve possible issues and reap the rewards of automation. This might entail funding worker retraining programs, enhancing education and skill development, and implementing regulations that support equality and justice at work.

IV. The Need for Ethical Considerations

We must consider the ethical ramifications of automation and its effects on society as technology develops. The impact on employees and their rights, possible hazards to privacy and security, and the duty of corporations and governments to ensure that automation is utilized responsibly and ethically are all factors to be taken into account.

Conclusion:

To summarise, the future of employment and automation will most certainly be defined by a complex interaction of technological advances, economic trends, and cultural ideals. All stakeholders must work together to handle the problems and possibilities presented by automation and ensure that technology is employed to benefit society as a whole.

The Role of Technology in Education

Introduction.

Nearly every part of our lives has been transformed by technology, and education is no different. Today's students have greater access to knowledge, opportunities, and resources than ever before, and technology is becoming a more significant part of their educational experience. Technology is transforming how we think about education and creating new opportunities for learners of all ages, from online courses and virtual classrooms to instructional applications and augmented reality.

Technology's Benefits for Education

The capacity to tailor learning is one of technology's most significant benefits in education. Students may customize their education to meet their unique needs and interests since they can access online information and tools. 

For instance, people can enroll in online classes on topics they are interested in, get tailored feedback on their work, and engage in virtual discussions with peers and subject matter experts worldwide. As a result, pupils are better able to acquire and develop the abilities and information necessary for success.

Challenges and Concerns

Despite the numerous advantages of technology in education, there are also obstacles and considerations to consider. One issue is the growing reliance on technology and the possibility that pupils would become overly dependent on it. This might result in a lack of critical thinking and problem-solving abilities, as students may become passive learners who only follow instructions and rely on technology to complete their assignments.

Another obstacle is the digital divide between those who have access to technology and those who do not. This division can exacerbate the achievement gap between pupils and produce uneven educational and professional growth chances. To reduce these consequences, all students must have access to the technology and resources necessary for success.

In conclusion, technology is rapidly becoming an integral part of the classroom experience and has the potential to alter the way we learn radically. 

Technology can help students flourish and realize their full potential by giving them access to individualized instruction, tools, and opportunities. While the benefits of technology in the classroom are undeniable, it's crucial to be mindful of the risks and take precautions to guarantee that all kids have access to the tools they need to thrive.

The Influence of Technology On Personal Relationships And Communication 

Technological advancements have profoundly altered how individuals connect and exchange information. It has changed the world in many ways in only a few decades. Because of the rise of the internet and various social media sites, maintaining relationships with people from all walks of life is now simpler than ever. 

However, concerns about how these developments may affect interpersonal connections and dialogue are inevitable in an era of rapid technological growth. In this piece, we'll discuss how the prevalence of digital media has altered our interpersonal connections and the language we use to express ourselves.

Direct Effect on Direct Interaction:

The disruption of face-to-face communication is a particularly stark example of how technology has impacted human connections. The quality of interpersonal connections has suffered due to people's growing preference for digital over human communication. Technology has been demonstrated to reduce the usage of nonverbal signs such as facial expressions, tone of voice, and other indicators of emotional investment in the connection.

Positive Impact on Long-Distance Relationships:

Yet there are positives to be found as well. Long-distance relationships have also benefited from technological advancements. The development of technologies such as video conferencing, instant messaging, and social media has made it possible for individuals to keep in touch with distant loved ones. It has become simpler for individuals to stay in touch and feel connected despite geographical distance.

The Effects of Social Media on Personal Connections:

The widespread use of social media has had far-reaching consequences, especially on the quality of interpersonal interactions. Social media has positive and harmful effects on relationships since it allows people to keep in touch and share life's milestones.

Unfortunately, social media has made it all too easy to compare oneself to others, which may lead to emotions of jealousy and a general decline in confidence. Furthermore, social media might cause people to have inflated expectations of themselves and their relationships.

A Personal Perspective on the Intersection of Technology and Romance

Technological advancements have also altered physical touch and closeness. Virtual reality and other technologies have allowed people to feel physical contact and familiarity in a digital setting. This might be a promising breakthrough, but it has some potential downsides. 

Experts are concerned that people's growing dependence on technology for intimacy may lead to less time spent communicating face-to-face and less emphasis on physical contact, both of which are important for maintaining good relationships.

In conclusion, technological advancements have significantly affected the quality of interpersonal connections and the exchange of information. Even though technology has made it simpler to maintain personal relationships, it has chilled interpersonal interactions between people. 

Keeping tabs on how technology is changing our lives and making adjustments as necessary is essential as we move forward. Boundaries and prioritizing in-person conversation and physical touch in close relationships may help reduce the harm it causes.

The Security and Privacy Implications of Increased Technology Use and Data Collection

The fast development of technology over the past few decades has made its way into every aspect of our life. Technology has improved many facets of our life, from communication to commerce. However, significant privacy and security problems have emerged due to the broad adoption of technology. In this essay, we'll look at how the widespread use of technological solutions and the subsequent explosion in collected data affects our right to privacy and security.

Data Mining and Privacy Concerns

Risk of Cyber Attacks and Data Loss

The Widespread Use of Encryption and Other Safety Mechanisms

The Privacy and Security of the Future in a Globalized Information Age

Obtaining and Using Individual Information

The acquisition and use of private information is a significant cause for privacy alarm in the digital age. Data about their customers' online habits, interests, and personal information is a valuable commodity for many internet firms. Besides tailored advertising, this information may be used for other, less desirable things like identity theft or cyber assaults.

Moreover, many individuals need to be made aware of what data is being gathered from them or how it is being utilized because of the lack of transparency around gathering personal information. Privacy and data security have become increasingly contentious as a result.

Data breaches and other forms of cyber-attack pose a severe risk.

The risk of cyber assaults and data breaches is another big issue of worry. More people are using more devices, which means more opportunities for cybercriminals to steal private information like credit card numbers and other identifying data. This may cause monetary damages and harm one's reputation or identity.

Many high-profile data breaches have occurred in recent years, exposing the personal information of millions of individuals and raising serious concerns about the safety of this information. Companies and governments have responded to this problem by adopting new security methods like encryption and multi-factor authentication.

Many businesses now use encryption and other security measures to protect themselves from cybercriminals and data thieves. Encryption keeps sensitive information hidden by encoding it so that only those possessing the corresponding key can decipher it. This prevents private information like bank account numbers or social security numbers from falling into the wrong hands.

Firewalls, virus scanners, and two-factor authentication are all additional security precautions that may be used with encryption. While these safeguards do much to stave against cyber assaults, they are not entirely impregnable, and data breaches are still possible.

The Future of Privacy and Security in a Technologically Advanced World

There's little doubt that concerns about privacy and security will persist even as technology improves. There must be strict safeguards to secure people's private information as more and more of it is transferred and kept digitally. To achieve this goal, it may be necessary to implement novel technologies and heightened levels of protection and to revise the rules and regulations regulating the collection and storage of private information.

Individuals and businesses are understandably concerned about the security and privacy consequences of widespread technological use and data collecting. There are numerous obstacles to overcome in a society where technology plays an increasingly important role, from acquiring and using personal data to the risk of cyber-attacks and data breaches. Companies and governments must keep spending money on security measures and working to educate people about the significance of privacy and security if personal data is to remain safe.

In conclusion, technology has profoundly impacted virtually every aspect of our lives, including society and culture, ethics, work, education, personal relationships, and security and privacy. The rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning has presented new ethical considerations, while automation is transforming the future of work. 

In education, technology has revolutionized the way we learn and access information. At the same time, our dependence on technology has brought new challenges in terms of personal relationships, communication, security, and privacy.

Jenni.ai is an AI tool that can help students write essays easily and quickly. Whether you're looking, for example, for essays on any of these topics or are seeking assistance in writing your essay, Jenni.ai offers a convenient solution. Sign up for a free trial today and experience the benefits of AI-powered writing assistance for yourself.

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Human-technology interactions

Technology shapes the way people behave, interact, grow, and develop, both within their own lives and in their relationships with others and their wider communities. At its best, technology allows people to bridge gaps, improve communication and enhance the efficiency of complex tasks. Yet greater immersion in the digital world undoubtedly creates new challenges and can adversely affect human-to-human interactions.

This Collection explores this complex and fast-evolving relationship between people and technologies. Multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives are welcomed on the design, use, adoption, and impact of technologies on people and societies. Research is invited on key themes, including but not limited to:

• Social, behavioural, cultural and philosophical perspectives on the impacts of technology and automation
• Domain-specific analyses (e.g. education, training, public health, recreation, workplace, business)
• Development of technologies and user experiences using insights from the social and behavioural sciences
• Ethical and policy issues arising from human-technology interactions
• Future perspectives on the role and place of technology in society

Marc Cheong

The University of Melbourne, Australia

Fábio Duarte

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Michal Klichowski

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland

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A diary study investigating the differential impacts of Instagram content on youths’ body image

• Hannah C. Glaser
• Sikke R. Jansma
• Hanneke Scholten

Dictionaries and lexicography in the AI era

Academic stress and cyberloafing among university students: the mediating role of fatigue and self-control

• Gabriel E. Nweke
• Yosra Jarrar
• Ibrahim Horoub

Beyond occupational exhaustion: exploring the influence of positive meaningful work on teachers’ psychoemotional well-being in the digital age

• F. D. Bretones

CyberGaia: Earth as cyborg

• Logan Thrasher Collins

The level of conscientiousness trait and technostress: a moderated mediation model

• Eva Ariño-Mateo
• Matías Arriagada Venegas
• David Pérez-Jorge

Risk assessments of virtual interactions on Saudi families

• Hanaa Faize A. Moubarak
• Asyraf Afthanorhan

AI chatbots contribute to global conservation injustices

• Danilo Urzedo
• Zarrin Tasnim Sworna
• Cathy J. Robinson

Exploring the effects of modality and variability on EFL learners’ pronunciation of English diphthongs: a student perspective on HVPT implementation

• Asma Almusharraf
• Amal Aljasser
• Elham Ghobain

Can digital tools foster ethical deliberation?

• Joanna Sleigh
• Shannon Hubbs
• Effy Vayena

Walking in the shoes of others through brain-to-brain interfaces: a phenomenological approach to the generation of a collective living body

• Nicola Liberati
• Dmytro Mykhailov

Digital competence in adolescents and young adults: a critical analysis of concomitant variables, methodologies and intervention strategies

• Annika Kreuder
• Ulrich Frick
• Sabine J. Schlittmeier

Online sharing behaviors driven by need for approval: the choice of individuals with low social intelligence and high gratitude?

• Yiying Huang

Is visual content modality a limiting factor for social capital? Examining user engagement within Instagram-based brand communities

• Agung Artha Kusuma
• Adi Zakaria Afiff
• Sri Rahayu Hijrah Hati

Gender and academic year as moderators of the efficacy of mobile app interventions to promote physical activity in adolescents: a randomized controlled trial

• Adrián Mateo-Orcajada
• Raquel Vaquero-Cristóbal
• Lucía Abenza-Cano

Multimedia use and its impact on the effectiveness of educators: a technology acceptance model perspective

• Siti Rohaida Binti Mohamed Zainal

The functional differentiation of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) and its ethical implications

• Xiao-yu Sun

ChatGPT as a COBUILD lexicographer

The concept of “interaction” in debates on human–machine interaction

• Sebastian Schleidgen
• Orsolya Friedrich
• Johanna Seifert

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Changing Humanity's Future

Technology and the Future of Humanity: Exploring the Possibilities and Challenges Ahead

As we stand on the threshold of a new era, the future of humanity beckons us with its vast potential and formidable challenges. It is a tapestry of innovation, scientific breakthroughs, and societal transformations that will shape the very fabric of our existence. The rapid pace of technological advancements, from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering, offers promises of great progress. However, it also raises ethical dilemmas and moral quandaries that require careful consideration. Simultaneously, we must confront urgent issues like climate change and the future of work amidst automation. In this journey into the future, we invite you to embrace conscious living as the key organizing principle for human life on Earth. By doing so, we can shape a future that is both prosperous and sustainable, ensuring the well-being of all.

Technological Advancements Shaping the Future?

 Here at Humanity's Team , we acknowledge that technological advancements have the power to shape the future of humanity. Artificial intelligence (AI) and genetic engineering hold immense potential for revolutionizing industries and enhancing our lives. It is crucial to navigate these advancements with a mindful approach. We underscore that living consciously allows us to see the underlying unity in all of life and feel the inner harmony present in all things. This awareness aligns with the growing realization in the world that all of life is deeply connected and benevolent. By embracing conscious living, we can harness the power of technology while ensuring its ethical use for the greater good.

Possible Challenges and Ethical Considerations

In exploring the possibilities of the future, we acknowledge the challenges and ethical considerations that lie ahead. The current state of society, marked by concerns such as COVID, war, social injustice, and climate change, calls for a shift in our approach to life.  We emphasize the need to turn inward and choose a more enlightened path, recognizing that living consciously is the catalyst for transformative change. This perspective aligns with the understanding that living mindfully means prioritizing serving all of life and embodying kindness, compassion, and unconditional love. By committing to our own self-awakening and supporting others on their journey, we can create a whole new way of living on Earth , ushering in a future that is rooted in unity and purpose.

Impact of AI on Society

Artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize society, but it also raises important considerations. Our focus lies in highlighting the importance of ethical guidelines and regulations, ensuring the promotion of fairness, privacy, and security in the utilization of AI. Additionally, as AI systems become more autonomous, questions arise about accountability and the potential ethical implications of their decisions. By having robust frameworks in place, we can govern the development and deployment of AI to ensure it benefits all of humanity. Embracing conscious living enables us to approach AI with wisdom, ensuring that it remains a tool for human empowerment rather than a threat to our autonomy.

The Future of Work and Automation

Automation presents a significant challenge to the future of work. As technology advances, many jobs will be automated, potentially leading to job displacement and economic inequality. We recognize the need to address this issue by investing in education and training programs that equip individuals with the skills needed for the jobs of the future. Moreover, exploring innovative solutions like universal basic income can help ensure that no one is left behind in the face of automation. By embracing conscious living, we can adapt to the changing landscape of work, focusing on personal growth and transformation while fostering a society that values well-being and fulfillment.

Genetic Engineering and Its Implications

The field of genetic engineering offers immense promise for improving human health and well-being. However, it also raises ethical questions about the limits of scientific intervention and the potential for creating societal divisions. Humanity's Team recognizes the need to approach genetic engineering with caution and thoughtful consideration. By living consciously, we recognize the interconnectedness of all life and respect the dignity and autonomy of every individual. It calls for the benefits of genetic engineering to be accessible to all, while ensuring responsible and ethical use that aligns with the well-being of individuals and society as a whole.

Space Exploration and Colonization

Space exploration and colonization have long captivated the human imagination. We acknowledge the importance of approaching these endeavors with a commitment to sustainability, international cooperation, and the preservation of our shared heritage. Mindful living invites us to consider the ethical implications of resource allocation, the preservation of celestial bodies, and the impact on indigenous life forms. By embracing a conscious perspective, we can explore and expand our horizons while ensuring the long-term well-being of humanity and the environments we encounter.

Environmental Sustainability in the Future

The future of humanity is inextricably linked to environmental sustainability. Humanity's Team recognizes the urgent need to address the growing crisis of climate change. Living mindfully means recognizing that we are stewards of the Earth and taking immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to renewable energy sources. By coming together and implementing sustainable practices, we can protect our environment, preserve biodiversity, and create a prosperous future for all.

Ethical Considerations for the Future of Humanity

As we navigate the uncharted territory of the future, we underscore the importance of confronting ethical considerations with conscious awareness. Living mindfully means recognizing the interconnectedness of all life and making decisions that prioritize the well-being of individuals, communities, and the planet. It calls for ethical guidelines, regulations, and frameworks to govern the development and deployment of technologies and ensure fairness, accountability, and the preservation of human dignity. By embracing conscious living, we can shape a future that is rooted in unity, compassion, and the greater good of all.

Conclusion: Embracing the Possibilities and Addressing the Challenges Ahead

We are standing on the threshold of a new era. The future of humanity is both filled with possibilities and accompanied by challenges. Yet we are not too far gone, and the solution is available to us right here, right now: living consciously. When we live consciously, we see how sacred the world is and it requires that we live with different priorities. 

We will become a conscious species, living in oneness with each other, other living creatures, our Creator, and the planet itself. And, this isn’t a ‘one hundred years from now’ kind of thing — as Tomorrow's God by Neale Donald Walsch says, '...humanity can reach critical mass within a very short period. Decades, not centuries. Perhaps not even decades but years.’

We invite you to embrace conscious living as the key organizing principle for human life on Earth. By turning inward, recognizing our interconnectedness, and living in alignment with the benevolence of all life, we can shape a future that is prosperous and sustainable. Through mindful living, we can navigate the rapid pace of technological advancements, address urgent issues like climate change and automation, and make ethical decisions that prioritize human well-being and the preservation of our planet. Let us embark on this journey together, guided by unity, purpose, and the understanding that living mindfully is the catalyst for transformative change.

Explore How To Accelerate Your Own Conscious Evolution with Neale Donald Walsch and Steve Farrell’s free webinar!

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Ep. 204: ‘Pay Attention When the Universe Whispers’ with Suzanne Giesemann

Ep. 203: ‘Reconnecting with Your Internal Power’ with Derek Rydall

Ep. 202: ‘Reaching Beyond The Veil’ with Dr. Eben Alexander, Karen Newell, Suzanne Giesemann, and Ross Hostetter

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• Technology Essay

Essay on Technology

The word "technology" and its uses have immensely changed since the 20th century, and with time, it has continued to evolve ever since. We are living in a world driven by technology. The advancement of technology has played an important role in the development of human civilization, along with cultural changes. Technology provides innovative ways of doing work through various smart and innovative means. 

Electronic appliances, gadgets, faster modes of communication, and transport have added to the comfort factor in our lives. It has helped in improving the productivity of individuals and different business enterprises. Technology has brought a revolution in many operational fields. It has undoubtedly made a very important contribution to the progress that mankind has made over the years.

The Advancement of Technology:

Technology has reduced the effort and time and increased the efficiency of the production requirements in every field. It has made our lives easy, comfortable, healthy, and enjoyable. It has brought a revolution in transport and communication. The advancement of technology, along with science, has helped us to become self-reliant in all spheres of life. With the innovation of a particular technology, it becomes part of society and integral to human lives after a point in time.

Technology is Our Part of Life:

Technology has changed our day-to-day lives. Technology has brought the world closer and better connected. Those days have passed when only the rich could afford such luxuries. Because of the rise of globalisation and liberalisation, all luxuries are now within the reach of the average person. Today, an average middle-class family can afford a mobile phone, a television, a washing machine, a refrigerator, a computer, the Internet, etc. At the touch of a switch, a man can witness any event that is happening in far-off places.  

Benefits of Technology in All Fields: 

We cannot escape technology; it has improved the quality of life and brought about revolutions in various fields of modern-day society, be it communication, transportation, education, healthcare, and many more. Let us learn about it.

Technology in Communication:

With the advent of technology in communication, which includes telephones, fax machines, cellular phones, the Internet, multimedia, and email, communication has become much faster and easier. It has transformed and influenced relationships in many ways. We no longer need to rely on sending physical letters and waiting for several days for a response. Technology has made communication so simple that you can connect with anyone from anywhere by calling them via mobile phone or messaging them using different messaging apps that are easy to download.

Innovation in communication technology has had an immense influence on social life. Human socialising has become easier by using social networking sites, dating, and even matrimonial services available on mobile applications and websites.

Today, the Internet is used for shopping, paying utility bills, credit card bills, admission fees, e-commerce, and online banking. In the world of marketing, many companies are marketing and selling their products and creating brands over the internet. 

In the field of travel, cities, towns, states, and countries are using the web to post detailed tourist and event information. Travellers across the globe can easily find information on tourism, sightseeing, places to stay, weather, maps, timings for events, transportation schedules, and buy tickets to various tourist spots and destinations.

Technology in the Office or Workplace:

Technology has increased efficiency and flexibility in the workspace. Technology has made it easy to work remotely, which has increased the productivity of the employees. External and internal communication has become faster through emails and apps. Automation has saved time, and there is also a reduction in redundancy in tasks. Robots are now being used to manufacture products that consistently deliver the same product without defect until the robot itself fails. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technology are innovations that are being deployed across industries to reap benefits.

Technology has wiped out the manual way of storing files. Now files are stored in the cloud, which can be accessed at any time and from anywhere. With technology, companies can make quick decisions, act faster towards solutions, and remain adaptable. Technology has optimised the usage of resources and connected businesses worldwide. For example, if the customer is based in America, he can have the services delivered from India. They can communicate with each other in an instant. Every company uses business technology like virtual meeting tools, corporate social networks, tablets, and smart customer relationship management applications that accelerate the fast movement of data and information.

Technology in Education:

Technology is making the education industry improve over time. With technology, students and parents have a variety of learning tools at their fingertips. Teachers can coordinate with classrooms across the world and share their ideas and resources online. Students can get immediate access to an abundance of good information on the Internet. Teachers and students can access plenty of resources available on the web and utilise them for their project work, research, etc. Online learning has changed our perception of education. 

The COVID-19 pandemic brought a paradigm shift using technology where school-going kids continued their studies from home and schools facilitated imparting education by their teachers online from home. Students have learned and used 21st-century skills and tools, like virtual classrooms, AR (Augmented Reality), robots, etc. All these have increased communication and collaboration significantly. 

Technology in Banking:

Technology and banking are now inseparable. Technology has boosted digital transformation in how the banking industry works and has vastly improved banking services for their customers across the globe.

Technology has made banking operations very sophisticated and has reduced errors to almost nil, which were somewhat prevalent with manual human activities. Banks are adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to increase their efficiency and profits. With the emergence of Internet banking, self-service tools have replaced the traditional methods of banking. 

You can now access your money, handle transactions like paying bills, money transfers, and online purchases from merchants, and monitor your bank statements anytime and from anywhere in the world. Technology has made banking more secure and safe. You do not need to carry cash in your pocket or wallet; the payments can be made digitally using e-wallets. Mobile banking, banking apps, and cybersecurity are changing the face of the banking industry.

Manufacturing and Production Industry Automation:

At present, manufacturing industries are using all the latest technologies, ranging from big data analytics to artificial intelligence. Big data, ARVR (Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality), and IoT (Internet of Things) are the biggest manufacturing industry players. Automation has increased the level of productivity in various fields. It has reduced labour costs, increased efficiency, and reduced the cost of production.

For example, 3D printing is used to design and develop prototypes in the automobile industry. Repetitive work is being done easily with the help of robots without any waste of time. This has also reduced the cost of the products. 

Technology in the Healthcare Industry:

Technological advancements in the healthcare industry have not only improved our personal quality of life and longevity; they have also improved the lives of many medical professionals and students who are training to become medical experts. It has allowed much faster access to the medical records of each patient. 

The Internet has drastically transformed patients' and doctors’ relationships. Everyone can stay up to date on the latest medical discoveries, share treatment information, and offer one another support when dealing with medical issues. Modern technology has allowed us to contact doctors from the comfort of our homes. There are many sites and apps through which we can contact doctors and get medical help. 

Breakthrough innovations in surgery, artificial organs, brain implants, and networked sensors are examples of transformative developments in the healthcare industry. Hospitals use different tools and applications to perform their administrative tasks, using digital marketing to promote their services.

Technology in Agriculture:

Today, farmers work very differently than they would have decades ago. Data analytics and robotics have built a productive food system. Digital innovations are being used for plant breeding and harvesting equipment. Software and mobile devices are helping farmers harvest better. With various data and information available to farmers, they can make better-informed decisions, for example, tracking the amount of carbon stored in soil and helping with climate change.

Disadvantages of Technology:

People have become dependent on various gadgets and machines, resulting in a lack of physical activity and tempting people to lead an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. Even though technology has increased the productivity of individuals, organisations, and the nation, it has not increased the efficiency of machines. Machines cannot plan and think beyond the instructions that are fed into their system. Technology alone is not enough for progress and prosperity. Management is required, and management is a human act. Technology is largely dependent on human intervention. 

Computers and smartphones have led to an increase in social isolation. Young children are spending more time surfing the internet, playing games, and ignoring their real lives. Usage of technology is also resulting in job losses and distracting students from learning. Technology has been a reason for the production of weapons of destruction.

Dependency on technology is also increasing privacy concerns and cyber crimes, giving way to hackers.

FAQs on Technology Essay

1. What is technology?

Technology refers to innovative ways of doing work through various smart means. The advancement of technology has played an important role in the development of human civilization. It has helped in improving the productivity of individuals and businesses.

2. How has technology changed the face of banking?

Technology has made banking operations very sophisticated. With the emergence of Internet banking, self-service tools have replaced the traditional methods of banking. You can now access your money, handle transactions, and monitor your bank statements anytime and from anywhere in the world. Technology has made banking more secure and safe.

3. How has technology brought a revolution in the medical field?

Patients and doctors keep each other up to date on the most recent medical discoveries, share treatment information, and offer each other support when dealing with medical issues. It has allowed much faster access to the medical records of each patient. Modern technology has allowed us to contact doctors from the comfort of our homes. There are many websites and mobile apps through which we can contact doctors and get medical help.

4. Are we dependent on technology?

Yes, today, we are becoming increasingly dependent on technology. Computers, smartphones, and modern technology have helped humanity achieve success and progress. However, in hindsight, people need to continuously build a healthy lifestyle, sorting out personal problems that arise due to technological advancements in different aspects of human life.

Essay on Science and Technology for Students and Children

500+ words essay on science and technology.

Essay on Science and Technology: Science and technology are important parts of our day to day life. We get up in the morning from the ringing of our alarm clocks and go to bed at night after switching our lights off. All these luxuries that we are able to afford are a resultant of science and technology . Most importantly, how we can do all this in a short time are because of the advancement of science and technology only. It is hard to imagine our life now without science and technology. Indeed our existence itself depends on it now. Every day new technologies are coming up which are making human life easier and more comfortable. Thus, we live in an era of science and technology.

Essentially, Science and Technology have introduced us to the establishment of modern civilization . This development contributes greatly to almost every aspect of our daily life. Hence, people get the chance to enjoy these results, which make our lives more relaxed and pleasurable.

Benefits of Science and Technology

If we think about it, there are numerous benefits of science and technology. They range from the little things to the big ones. For instance, the morning paper which we read that delivers us reliable information is a result of scientific progress. In addition, the electrical devices without which life is hard to imagine like a refrigerator, AC, microwave and more are a result of technological advancement.

Furthermore, if we look at the transport scenario, we notice how science and technology play a major role here as well. We can quickly reach the other part of the earth within hours, all thanks to advancing technology.

In addition, science and technology have enabled man to look further than our planet. The discovery of new planets and the establishment of satellites in space is because of the very same science and technology. Similarly, science and technology have also made an impact on the medical and agricultural fields. The various cures being discovered for diseases have saved millions of lives through science. Moreover, technology has enhanced the production of different crops benefitting the farmers largely.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

India and Science and Technology

Ever since British rule, India has been in talks all over the world. After gaining independence, it is science and technology which helped India advance through times. Now, it has become an essential source of creative and foundational scientific developments all over the world. In other words, all the incredible scientific and technological advancements of our country have enhanced the Indian economy.

Looking at the most recent achievement, India successfully launched Chandrayaan 2. This lunar exploration of India has earned critical acclaim from all over the world. Once again, this achievement was made possible due to science and technology.

In conclusion, we must admit that science and technology have led human civilization to achieve perfection in living. However, we must utilize everything in wise perspectives and to limited extents. Misuse of science and technology can produce harmful consequences. Therefore, we must monitor the use and be wise in our actions.

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Technological advancements affect the future of human rights.

The evolution of technology will have inevitably profound implications for the human rights framework.

From a practical perspective, technology can help move the human rights agenda forward. For instance, the use of satellite data can monitor the flow of displaced people; artificial intelligence can assist with image recognition to gather data on rights abuses; and the use of forensic technology can reconstruct crime scenes and hold perpetrators accountable.

Yet, for the multitude of areas in which emerging technologies advance the human rights agenda, technological developments have equal capacity to undermine efforts. From authoritarian states monitoring political dissidents by way of surveillance technologies, to the phenomenon of “deepfakes” destabilizing the democratic public sphere, ethical and policy-oriented implications must be taken into consideration with the development of technological innovations.  

Technological advancements also introduce new actors to the human rights framework. The movement has historically focused on the role of the state in ensuring rights and justice. Today, technological advancements and the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, in particular, necessitate interaction, collaboration, and coordination with leaders from business and technology in addition to government.

The Carr Center's Technology and Human Rights Program brings together the Technology and Human Rights Fellowship, with a new cohort selected each academic year to perform research on the challenges of technology to the human rights framework. Additionally, the program hosts the  Towards Life 3.0: Ethics and Technology in the 21st Century  webinar series, which draws upon a range of scholars, tech leaders, and public interest technologists to address the ethical aspects of the long-term impact of AI on society and human life.

A new sub-theme of the Technology and Human Rights Fellowship gives special focus to research on "Surveillance Democracy or Capitalism?," a cohort that connects fellows' projects to the research in Shoshana Zuboff's 2019 book,  The Age Surveillance Capitalism,  and Mathias Risse’s 2023 book,  Political Theory of the Digital Age . This portion of the Technology and Human Rights Fellowship is co-directed by Mathias Risse and Shoshana Zuboff. 

Our Technology and Human Rights Fellows

Alexandra Belias

Head of Product Policy & Partnerships DeepMind

Isabel Ebert

Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Business Ethics University of St. Gallen

Mona Elswah

DPhil Candidate Oxford Internet Institute

Albert Fox Cahn

Founder and Executive Director Surveillance Technology Oversight Project

Nnenna Ifeanyi-Ajufo

Associate Professor of Law Buckinghamshire New University

Dragana Kaurin

Founder and Executive Director Localization Lab

Nitika Khaitan

Criminal Defense Lawyer LL.M. Candidate, Harvard Law School

Sebastian Lehuede

Postdoctoral Scholar University of Cambridge

Matthew MacDonald

Doctoral Candidate in Philosophy Harvard University

Ella McPherson

Associate Professor University of Cambridge

Lucas Meier

Junior Research Fellow University of Cambridge

Sebastian Smart

Regional Director Chilean National Human Rights Institution

Sharath Srinivasan

David and Elaine Potter Associate Professor University of Cambridge

Phumzile Van Damme

Former Member of Parliament South Africa

From Our Tech & Human Rights Fellows

The consequences of video game moderation.

Online video games are social networks, afflicted with the same speech moderation questions as other social media platforms. 

Rights, Systematicity, and Misinformation

The dangers of new technology, misinformation, and how they intersect with human rights.

Does AI Understand Arabic?

Mona Elswah zooms in on the AI-powered content moderation by Meta’s Facebook in relation to managing Arabic content. 

Provocations for Human Rights & Technology

Breaking from big tech, human rights advocates working with technology envision data, platforms and systems aligned with pluralism and solidarity.

Technology Dependence & Racial Inequality

The exacerbation of racial inequality through the design of technologies shows how the evolution of digital technologies impacts our human rights.

Automation Anxiety

Rapid advances in AI have created a global sense of urgency around the ways that automated systems are changing human lives, but not all of these changes are necessarily for the better. 

Can We Move Fast Without Breaking Things?

As technology becomes ever more prevalent, evidence of the undesirable consequences has become too difficult to ignore.

Not My A.I.

Feminist theories and practices are important tools to acknowledge the existence of the political structures behind the deployment of technologies.

Online Platforms & Mental Health

In recent years, there has been growing concern regarding the unintended mental health impact of online platforms and whether they might be driving a public health crisis.

Towards Life 3.0 Webinars

Ai as a catalyst for participatory governance.

Beth Noveck discusses the transformative potential of AI in reshaping governance and strengthening democratic processes. 

AI and Ethics in Science Fiction

Award-winning science fiction author Jo Walton discusses artificial intelligence in science fiction. 

Technology, Repression, & Geopolitics

Steve Feldstein of the Carnegie Endowment discusses the role of artificial intelligence is reshaping repression.

Generative AI and Deepfakes

Samuel Gregory of WITNESS discusses the dangers of generative AI and deepfakes for our human rights.

Seeing Through the Fog in Russia and Ukraine

Aric Toler of Bellingcat discusses the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

AI and the Future of Democracy

Mathias Risse discusses the potential impacts of artificial intelligence on the future of our democracy.

Related Content

The age of surveillance capitalism, making a movement, black witnessing, smartphones, and the new protest journalism.

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✍️Essay on Humanity in 100 to 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Oct 26, 2023

Humanity could be understood through different perspectives. Humanity refers to acts of kindness, care, and compassion towards humans or animals. Humanity is the positive quality of human beings. This characteristic involves the feeling of love, care, reason, decision, cry, etc. Our history reveals many acts of inhuman and human behaviour. Such acts differentiate the good and the bad. Some of the key characteristics of Humanity are intelligence, creativity , empathy and compassion. Here are some sample essay on Humanity that will tell about the importance and meaning of Humanity!

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay on Humanity 100 Words
• 2.1 Importance of Humanity 

Also Read: Essay on Family

Essay on Humanity 100 Words

Humanity is the sum of all the qualities that make us human. We should seek inspiration from the great humanitarians from our history like Mahatma Gandhi , Nelson Mandela , Mother Teresa , and many more. They all devoted their life serving the cause of humanity. Their tireless efforts for the betterment of the needy make the world a better place. 

In a world suffering from a humanitarian crisis, there is an urgent need to raise awareness about the works of humanitarians who died serving for a noble cause. World Humanitarian Day is celebrated on 19 August every year to encourage humanity. 

Here are some examples of humanity:

• Firefighters risking their lives to save someone stuck in a burning building.
• Raising voices for basic human rights.
• Blood donation to save lives is also an example of humanity.
• A doctor volunteering to work in a war zone.

Also Read: Famous Personalities in India

Essay on Humanity 300 Words

Humanity is the concept that lies at the core of our existence. It contains the essence of what makes us humans. It encompasses our capacity for empathy, compassion, and understanding, and it is a driving force behind our progress as a species. In a world often characterized by division and war, the essence of humanity shines as a ray of hope, reminding us of our shared values and aspirations.

One of the defining characteristics of humanity is our ability to empathize with others. Empathy allows us to connect with people on a profound level, to feel their joys and sorrows, and to provide support in times of need. It bridges the gaps that might otherwise separate us, creating a sense of unity in the face of adversity. Even comforting a friend in distress is a sign of humanity. 

Also Read: Emotional Intelligence at Workplace

Importance of Humanity 

Compassion is the fundamental element of humanity. It is the driving force behind acts of kindness, charity, and selflessness. Humanity is important to protect cultural, religious, and geographical boundaries, as it is a universal language understood by all.

When we extend some help to those in need out of humanity, we affirm our commitment to the well-being of others and demonstrate our shared responsibility for the betterment of society.

Humanity balances out the evil doings in the world. It creates a better world for all to reside. Humanity is the foundation of the existence of humans because it makes us what we are and differentiate us from other living organism who do not possess the ability to think and feel. It is a testament to our potential for progress and unity.

In conclusion, humanity, with its pillars of empathy, compassion, and understanding, serves as a guiding light in a complex and divided world. These qualities remind us that, despite our differences, we are all part of the human family. 

Related Articles

Humanity is a complex characteristic of any human being. It includes the ability of a person to differentiate between good and bad and to show sympathy and shared connections as human beings. The human race can win any war be it harsh climatic conditions, pandemic, economic crisis, etc, if they have humanity towards each other. Humans have the potential to solve problems and make the world a better place for all.

An essay on humanity should be started with an introduction paragraph stating the zest of the complete essay. It should include the meaning of humanity. You need to highlight the positive characteristics of the act of humanity and how it can work for the betterment of society.

Humanity is very important because this characteristic of human beings makes the world a better place to live. It is what makes us humans. Humanity is the feeling of care and compassion towards other beings and gives us the ability to judge between right and wrong.

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

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Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack?

A Microsoft engineer noticed something was off on a piece of software he worked on. He soon discovered someone was probably trying to gain access to computers all over the world.

Credit... Jon Han

Supported by

By Kevin Roose

Reporting from San Francisco

• April 3, 2024

The internet, as anyone who works deep in its trenches will tell you, is not a smooth, well-oiled machine.

It’s a messy patchwork that has been assembled over decades, and is held together with the digital equivalent of Scotch tape and bubble gum. Much of it relies on open-source software that is thanklessly maintained by a small army of volunteer programmers who fix the bugs, patch the holes and ensure the whole rickety contraption, which is responsible for trillions of dollars in global G.D.P., keeps chugging along.

Last week, one of those programmers may have saved the internet from huge trouble.

His name is Andres Freund. He’s a 38-year-old software engineer who lives in San Francisco and works at Microsoft. His job involves developing a piece of open-source database software known as PostgreSQL, whose details would probably bore you to tears if I could explain them correctly, which I can’t.

Recently, while doing some routine maintenance, Mr. Freund inadvertently found a backdoor hidden in a piece of software that is part of the Linux operating system. The backdoor was a possible prelude to a major cyberattack that experts say could have caused enormous damage, if it had succeeded.

Now, in a twist fit for Hollywood, tech leaders and cybersecurity researchers are hailing Mr. Freund as a hero. Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, praised his “curiosity and craftsmanship.” An admirer called him “the silverback gorilla of nerds.” Engineers have been circulating an old, famous-among-programmers web comic about how all modern digital infrastructure rests on a project maintained by some random guy in Nebraska . (In their telling, Mr. Freund is the random guy from Nebraska.)

In an interview this week, Mr. Freund — who is actually a soft-spoken, German-born coder who declined to have his photo taken for this story — said that becoming an internet folk hero had been disorienting.

“I find it very odd,” he said. “I’m a fairly private person who just sits in front of the computer and hacks on code.”

The saga began earlier this year, when Mr. Freund was flying back from a visit to his parents in Germany. While reviewing a log of automated tests, he noticed a few error messages he didn’t recognize. He was jet-lagged, and the messages didn’t seem urgent, so he filed them away in his memory.

But a few weeks later, while running some more tests at home, he noticed that an application called SSH, which is used to log into computers remotely, was using more processing power than normal. He traced the issue to a set of data compression tools called xz Utils, and wondered if it was related to the earlier errors he’d seen.

(Don’t worry if these names are Greek to you. All you really need to know is that these are all small pieces of the Linux operating system, which is probably the most important piece of open-source software in the world. The vast majority of the world’s servers — including those used by banks, hospitals, governments and Fortune 500 companies — run on Linux, which makes its security a matter of global importance.)

Like other popular open-source software, Linux gets updated all the time, and most bugs are the result of innocent mistakes. But when Mr. Freund looked closely at the source code for xz Utils, he saw clues that it had been intentionally tampered with.

In particular, he found that someone had planted malicious code in the latest versions of xz Utils. The code, known as a backdoor, would allow its creator to hijack a user’s SSH connection and secretly run their own code on that user’s machine.

In the cybersecurity world, a database engineer inadvertently finding a backdoor in a core Linux feature is a little like a bakery worker who smells a freshly baked loaf of bread, senses something is off and correctly deduces that someone has tampered with the entire global yeast supply. It’s the kind of intuition that requires years of experience and obsessive attention to detail, plus a healthy dose of luck.

At first, Mr. Freund doubted his own findings. Had he really discovered a backdoor in one of the world’s most heavily scrutinized open-source programs?

“It felt surreal,” he said. “There were moments where I was like, I must have just had a bad night of sleep and had some fever dreams.”

But his digging kept turning up new evidence, and last week, Mr. Freund sent his findings to a group of open-source software developers. The news set the tech world on fire. Within hours, a fix was developed and some researchers were crediting him with preventing a potentially historic cyberattack.

“This could have been the most widespread and effective backdoor ever planted in any software product,” said Alex Stamos, the chief trust officer at SentinelOne, a cybersecurity research firm.

If it had gone undetected, Mr. Stamos said, the backdoor would have “given its creators a master key to any of the hundreds of millions of computers around the world that run SSH.” That key could have allowed them to steal private information, plant crippling malware, or cause major disruptions to infrastructure — all without being caught.

(The New York Times has sued Microsoft and its partner OpenAI on claims of copyright infringement involving artificial intelligence systems that generate text.)

Nobody knows who planted the backdoor. But the plot appears to have been so elaborate that some researchers believe only a nation with formidable hacking chops, such as Russia or China, could have attempted it.

According to some researchers who have gone back and looked at the evidence, the attacker appears to have used a pseudonym, “Jia Tan,” to suggest changes to xz Utils as far back as 2022. (Many open-source software projects are governed via hierarchy; developers suggest changes to a program’s code, then more experienced developers known as “maintainers” have to review and approve the changes.)

The attacker, using the Jia Tan name, appears to have spent several years slowly gaining the trust of other xz Utils developers and getting more control over the project, eventually becoming a maintainer, and finally inserting the code with the hidden backdoor earlier this year. (The new, compromised version of the code had been released, but was not yet in widespread use.)

Mr. Freund declined to guess who might have been behind the attack. But he said that whoever it was had been sophisticated enough to try to cover their tracks, including by adding code that made the backdoor harder to spot.

“It was very mysterious,” he said. “They clearly spent a lot of effort trying to hide what they were doing.”

Since his findings became public, Mr. Freund said, he had been helping the teams who are trying to reverse-engineer the attack and identify the culprit. But he’s been too busy to rest on his laurels. The next version of PostgreSQL, the database software he works on, is coming out later this year, and he’s trying to get some last-minute changes in before the deadline.

“I don’t really have time to go and have a celebratory drink,” he said.

Kevin Roose is a Times technology columnist and a host of the podcast " Hard Fork ." More about Kevin Roose

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Modern Technologies’ Impact on Human Lives Essay

Article by kocielnik et al. (2018), article by reddy et al., (2021), article by rogers et al., (2019).

Modern technologies allow people to collect a lot of data about their activities, for example, distance traveled and similar information. However, a gap remains in analyzing and using this data for personal learning. Therefore, it is necessary to involve users in reflection, which expands self-knowledge, improves goal setting and self-control in correcting behavior. Existing capabilities as diaries in applications imply that reflection will occur on its own after the data collected is provided. However, conversations can better trigger thinking, and in the context of technologies – mini-dialogues. Kocielnik et al. (2018) check how a dialogue system based on different levels of learning theory (Noticing, Understanding, and Future Actions) will help users reflect in fitness applications. To achieve their goal, they conducted several workshops and field deployment.

Creating dialogs to encourage reflection is a complex challenge for developers. Twelve people participated in the author’s workshops to make the reflective questions. They discussed reflection on their daily activity and proposed reflexive questions of three levels (Noticing, Understanding, and Future Actions) in three categories – personal goals, goals and personal data usage, other people’s goals, and data. In addition to generating 275 questions, the authors noted the limitations of existing systems that they seek to avoid – focus on notifications rather than reflection, boredom due to repetitions, demotivation, and platform inconvenience.

As a result, authors developed Reflection Companion implemented as a PHP server and working through SMS sent at a random time, controlled through the Twilio API. Moreover, they applied a two-step minidialogues structure, personalization, and daily reflection sessions to stimulate reflection. After field deployment, 19 people participated in interviews and praised the engagement, performance of the system, and reflection triggers. They noted an increase in awareness, an understanding of own actions, and motivation.

Intellectual things are increasingly becoming part of people’s lives. Reddy et al. (2021) believe that consequently, a desire to talk with these things appears. At the moment, conversational agents (CA), such as Google Assistant, act as intermediaries for communication between people and things, but established programs limit such interactions. The authors applied a more-than-human approach, Thing Perspective exercise, and speculative Thing Interview to highlight the ways and themes in the relationship between people and things surrounding them. The authors endowed voices with several items from their daily use and conducted interviews speaking on their behalf. Determined topics can inspire the future development of things with conversational capabilities. After the interview, the authors reflected process and recorded fragments of the conversation, which they considered the most significant.

The topics that arose during the interview process form the basis of the article. The topic Breaking silences notes that things already communicate in a certain way with their owners, for example, the sounds of boiling for a kettle and a coffee maker, emphasizing that communication occurs not only through voice. This fact inspired the authors to reflect on the capabilities of CAs in the use of sounds, their amplification, and other aspects. Navigating proximity explores the relationship between an object’s place and its perception by a person; for example, the earpiece feels like part of the ear. The spatiality and distributing agency determines that things and people can have perceptual gaps; for instance, doors could know who knocks on them while a person does not know. Altered presence raises the question of how much things could judge and influence their owners.

The theme of Permanence/Impermanence inspired the authors to think about the memory and durability of CAs. Finally, World as perceived by the thing raises the question of how things could know the world around us. Thus, the authors shifted focus from how items with voice interfaces can be developed to the relationship between people and things during their research. However, the themes raised may be the basis of future research on the design of everyday items.

Technology has significantly changed human lives, and there is debate about whether changes are positive or harmful. Rogers et al. (2019) explore the role of design research in protecting the positive effects of technology by focusing on voice-enabled Internet. Human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers and designers can play a significant role in presenting modern technologies to the public and in future interactions to regulate them. The authors’ goal is to create a design research film that will simultaneously explore opportunities and protect a healthy approach to creating voice-driven products.

At various stages of their work, the authors shared ideas, made a film to implement ideas, and evaluated its potential impact. The main themes that the authors wanted to emphasize are

• The consent model is dead: it draws attention to the problems of using any voice to activate devices.
• Visibility is at the crux of trust: it indicates the need to display processes in devices controlled by voice.
• Behind every object is an ideology: consumers should understand the ideologies behind the technology.
• Our bodies are our sensors: explores how the approach of technology to people will affect them.

Wanting to cover the themes, make films more entertaining, show the possibilities of artificial intelligence education, and demonstrate the importance of both trust in technology and media literacy, the authors created three concepts for films:

• Eddi is a voice assistant who learns from his owner.
• Karma is a voice assistant that uses personal data for calls on behalf of the owner.
• Sig is an assistant whose identity can be changed by the owner.

A film with plots based on these ideas was presented at the London Design Festival. Thus, through exciting content, the authors drew attention to some exciting problems related to the use of voice-controlled technologies. They also presented potential directions for technologies development that protect a healthier voice-enabled Internet approach.

Kocielnik, R., Xiao, L., Avrahami, D., & Hsieh, G. (2018). Reflection companion: a conversational system for engaging users in reflection on physical activity . Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies , 2 (2), 1-26.

Reddy, A., Kocaballi, A. B., Nicenboim, I., Søndergaard, M. L. J., Lupetti, M. L., Key, C., Speed, C., Lockton, D., Giaccardi, E., Grommé, F., Robbins, H., Primlani, N., Yurman, P., Sumartojo, S., Phan, T., Bedö, V., & Strengers, Y. (2021). Making everyday things talk: Speculative conversations into the future of voice interfaces at home . Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 1-16.

Rogers, J., Clarke, L., Skelly, M., Taylor, N., Thomas, P., Thorne, M., Larsen, S., Odrozek, K., Kloiber, J., Bihr., P., Jain, A., Arden, J., & von Grafenstein, M. (2019). Our friends electric: Reflections on advocacy and design research for the voice enabled internet. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-13.

• Chicago (A-D)
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IvyPanda. (2023, July 30). Modern Technologies' Impact on Human Lives. https://ivypanda.com/essays/modern-technologies-impact-on-human-lives/

"Modern Technologies' Impact on Human Lives." IvyPanda , 30 July 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/modern-technologies-impact-on-human-lives/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Modern Technologies' Impact on Human Lives'. 30 July.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Modern Technologies' Impact on Human Lives." July 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/modern-technologies-impact-on-human-lives/.

1. IvyPanda . "Modern Technologies' Impact on Human Lives." July 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/modern-technologies-impact-on-human-lives/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Modern Technologies' Impact on Human Lives." July 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/modern-technologies-impact-on-human-lives/.

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A Guide to the Total Solar Eclipse

By Rivka Galchen

On April 8th, the moon will partly and then entirely block out the sun. The total eclipse will be visible to those in a hundred-and-fifteen-mile-wide sash, called the path of totality, slung from the hip of Sinaloa to the shoulder of Newfoundland. At the path’s midline, the untimely starry sky will last nearly four and a half minutes, and at the edges it will last for a blink. On the ground, the lunacy around total eclipses often has a Lollapalooza feel. Little-known places in the path of totality—Radar Base, Texas; Perryville, Missouri—have been preparing, many of them for years, to accommodate the lawn chairs, soul bands, food trucks, sellers of commemorative pins, and porta-potties. Eclipse viewers seeking solitude may also cause problems: the local government of Mars Hill, Maine, is reminding people that trails on Mt. Katahdin are closed, because it is mud season and therefore dangerous. I have a friend whose feelings and opinions often mirror my own; when I told her a year ago that I had booked an Airbnb in Austin in order to see this eclipse, she looked at me as if I’d announced I was bringing my daughter to a pox party.

Altering plans because of this periodic celestial event has a long tradition, however. On May 28, 585 B.C., according to Herodotus, an eclipse led the Medes and Lydians, after more than five years of war, to become “alike anxious” to come to peace. More than a hundred years before that, the Assyrian royalty of Mesopotamia protected themselves from the ill omen of solar eclipses—and from other celestial signs perceived as threatening—by installing substitute kings and queens for the day. Afterward, the substitutes were usually killed, though in one instance, when the real king died, the stand-in, who had been a gardener, held the throne for decades. More recently, an eclipse on May 29, 1919, enabled measurements that recorded the sun bending the path of light in accordance with, and thus verifying, Einstein’s theory of general relativity .

Any given spot on the Earth witnesses a total solar eclipse about once every three hundred and seventy-five years, on average, but somewhere on the planet witnesses a total solar eclipse about once every eighteen months. In Annie Dillard’s essay “ Total Eclipse ,” she says of a partial solar eclipse that it has the relation to a total one that kissing a man has to marrying him, or that flying in a plane has to falling out of a plane. “Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it,” she writes. During a partial eclipse, you put on the goofy paper eyeglasses and see the outline of the moon reducing its rival, the sun, to a solar cassava, or slimmer. It’s a cool thing to see, and it maybe hints at human vulnerability, the weirdness of light, the scale and reality of the world beyond our planet. But, even when the moon blocks ninety-nine per cent of the sun, it’s still daylight out. When the moon occludes the whole of the sun, everyday expectations collapse: the temperature quickly drops, the colors of shadows become tinny, day flips to darkness, stars precipitously appear, birds stop chirping, bees head back to their hives, hippos come out for their nightly grazing, and humans shout or hide or study or pray or take measurements until, seconds or minutes later, sunlight, and the familiar world, abruptly returns.

It is complete earthly luck that total eclipses follow such a dramatic procession. Our moon, which is about four hundred times less wide than our sun, is also about four hundred times closer to us. For this reason, when the Earth, moon, and sun align with one another, our moon conceals our sun precisely, like a cap over a lens. (I stress “our moon” because other moons around other planets, including planets that orbit other stars, have eclipses that almost certainly don’t line up so nicely.) If our moon were smaller or farther away, or our sun larger or nearer, our sun would never be totally eclipsed. Conversely, if our moon were larger or closer (or our sun smaller or farther away) then our sun would be wholly eclipsed—but we would miss an ecliptic revelation. During totality, a thin circle of brightness rings the moon. Johannes Kepler thought that the circle was the illumination of the atmosphere of the moon, but we now know that the moon has next to no atmosphere and that the bright circle (the corona) is the outermost part of the atmosphere of the sun . A million times less bright than the sun itself, the corona is visible (without a special telescope) only during an eclipse. If we’re judging by images and reports, the corona looks like a fiery halo. I have never seen the sun’s corona. The first total solar eclipse I’ll witness will be this one.

The physicist Frank Close saw a partial eclipse on a bright day in Peterborough, England, in June, 1954, at the age of eight. Close’s science teacher, using cricket and soccer balls to represent the moon and the sun, explained the shadows cast by the moon; Close attributes his life in science to this experience. The teacher also told the class that, forty-five years into the future, there would be a total eclipse visible from England, and Close resolved to see it. That day turned out to be overcast, so the moon-eclipsed sun wasn’t visible—but Close described seeing what felt to him like a vision of the Apocalypse, with a “tsunami of darkness rushing towards me . . . as if a black cloak had been cast over everything” and then the clouds over the sun dispersing briefly when totality was nearly over. Close has since seen six more eclipses and written two books about them, the first a memoir of “chasing” eclipses (“ Eclipse: Journeys to the Dark Side of the Moon ”) and the second a general explainer (“ Eclipses: What Everyone Needs to Know ”).

“I’ve tried to describe each of the eclipses I’ve seen, and I do describe them, but it’s not really describable. There’s no natural phenomenon to compare it to,” he told me recently. Describing an eclipse to someone who hasn’t seen one is like trying to describe the Beatles’ “Good Day Sunshine” to someone who has never heard music, he said. “You can describe notes, frequencies of vibration, but we all know that’s missing the whole thing.” Total eclipses are also close to impossible to film in any meaningful way. The light level plummets, which your eye can process in a way that, say, your mobile phone can’t.

In the half hour or so before totality, as the moon makes its progress across the circle of the sun, colors shift to hues of red and brown. (Dillard, a magus of describing the indescribable, writes that people looked to her as though they were in “a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages”—the faces seemed to be those of people now dead, which made her miss her own century, and the people she knew, and the real light of day.) As more of the sun is covered, its light reaches us less directly. “Much of the light that you will be getting is light that has been scattered by the atmosphere from ten to twenty miles away,” Close said. Thus the color shift.

He showed me the equipment that he has used to watch six eclipses: a piece of cardboard about the size of an LP sleeve, with a square cut out of the middle, covered by dark glass. “I used gaffer tape to affix a piece of welder’s glass,” he said. There are small holes at the edge of the board, so he can see how shadows change as the moon eclipses more, and then less, of the sun. When sunlight comes from a crescent rather than from a circle, shadows become elongated along one axis and narrowed along another. “If you spread out your fingers, and look at the shadow of your hand, your fingers will look crablike, as if they have claws on them,” Close said.

Each eclipse Close has seen has been distinct. On a boat in the South Seas, the moon appeared more greenish black than black, “because of reflected light from the water,” he said. In the Sahara, the millions of square miles of sand acted as a mirror, so it was less dark, and Close could see earthshine making the formations on the moon’s surface visible. At another eclipse, he found himself focussed on the appearance of the light of the sun as it really is: white. “We think of it as yellow, but of course that’s just atmospheric scattering, the same mechanism that makes the sky appear blue,” he said. When he travelled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with his family, in 2017, his seven-year-old grandson said, half a minute before totality, that the asphalt road was “moving.” “It was these subtle bands of darker and lighter, moving along at walking pace. The effect it gave to your eye was that you thought the pavement was rippling,” Close said. He had never seen that before.

The moon doesn’t emit light; it only reflects it, like a mirror. In Oscar Wilde’s play “ Salomé ,” each character sees in the moon something of what he fears, or desires. The etymology of “eclipse” connects to the Greek word for failure, and for leaving, for abandonment. In Chinese, the word for eclipse comes from the term that also means “to eat,” likely a reference to the millennia-old description of solar eclipses happening when a dragon consumes the sun. If the moon is a mirror, then the moon during a solar eclipse is a dark and magic mirror.

A Hindu myth explains eclipses through the story of Svabhanu, who steals a sip of the nectar of the gods. The Sun and the Moon tell Vishnu, one of the most powerful of the gods. Vishnu decapitates Svabhanu, but not before he can swallow the sip of nectar. The nectar has made his head, now called Rahu, immortal. As revenge, Rahu periodically eats the Sun—creating eclipses. But, his throat being cut, he can’t swallow the Sun, so it reëmerges again and again. Rahu is in the wrong, obviously, but in ancient representations of him he is often grinning. To me, he looks mischievous rather than frightening.

The first story I can remember reading that featured an eclipse is Mark Twain’s “ A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court .” The wizard Merlin imprisons an engineer named Hank Morgan, who has accidentally travelled from nineteenth-century America to sixth-century Camelot. Morgan, a man who dresses and acts strangely for the sixth century, finds himself, as one would, sentenced to be burned at the stake. But he gets out of it—by convincing others that he is the cause of an eclipse that he knew would occur. As seems only natural for a beloved American story, it’s the (man from the) future that wins this particular standoff, over the ancient ways of Merlin.

To Close, the beginning of an eclipse feels like “a curtains-up statement from the heavens: Science works. Come back in an hour.” He finds it particularly moving that someone, using only measurements and reason, and the laws of celestial motion, could have predicted the April 8th eclipse down to the minute, maybe to the second. The eclipse that surprised the warring Medes and Lydians into peace may not have been a surprise to all; it is said to have been predicted by Thales of Miletus.

I asked Close if he’d ever met someone on his eclipse journeys who wasn’t much impressed. He said no. Still, it’s possible that I and my mirror friend both have the right intuition about this experience we’ve never had. In the last chapter of Roberto Bolaño’s novella “French Comedy of Horrors,” the young narrator witnesses an eclipse while at a soda fountain with his friends; he also witnesses the people around him witnessing the eclipse, including a couple doing a dance “that was somehow anachronistic but at the same time terrifying.” On his way home, he answers a ringing pay phone and finds himself in a lengthy conversation with a stranger who claims to be a member of the Clandestine Surrealist Group, writers living in Paris’s sewer system. The stranger invites the narrator (who wants desperately to be a poet) to join them, at an appointed time and place, months into the future—but says that they can’t pay for his ticket.

His whole eclipse day is banal (soda fountain, pay phone, the price of things) but also tempting, literally surreal, and like a dream. When our hero finally makes it home, at dawn, he sees Achille, the local drunk. Achille tells him that “the eclipse thing wasn’t such a big deal and that people were always getting excited about nothing. In his opinion, true and incredible things happened in the sky every day.” Nature’s everyday wonders might be the more clandestine ones. ♦

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Untangling Disinformation

Using ai to detect ai-generated deepfakes can work for audio — but not always.

Huo Jingnan

As deepfake generation technology improves and leaves ever-fewer telltale signs that humans can rely on, computational methods for detection are becoming the norm. But technological solutions are no silver bullet for the problem of detecting AI-generated voices. Aaron Marin for NPR hide caption

As deepfake generation technology improves and leaves ever-fewer telltale signs that humans can rely on, computational methods for detection are becoming the norm. But technological solutions are no silver bullet for the problem of detecting AI-generated voices.

Artificial intelligence is supercharging audio deepfakes , with alarm bells ringing in areas from politics to financial fraud.

The federal government has banned robocalls using voices generated by AI and is offering a cash prize for solutions to mitigate harms from voice cloning frauds . At the same time, researchers and the private sector are racing to develop software to detect voice clones, with companies often marketing them as fraud-detection tools.

The stakes are high. Detection software getting it wrong can carry serious implications.

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"If we label a real audio as fake, let's say, in a political context, what does that mean for the world? We lose trust in everything," says Sarah Barrington, an AI and forensics researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

"And if we label fake audios as real, then the same thing applies. We can get anyone to do or say anything and completely distort the discourse of what the truth is."

As deepfake generation technology improves and leaves ever-fewer telltale signs that humans can rely on, computational methods for detection are becoming the norm.

But an NPR experiment indicated that technological solutions are no silver bullet for the problem of detecting AI-generated voices.

Probably yes? Probably not

NPR identified three deepfake audio detection providers — Pindrop Security , AI or Not and AI Voice Detector . Most claim their tools are over 90% accurate at differentiating between real audio and AI-generated audio. Pindrop only works with businesses, while the others are available for individuals to use.

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NPR submitted 84 clips of five to eight seconds to each provider. About half of the clips were snippets of real radio stories from three NPR reporters. The rest were cloned voices of the same reporters saying the same words as in the authentic clips.

The voice clones were generated by technology company PlayHT. To clone each voice, NPR submitted four 30-second clips of audio — one snippet of a previously aired radio story of each reporter and one recording made for this purpose.

Our experiment revealed that the detection software often failed to identify AI-generated clips, or misidentified real voices as AI-generated, or both. While Pindrop Security's tool got all but three samples correct, AI or Not's tool got about half wrong, failing to catch most of the AI-generated clips.

The verdicts these companies provide aren't just a binary yes or no. They give their results in the form of probabilities between 0% and 100%, indicating how likely it is that the audio was generated by AI.

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AI Voice Detector's CEO, Abdellah Azzouzi, told NPR in an interview that if the model predicts that a clip was 60% or more likely to be generated by AI, then it considers the clip AI-generated. Under this definition, the tool wrongly identified 20 out of the 84 samples NPR submitted.

AI Voice Detector updated its website after the interview. While the probability percentages for most previously tested clips remained the same, they now include an additional note laying out a new way of interpreting those results. Clips flagged as 80% or more are now deemed "highly likely to be generated by AI." Those scoring between 20% and 80% are "inconclusive." Clips rated less than 20 are "highly likely to be real."

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In an email to NPR, the company did not respond to NPR's questions about why the thresholds changed, but says it's "always updating our services to offer the best to those who trust us." The company also removed the claim from its website that the tool was more than 90% accurate.

Under these revised definitions, AI Voice Detector's tool got five of the clips NPR submitted wrong and returned inconclusive results for 32 clips.

While the other providers also provide results as probabilities, they did not provide results marked as inconclusive.

Using AI to catch AI

While NPR's anecdotal experiment is not a formal test or academic study, it highlights some challenges in the tricky business of deepfake detection.

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Detection technologies often involve training machine learning models. Since machine learning and artificial intelligence are virtually the same technology, people also call this approach "using AI to detect AI."

Barrington has both tested various detection methods and developed one with her team. Researchers curate a dataset of real audio and fake audio, transforming each into a series of numbers that are fed into the computer to analyze. The computer then finds the patterns humans cannot see to distinguish the two.

"Things like in the frequency domain, or very sort of small differences between audio signals and the noise, and things that we can't hear but to a computer are actually quite obvious," says Barrington.

Amit Gupta, head of product at Pindrop Security, says one of the things their algorithm does when evaluating a piece of audio is to reverse-engineer the vocal tract — the actual physical properties of a person's body — that would be needed to produce the sound. They called one fraudster's voice that they caught "Giraffe Man."

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"When you hear the sequence of sound from that fraudster, it is only possible for a vocal tract where a human had a 7-foot-long neck," Gupta says. "Machines don't have a vocal tract. ... And that's where they make mistakes."

Anatoly Kvitnitsky, CEO of AI or Not, says his company trains its machine learning model based on clients' specific-use cases. As a result, he said, the general-use model the public has access to is not as accurate.

"The format is a little bit different depending on if it's a phone call ... if it's a YouTube video. If it's a Spotify song, or TikTok video. All of those formats leave a different kind of trace."

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While often better at detecting fake audio than people, machine learning models can easily be stumped in the wild. Accuracy can drop if the audio is degraded or contains background noise. Model makers need to train their detectors on every new AI audio generator on the market to detect the subtle differences between them and real people. With new deepfake models being released frequently and open source models becoming available for everyone to tweak and use, it's a game of whack-a-mole.

After NPR told AI or Not which provider it used to generate the deepfake audio clips, the company released an updated detection model that returned better results. It caught most of the AI clips, but also misidentified more real voices as AI. Its tool cannot process some other clips and returned error messages.

What's more, all of these accuracy rates only pertain to English-language audio. Machine learning models need to analyze real and fake audio samples from each language to tell the difference between them.

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While there seems to be an arm's race between deepfake voice generators and deepfake voice detectors, Barrington says it's important for the two sides to work together to make detection better.

ElevenLabs, whose technology was used to create the audio for the deepfake Biden robocall , has a publicly available tool that detects its own product. Previously, the website claimed that the tool also detects audio generated by other providers, but independent research has shown poor results. PlayHT says a tool to detect AI voices — including its own — is still under development.

Detection at scale isn't there yet

Tech giants including major social media companies such as Meta, TikTok and X have expressed their interest in "developing technology to watermark, detect and label realistic content that's been created with AI." Most platforms' efforts seem to focus more on video, and it's unclear whether that would include audio, says Katie Harbath, chief global affairs officer at Duco Experts, a consultancy on trust and safety.

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In March, YouTube announced that it would require content creators to self-label some videos made with generative AI before they upload videos. This follows similar steps from TikTok . Meta says it's also going to roll out labeling on Facebook and Instagram, using watermarks from companies that produce generative AI content.

Barrington says specific algorithms could detect deepfakes of world leaders whose voices are well known and documented, such as President Biden. That won't be the case for people who are less well known.

"What people should be very careful about is the potential for deepfake audio in down-ballot races," Harbath says. With less local journalism and with fact-checkers at capacity, deepfakes could cause disruption.

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As for scam calls impersonating loved ones, there's no high-tech detection that flags them. You and your family can come up with questions a scammer wouldn't know the answer to in advance, and the FTC recommends calling back to make sure the call was not spoofed.

"Anyone who says 'here's an algorithm,' just, you know, a web browser plug-in, it will tell you yes or no — I think that's hugely misleading," Barrington says.