social science essay topics

social science essay topics

Exploring the Intersection of Technology and Society: Social Science Perspectives

1. Introduction to Technology and Society

With the current advancement of sensor and data storage technologies, it has never been a better time to engage these social scientific contributions to technology. This is true not just at the level of tool and technique to ensure the responsible development and deployment, but also in research that uncovers and describes the dynamics and processes in society more broadly. At present, it is our contention that technological advance is occurring at a greater pace than studies that attempt to understand the implications for society can hope to keep up with. This special issue is focused on the latter of these two interests. That is, the contributions are works that endeavor to investigate and describe the interplay between technology and society. The individual papers cover a diverse range of technologies and equally diverse research questions, using tools to understand the relationship drawn from across the social sciences.

Advances in technology are key to the future well-being of our society. Many grand challenges for the 21st century, such as sustainable development, food and water security, new energy sources, and the prevention and control of diseases, are related to the creation and application of new technologies. Although the impact of technology on our world is undeniably great, the social and cultural factors that shape and deploy it remain poorly understood. Social science offers an array of concepts and theoretical points of departure that can help technologists and scientists involved in technology research and development to build a set of guiding principles and to adopt methods that bring together their skills and areas of expertise with those from social science.

2. Theoretical Frameworks in Social Science Research

The focus of this chapter is the ways in which social science research can contribute to advancing knowledge about the complex relationships that exist between the development and use of technology on the one hand and the abilities of households, communities, businesses, and public organizations to function effectively on the other. Technology research that is conducted within the social sciences concerns itself explicitly with the ways in which the work of people has formed, and would continue to shape, both technical innovation and the development in the social agencies that diffuse and/or exploit the capacity of technology. The technology research conducted in the social sciences shares goals, an area of investigation, theoretical perspectives, research methodologies, and methodological perspectives, and can contribute to a shared body of knowledge, with research done by those in traditional social science and humanities departments.

This chapter focuses on two types of questions. The first concerns specific empirical examples of research about technology and society that have employed the methods of social science. Here, we focus particularly on examples of research that. The specific method that social scientists employ to explore the intersection of technology and society is theoretically informed empirical research. To provide some context to our consideration of the contributions of theoretical perspectives from the social sciences to empirical research in the field of technology and society, we summarize a number of the more prominent of these perspectives.

3. Impact of Technology on Social Structures and Relationships

If one’s objective is to assess the well-being of the population, the evaluation of GNP or related statistics involves an aggregation calculus in which distinct components of life satisfaction are weighed according to their relative importance. Measurement carries the danger of taking “goals” or “values” for granted (i.e., assuming that the policy maker knows how to compare and assess diverse private tastes and that the scale for this purpose is also known) and that policymakers may have information not available to the individuals producing our information about private preferences.

Scientists and others concerned with the measurement of aspects of well-being have created a confusing variety of metrics, each with its virtues and defects. If one wishes to assess priorities among competing policy goals, it is essential to create laundry lists of distinct dimensions of well-being that correspond to potential government actions or situations produced by the economy. If one wishes to assign evaluation of different policies to a single scaling of a multifaceted measure of well-being, it is important to determine whether the distinct dimensions are indeed descriptive of the model. In general, inattention to the empirical foundation of the aggregation calculus may lead authors to use GNP and related statistics less cleanly than has been suggested by the critiques of the past.

4. Ethical Considerations in Technological Advancements

Governing bodies always need to make sure that technological developments are used for the good of the communities, but this is not always so, and the balance between benefiting the community in ways of easing traffic flows, reducing traffic jams, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, detecting crime, detecting the outbreak of diseases, etc. has its negative side that infringes on citizens’ rights, privacy, and freedom. Complex indicate how privacy has been viewed in the history of electronic surveillance. also considered the relationship between power and surveillance, but following World War II, he changed emphasis to power and security as surveillance. The ethical risk in surveillance technologies and practices, in general, is huge, so how to govern future AI implementation and development, especially practices related to risk-benefit balances? Also, it depends on the creator’s consciousness, personal values, and choices. Intelligence technology developments have to be designed to ensure the responsible use of such rights, freedom, and other ethical rights. All these ethical issues are also compounded by the fact that AI tools and technologies are being made commercially and operationally available to AI professionals to just get things done. Such issues associated with the use and potential misuse of intelligence are, in fact, known from long-standing security literature.

Technological advancements challenge the ethical traditions which society has developed over time. The typical dilemmas occur at the intersection of safety, security, and personal rights when considering the potential negative implications of AI and the smart city on, for example, predictive policing, hate speech, employment practices when intelligent AI or robotics can do such work so much more efficiently and effectively than a human can. provides a useful synopsis of the long-standing ethical debates associated with the development of surveillance technologies, and enjoys that this technical-normative intersection is similar to that which has occurred in the domain of information security. In this same spirit, this research attempts to explore the technical option space and provide a hint of the associated normative and value space, recognizing that there are multiple interpretations, value drift, framings depending on the individual or society seeking an AGI end result. However, the research results also suggest that there is only an extremely limited technical option space at this time to create AGI. Privacy and anonymity issues are key issues in smart city developments and also raise ethical issues.

5. Future Directions in Technology and Society Research

In conclusion, research on how technology and society shape each other has a rich intellectual legacy and raises a mix of pressing and timeless social questions. While much of the current media focus tends to hype technological change as excessive and unprecedented, cyclical bursts of innovation regularly refuel the hopes placed in industrial and science policy and the economy for bringing back “the golden days of yore” by creating jobs and generating knowledge and financial and political power. In descriptive terms, imbuing machines with intelligence is not only an old and recurring dream, but it is also the key to multiple whisking powers and the maintenance of hierarchical systems of money positioning.

This paper takes stock of research on the intersections of technology and society by providing a review of articles published in the journal Science, Technology, & Human Values. The article then highlights emerging themes in the study of science, technology, and society, with specific attention to the growing use of digital methods and social media data. We conclude with suggestions for further interdisciplinary research on technology and society, including a renewed emphasis on industrial policy and participatory governance in guiding innovation.