Understanding the impact of technologies

• Emerging Technology


  Radically novel and relatively fast growing technology characterized by a certain degree of coherence persisting over time and with the potential to exert a considerable impact on the socio-economic domain(s) which is observed in terms of the composition of actors, institutions and patterns of interactions among those, along with the associated knowledge production processes. Its most prominent impact, however, lies in the future and so in the emergence phase is still somewhat uncertain and ambiguous.
• Five Important Attributes of Emerging Technologies

  • Radical novelty
  • Relatively fast growth
  • Coherence
  • Prominent impact
  • Uncertainty
• Radical novelty


  • Technology's ability to be "revolutionary" in terms of achieving a new or changed purpose or function and to be "evolutionary" in terms of putting existing technologies to new use
• Relatively fast growth


  • Observed in a number of dimensions such as diversity of interested stakeholders, public and/or private funding, knowledge outputs, or other indicators of growth
• Coherence


  • Presence of an expert community of practice that adopts and iterates the concepts or constructs underlying a particular emerging technology
• Prominent impact


  • Technology gains popularity for its profound effect on specific domains or wide-ranging impact across different domains and potentially the entire socio-economic system
• Uncertainty


  • The prominent impact of emerging technologies lies somewhere in the future, the application of the technology is still malleable and fluid, and the knowledge of possible outcomes is incomplete, which include unintended consequences
• Disruptive technology


  An innovation that alters the way effectively that industries, consumers, and businesses operate. It alters a founded technology and agitates the industry or a ground-breaking product, that makes an entirely new industry. This technology sweeps away the habits or systems because it has attributes that are recognizably superior.
• Disruptive technologies


  • Artificial intelligence
  • Machine learning
  • Internet of things
• Disruptive technologies


  • Offer digital transformation for business processes and organizations as a whole
• Advanced robotics


  Increasingly capable robots or robotic tools, with enhanced "senses," dexterity, and intelligence, that can take on tasks once thought too delicate or uneconomical to automate. These technologies can also generate significant societal benefits, including robotic surgical systems that make procedures less invasive, as well as robotic prosthetics and "exoskeletons" that restore functions of amputees and the elderly.
• Next-generation genomics


  Marries the science used for imaging nucleotide base pairs (the units that make up DNA) with rapidly advancing computational and analytic capabilities. As our understanding of the genomic makeup of humans increases, so does the ability to manipulate genes and improve health diagnostics and treatments. Next-generation genomics will offer similar advances in our understanding of plants and animals, potentially creating opportunities to improve the performance of agriculture and to create high-value substances—for instance, ethanol and biodiesel—from ordinary organisms, such as E. coli bacteria.
• Energy-storage devices or physical systems


  Store energy for later use, such as lithium-ion batteries and fuel cells, that already power electric and hybrid vehicles, along with billions of portable consumer electronics. Over the coming decade, advancing energy-storage technology could make electric vehicles cost competitive, bring electricity to remote areas of developing countries, and improve the efficiency of the utility grid.
• Huge corporations are designed to work with sustaining technologies. They excel at knowing their market by making a close connection to the customers and by having a mechanism in place for developing the existing technology.
• Technology with Disruptive Impact

  • Digital Media Store
  • Streaming Video Portal
  • Smartphones
  • Internet
• Before 2003, most consumers buy their favorite music in the form of the Compact Disc (CD)


  With the emergence of Digital Media Store such as iTunes, led to the decline in the sales of physical press album such as CD and Long Play Vinyl (LP). In addition, continuous declination led to the demise of cassette tapes.
• With the emergency of streaming video portal such as Netflix


  People started to watch video online, which subsequently led to the declination in TV Cable and DVD
• Smartphones start to be used extensively since 2013


  Many products were created solely due to its existence such as Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp and others. These products did not exist several years
• The existence of internet


  Prompted the birth of a lot of other technologies such as email, social media, smartphones as well as file sharing among others
• Anyone who believes that they will still lead an active life in the next ten years should try to understand emerging technologies because these will radically change the world from what it is today.
• These new technologies will have an impact on all aspects – political, economic and even cultural – of society.
• These emerging technologies will decide the future of humanity because they can be used by the elite class or populists for good or evil.
• There is no doubt that there will be immense benefits from these new forms of technology.
• Distributive justice


  The determination of access to the benefits of technological change.
• The optimists believe that emerging technologies, if properly used, could eliminate poverty and abolish suffering.
• Stuart Russell of UC Berkley: 'Everything we have of value as human beings, as civilization is the result of intelligence and what artificial intelligence (AI) could do is essentially be a power tool that magnifies human intelligence and gives us the ability to move our civilization forward in all kinds of ways. It might be curing disease; it might be eliminating poverty. I think it certainly should be preventing environmental catastrophe. AI could be instrumental to all those things.'