Understanding the Integration of Technology in Society

Integrating technology constructively means more than just adopting new tools and systems. It involves creating solutions that enhance human well-being, promote justice, and address societal needs. Technology, when integrated thoughtfully, can drive social progress, improve quality of life, and bridge gaps between communities. However, without a guiding ethical framework, technological advancements can also exacerbate inequalities and create new challenges.

The Perspective on Social Action

A profound perspective on social action and its role in the advancement of society emphasizes the importance of action that is both principled and practical, aiming to promote unity and address the needs of the marginalized. Here are some key insights that are relevant to the constructive integration of technology:

1. Unity and Inclusivity: Technology should be used to bridge divides, whether they are economic, social, or geographic. This means developing technologies that are accessible to all, regardless of their background or socioeconomic status. For instance, initiatives that aim to provide digital education and resources to underserved communities align with the principle of universal access to education.
2. Ethical Considerations: In the context of technology, this translates into creating and implementing solutions that uphold principles of justice, privacy, and transparency. Individuals and institutions must be encouraged to consider the broader impact of their technological innovations and to ensure that they contribute to the betterment of society rather than causing harm.
3. Service to Humanity: Technology should serve as a tool for social good, addressing pressing issues such as health, education, and environmental sustainability. Technology should be directed toward the betterment of the human condition and the advancement of society as a whole.
4. Collaboration and Consultation: When integrating technology, it is essential to engage diverse stakeholders, including community members, experts, and policymakers. This inclusive approach ensures that technology solutions are well-rounded and consider various perspectives and needs.
5. Sustainability: Sustainable technology practices are crucial to ensure that innovations do not deplete resources or harm the environment. Developers are encouraged to develop technologies that are environmentally friendly and promote long-term well-being for all.

Practical Applications

To apply these principles in the context of technology integration, consider the following practical approaches:

1. Equitable Access: Develop and implement technologies that are accessible to diverse populations. For example, creating open-source educational platforms can help bridge the digital divide and provide valuable resources to those in need.
2. Ethical Design: Incorporate ethical considerations into the design and implementation of technology. Ensure that data privacy is protected, and that algorithms are free from biases that could perpetuate inequality.
3. Community Engagement: Involve community members in the technological development process through consultations and feedback mechanisms. This helps to ensure that technology solutions address real needs and are accepted by those they are intended to serve.
4. Sustainable Practices: Adopt sustainable practices in the development and deployment of technology. This includes reducing electronic waste, using energy-efficient systems, and supporting environmental conservation efforts.
5. Focus on Social Good: Prioritize projects that have a clear social impact, such as health tech solutions for underserved regions or platforms that promote social justice and community engagement.

Conclusion

Constructively integrating technology into society requires a balanced approach that aligns innovation with ethical and social values. This perspective offers valuable insights into how technology can be harnessed for the greater good, emphasizing unity, inclusivity, and responsible stewardship. By integrating these principles, we can ensure that technological advancements contribute positively to society and help build a more just and equitable world.

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We can now build machines that will do almost everything for us from cooling a room in the heat of summer to blowing up the world. We can arrange these devices in technical systems that in their operation profoundly modify and sometimes take the place of our natural environment. The workings of these systems, if insufficiently controlled, certainly contaminate and may in time exhaust significant resources of nature. The task at hand is to design the pieces of machinery and the structure of the enclosing systems to prevent such things from happening. It is to design and control things so that the artificial surroundings we create for ourselves will serve our interests better than the supplanted natural environment did.

How to give these products an appropriate order —meaning, how to organize a technological world we can live in— is now the great question. The criteria for such design and control cannot be established by a search for the maximum potential in each particular machine system. The criteria must derive from some general scheme that all the parts and pieces can fit into and serve. 

Such a scheme cannot be based only on our knowledge of what machines can be built to do almost anything. It has to be grounded in the sense of ourselves as the governing reference point. The controlling factor in the design problem is what we take the human condition to be. 

If we are to control the technological world we are building, we must first require ourselves to understand and respect the fundamental organization of our being to enable us to build a technological firmament that will really fit us.

At the center of all engineering works lies the problem of translating knowledge into practice; the complex process of converting the abstract into a real and tangible work. Refinement of technique sometimes involves dramatic improvements in the state of art, but fundamental advances derive only from increases in the amount of information available. Sometimes these increases are produced by the searches of those who simply want to know more; and sometimes by those who force the search because they want to do something better—or different.

The Romans built a remarkable set of structures including roads, aqueducts, temples, arenas, mine shafts, sewage disposals, bridges, municipal waterworks. In the course of this construction they learned to make and use a varied set of instruments such as pulleys, pumps, hoists, levels, cranes, hydraulic cement, metal trusses and even rivets. In their greatest period they built great structures from Asia Minor to the British Isles. Some of these still stand in distinctive grandeur as monuments to the genius of their creators.

Marcus Vetruvius Pollio, a Roman architect and engineer, who lived in the time of Caesar Augustus, published a book called De architectura libra decem. This work contains interesting summaries of the author’s explanations of what he had learned on the job. The volume became a textbook on Roman Engineering.

Fifteen hundred years later, Bramante, Michelangelo, Palladio and other great builders of the Renaissance took Vetruvius as their chief authority. What the men of the Renaissance learned from De architectura, passed on to those who came after them.

The Roman record demonstrates how much can be learned from experience and doing the work. Practice, supported only by the knowledge obtained from practice, provides invaluable insights. The Romans cared little, in fact, for the general implications of their work; they rarely sought the reasons for things or tried to build a sustaining structure of theory around what they were doing. The same was true of those who followed them for many years. So with a fixed set of resources and a stable body of procedures, the art remained, for a long time, in a fairly steady state. 

It was only in the early 17th century that men working with these same materials and forces began to feel the need to extend what Francis Bacon called “useful knowledge” about the natural world. Then things began to happen. The history of Western culture—or a great part of it —-can be written simply as a search for further information.

For a long time, this restless search for further information rested primarily on speculation about the biggest questions of life such as the nature of reality and the meaning of existence. It had little to do with simplifying the day’s work.

The Greeks introduced an almost fatal division between the head and the hands. Thinking, an ennobled exercise, could, in fact, stand above, beyond, and apart from operations. This separation was for long, and to some extent still is, a source of mischief both in the way we seek to educate and conduct our operations. 

Somewhere near the end of the 16th century, things began to change. Many causes and many minds contributed to this gradual shift in intellectual affairs.

Throughout the 17th century, there were tedious and painful efforts to connect one freshly discovered thing with another. Along the way, as recently acquired information began to displace older assumptions or explanations taken on faith, there were painful and dislocating debates over the structure of the universe, the nature of reality, and the meaning of existence. The life of the mind, oscillating in these years between polar differences—the ideal and the useful, things subject to the senses—was vivid, exciting, and at times very confusing. In the Novum Organum, in 1620, Francis Bacon gave his fullest statement of the need to search for that practical knowledge which could be applied to relieve and benefit the condition of men. The connections between new evidence, evolving ideas and subsequent action, Physical labor; intuitive perceptions of countless builders; the weight of accumulating experience; the play of intellectual forces; refining methods of investigation; led humanity to steadily increase their knowledge and understanding of the world and apply what they had learned to modify the stern conditions of the world. 

Men have come almost to the fulfilling today of the Socratic objective; they know enough to enter the companion of the gods and sit with them in authority. This point achieved, it now turns out that knowledge is only one part of power. The other part is an understanding of how to use it, and in this area men still fall short of the divine comprehension.

Reference: From Know-How to Nowhere: The Development of American Technology by Elting E. Morison

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Storytelling is a universal human experience. One can argue that storytelling is almost as old as the development of language. The earliest stories could have been in the form of cave drawings.

Stories transport knowledge and morals, and have been passed down from generation to generation throughout history to educate, entertain, guide, inspire, preserve history, and deepen understanding. We tell stories to explain our experiences. When we share stories, a phenomenon called ‘neural coupling’ happens where our audience’s brain neurons fire in the same patterns as the storyteller’s brain neurons. As a result, our senses, thoughts, and emotions become aligned. Listening to stories engages our emotions, and the engaged emotions not only create empathy with the storyteller but makes the stories memorable. Stories go beyond an event; they help the audience to gain a glimpse of reality and shape their perspective of the world.

Information by itself could be detached, tedious and forgettable, but when embedded in the structure of a story, they become memorable and more pleasant to follow. Studies of Functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain show that when we are presented by information alone, only two of our brain regions light up, however, listening to stories provokes many additional areas of the brain to become activated as if the events of the story were actually happening to us.

Stories teach us about the experiences that worked, the reward for showing forth the human values and the consequences of neglecting them. Oxytocin is a natural hormone that acts as a neurotransmitter. Storytelling increases the production of oxytocin which is responsible for empathy, compassion, trustworthiness, and social cues. Therefore, when we are engaged in a story, it can influence us to desire to act. 

How Stories Can Shape Tech Development

Choicest Fruit uses stories to illustrate the significance of practicing human values in the process of technology development and technology use. The stories impel the listener to think about the application of stories to the area of technology development. Technology, like any other tool, is neutral by itself and its impacts are contingent to the user. Choicest Fruit endeavors to use stories to engage and encourage individuals to think about the impacts of existing or new technologies in order to help determine if they are used for the betterment of humanity, or for its destruction. The more we use stories to engage people in technologies, the more we help developers and tech users imagine how these technologies can be used to create more equitable, just, and peaceful societies. Essentially, moral stories help create technologies that reflect human values! 

Recounting stories about the role of technology in social progress is a strategy Choicest Fruit employs to propel and direct constructive progress. We help tech developers and tech users make effective and compelling changes by documenting and sharing relevant stories that weave human values into the process of technology development. 

Without stories we are at the risk of repeating the problems from the past. Maybe part of the reason that injustice, bias, and inequality still exist in the tech world has to do with not telling honest and real stories.

• Let us think of cases where history repeats itself today.
• Why does this happen?
• Can it be traced back to something that went wrong with our storytelling?

Bringing Good Technologies to Life Through Stories

Sharing stories in technology development contributes to ensure that reality is expressed accurately. When we realize that stories have power, a sense of responsibility is created and our capacity to use this power grows constructively. When we only consume stories that depict our lower nature, we contribute to a culture that suppresses the development of human values. But when we consume stories that reflect our higher nature, we create a society that profound and empowering stories shape reality.

Incorporating stories to navigate uncertainties of new technologies

The speed at which new technologies are being developed and adopted has created changes in behaviors, lifestyles, economies, and the way we communicate with each other. New technologies have introduced uncertainties, risks, vulnerabilities and even a crisis of identity for those who find themselves or their industries struggling to adapt quickly enough to the changes brought in by new technologies. Storytelling connects and reminds us about the meaning of tests and difficulties in life. As our understanding about ourselves and our relationships with the world evolves, new stories are created, and inspirational spaces are opened to inspire humanity in its journey. The stories we share allow for accurate depictions of who we are as a collective. 

Storytelling is a crucial part of helping humanity navigate an uncertain future because it supports tech developers and users to envisage what the future could look like if we walk down a certain path. With stories we can show the ills that exist in society and the ways they can be remedied.  

Stories guide tech developers and users to identify and articulate shared values, ideals, and a collective vision, and enable them to better navigate uncertainty. The positive stories we share at Choicest Fruit, have the potential to diminish fear and give tech developers and tech users greater confidence, clarity, and conviction in fighting for the world we want to live in. A world where everyone is contributing to write a piece of the bigger story of technology development which promotes human’s life and extends their capabilities.  

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“Plan harm for another and harm yourself most, the evil we hatch always comes home to roost”

Homer explains that striving for excellence in all aspects of life would enable one to act justly. Hesiod describes that the concept of justice is directly connected to peace and tranquility such that just rulers build flourishing societies while unjust leaders cause societies to fall. Solon suggests that social imbalances would lead to injustices and ultimately the collapse of societies. Socrates defines justice as one of the fundamental human virtues and therefore a state of the soul. According to Plato a just person is able to create balance among the three elements of their soul which are the desire, the spirit and the reason.

Researchers believe that the concept of justice as we know it goes back to the sixth century BC but one can argue that justice is as old as human being’s existence. Justice finds its meaning in regards to our interactions with our surroundings be it the natural resources or other human beings.
Justice is the pillar to uphold “the tent of existence”, it is the “cause of the well-being of the world” and “the protection of the nations”. Our lives as human beings depend on justice because it brings order and tranquility to societies.

“The light of men is justice; quench it not with the contrary winds of oppression and tyranny. The purpose of justice is the appearance of unity among people.”

Justice requires one to consider humanity as one single human body. Surely, if a member of this body is hurt or injured, the rest of the body will naturally suffer. Although we may seem as discrete individuals, in reality we are closely integrated and connected like the different limbs and organs of the human body. Viewed in this light, justice demands us to regard the welfare of the community as our own; therefore, any decision we make or any action we take, we must thoroughly and rigorously assess its impacts on the welfare of not only ourselves but other individuals and the community in large. Justice requires one to consider the rights of all the people regardless of their class, nationality, race, creed and beliefs.

With the aid of technology, now more than ever before, we are living in an interconnected society where the impacts of our actions, decisions and behaviors are visible and evident. For example, with the help of technology, one is able to record an act of kindness or an unjust act and share it with the world to see instantaneously. Something impossible previously, except for the person who was present to witness the occurrence of the event. This is of great importance, and demands both the user and the developer of a technology a significant amount of accountability. Technology is a tool that if developed and used justly, promotes human’s life and extends their capabilities. 

Imagine a robotic company which is given the opportunity to design robotic arms that would help the individuals with disability to facilitate their daily activities.

• How can such a company practice justice to make their technology accessible and affordable to all who are in need?
• What other entities are responsible for making such technologies accessible to those who need it?

“Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and center your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements.”

Many communities around the world are in need of basic necessities such as clean water, reliable electricity, sanitation and energy. However, we witness that every year so many resources around the globe are used to develop technologies that are either used for warfare and destruction or technologies that do not answer the immediate needs of our age, when such resources can be dedicated to developing capacity in the population to provide their  basic needs.

• As a tech developer how can you assess that the technology you are developing is addressing the important needs of humanity?
• As a tech user, how can you assess that the time and the money you are spending on technology is contributing to justice?

Justice requires one to investigate the reality with their own knowledge and understanding not merely following others. Because every human being is endowed with a unique set of capacities and talents that if utilized brings unique perspectives to the world and if not utilized the world will be deprived from it. We all have probably heard of the story of ‘The elephant in the dark room’, where an elephant was brought into a dark room to be exhibited. People in the dark room couldn’t see the exhibition, except by touching and feeling the elephant in the dark. One person touched the trunk and thought it was a water pipe, another felt the ear and said that it was a large fan, a different person touched the leg and thought it must be a pillar, another felt the back and believed it must be a throne. The message of the story is that everyone’s understanding of reality is bounded by their experience. We all have a piece of truth, and when all pieces are put together through collaboration and consultation, we can reach the whole truth collectively.

• How much do the technologies we use in our daily lives encourage us to investigate reality on our own?
• How much technology makes us to be a passive follower of other people’s beliefs, lifestyles and understanding?

“The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.”

Aristotle

Justice prevents one from crossing the limits of moderation in their thoughts and actions. We are living in the era of digital technologies where more and more human interactions from shopping, medicine, working to human social life are being replaced by virtual relationships, and as a result we are becoming more and more isolated. Although the positive impacts of digital technologies are indisputable, if the usage ‘overleaps the bounds of moderation’, they cause great harm and destruction to society.

• How does justice enable a developer and/or user of a technology to not go beyond the limits of moderation?
• How can wisdom regulate our usage or development of technology?

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“Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues. Without truthfulness progress and success, in all the worlds of God, are impossible for any soul. When this holy attribute is established in man, all the divine qualities will also be acquired.”

How can truthfulness be “the foundation of all human virtues”? Every moment of our lives we are encountered with different decisions to make which affect us and the people around us. What quality do you think would safeguard making sound decisions? Truthfulness begins from within us and manifests itself in our actions, thoughts, emotions and words. One has to first be truthful with themselves in their thoughts and emotions in order to act truthfully towards others. Imagine you have to make a decision which you know may benefit you but can negatively impact others. Truthfulness enables you to honestly reflect on your thoughts and reasoning to distinguish the lower forces such as greed and selfishness from justice, trustworthiness and compassion. Truthfulness ensures sagaciousness and discernment.

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“Do not be content with showing friendship in words alone, let your heart burn with loving kindness for all who may cross your path.”

Love and kindness are two attributes that every soul should strive for. But what is the significance of the two accompanying each other? One may love another person in their heart but they may not show their love in their deeds and words; however, if they are adorned with the virtue of kindness, they strive to show their love by kind words, actions and thoughts. On the other hand, if a person strives to show kindness to others without letting the fire of love brighten their heart, the kindness may stop in words alone or may have traces of insincerity. Striving to practice love and kindness together, enables one to attain a higher degree of growth.

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“No light can compare with the light of justice. The establishment of order in the world and the tranquillity of the nations depend upon it.”

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”  — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Imagine a house that has been built partially strong and proper, and partially weak and frail. Would such a house stay intact and strong? Would such a house be a reliable place to live? The society is the greater house, and any unjust act impairs its foundation and causes disorder. Even if the injustices are not directly affecting us, the effects of the injustices impact everyone’s prosperity and well-being. In order to live in a flourishing and tranquil world, we should constantly be concerned with the promotion of justice through our deeds, words and thoughts.

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“Your hearts must be pure and your intentions sincere in order that you may become recipients of the divine bestowals. Consider that although the sun shines equally upon all things, yet in the clear mirror its reflection is most brilliant and not in the black stone. This great effulgence and heat have been produced by the crystal clearness of the glass. If there were no clearness and purity, these effects would not be witnessed. Should rain fall upon salty, stony earth, it will never have effect; but when it falls upon good pure soil, green and verdant growth follows, and fruits are produced. This is the day when pure hearts have a portion of the everlasting bounties and sanctified souls are being illumined by the eternal manifestations.”

What does a pure heart look like? A pure heart is like a clean and clear mirror that can perfectly reflect the light. Similar to a mirror which needs regular dusting and maintenance, one’s heart requires constant care and nurturing to stay pure and sincere. Kind, loving and selfless thoughts and actions keep one’s heart pure while greed, hatred, envy and insincerity are like layers of dust covering the heart and ceasing it from reflecting the divine attributes.

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