Many public issues, such as environmental actions, involve a large number of diverse stakeholders such as governments, corporations, organizations, and concerned citizens. Discussions frequently become contentious as the stakeholders defend their potentially conflicting goals with various assumptions, views, and expert testimony. These issues also tend to involve a range of fields. For example, the disposition of nuclear waste includes issues of economics, science, engineering, politics, and intergenerational justice, each with large uncertainties due to dependences on indirect estimations and the long (...) time periods involved. At the same time that these complex issues might increase in number, due to applications of new technologies, tools are being developed on the Internet to enable flexible learning, visualization, collaborative conferencing, distributed computing, and meaning‐based context. These tools might enable improved techniques for debating and discussing these complex issues. A technique that might facilitate orderly discussion of various arguments would include explicit recording and visualization of the evidence, its assumptions and uncertainties, their relationships in constructing the overall argument, and the ways the evidence needs to be generalized to support the argument. A simple argument visualization approach is explored based on a combination of an argument logic framework and techniques for fusing generalized data that are similar to kriging in spatial analysis. This approach is then applied to a recently contested risk analysis of nuclear waste disposition that was debated in a peer‐reviewed journal, involving concerns about uses of data, complex computational models, uncertainty analysis, and expert judgment. The need for wider understanding of such complex issues might be addressed by a convergence of techniques to facilitate greater understanding and the advanced Internet technologies to lower barriers to their adoption. (shrink)

The integration of technology into the workplace has resulted in a long trend of changing working conditions, from agriculture to today’s growing “knowledge economy.” This latest development depends on information technology, which may continue to evolve through eventual convergence with nanotechnology and biotechnology. Knowledge work places more emphasis on an expanded skill set, as opposed to the smaller set of specialized skills typically needed in an industrial economy. Future technological progress might lead to further enhancement of human potential or to (...) even greater inequality in income distribution, generating even larger pressures toward the divisions in society. This is illustrated by recently proposed scenarios of accelerated and logistic growth of technological progress. In an attempt to understand these dynamics, a simple model is constructed to clarify a possible relationship between technology and social systems. The model, based on the technology maturation process, focuses on the delay in social systems in responding to a technological change. Examples of current problems of technology and social issues are reviewed in the model’s context. Some potential approaches to framing these problems from an ethical viewpoint are reviewed, including applying Rawlsian concepts of fairness and the “veil of ignorance” and applying a simple discount rate to balance perceived future risks, technological solutions, and uncertainty. (shrink)

Information Technology has ushered in not only large societal opportunities but also large uncertain ‐ ties and risks. Future developments, like ubiquitous networked embedded systems, are technologies society may face. Such technologies offer larger opportunities and uncertainties because of their ability to widely distribute power through their small, inexpensive, and ubiquitous characteristics. Many interpretations of how these technologies may develop have been postulated, ranging from the conservative Precautionary Principle, to uncontrolled development leading to “singularity.” With so much uncertainty and so (...) many predictions about the benefits and consequences of these technologies, it is important to raise ethical questions, determine potential scenarios, and try to identify appropriate decision points and stakeholders. Rather than going along an unknown path, perhaps lessons could be learned from recently deployed technologies, such as nuclear technology, that were controversial but offered similarly large potential benefits and risks. The experience of nuclear technology development, with its various successes and failures, is recalled and compared with potential scenarios in the development of networked embedded systems. (shrink)