Essay On Role Of Computer In Modern Society

This tendency to elevate our human practices and hold them as outside of ourselves, in the pursuit of something greater than ourselves has potential damaging consequences.There was a time when technological advances in the field of computer science were greatly beneficial to society.

This tendency to elevate our human practices and hold them as outside of ourselves, in the pursuit of something greater than ourselves has potential damaging consequences.There was a time when technological advances in the field of computer science were greatly beneficial to society.

While we continue to imagine our role with digital technology as one of creator-creation we will always run the risk of pulling a Frankenstein.

While we continue to attribute value to technologies based on their sheer computing power and not on their application to social causes we make it easier to displace our objectives and goals.

These two events are representative of a society-wide fascination we have with machines that can become ‘smarter’ than us.

Such fascination is the substance of popular science fiction as prophesied by the likes of Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams.

With more raw computational powers novel understandings of the world were possible: Everything from statistical models of weather patterns, to the sequencing of the human genome, to improvements in telecommunication greatly benefited from them.

We allocated millions of dollars to research and development because there was a premise that with greater computation, better understanding of the world would be possible which in turn would lead us to live healthier and more productive lives.

1 views and opinions expressed on this page are those of their individual authors.

Unless the opposite is explicitly stated, or unless the opposite may be reasonably inferred, CIS does not subscribe to these views and opinions which belong to their individual authors.

This week much fuzz is being made about Watson, an IBM super computer that handily defeated two of the most successful Jeopardy! This event coincides with an interview in Time magazine with Ray Kurzweil, an American author, inventor and futurist involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments.

As a technology enthusiast he often talks about artificial intelligence and is a firm believer in ‘the singularity’, a moment in time when computers will become more intelligent than human beings.