SOCIAL AND PROFESSIONAL ISSUES

To my Student:
You are about to start the Third lesson for week 3.
Read the learning materials below then answer the Check
your progress and as well as the quiz.

Module 1.3
Social and Professional Issues
Visit the link for more explanation – https://bit.ly/3jaKAGe
Lesson 3

Section 3: Work and Employment Transformed

In globalizing the process of production of goods and services, thousands of jobs,

particularly in manufacturing, have been eliminated either by automation or by relocation to
countries where wages are low. Job creation and the increased education of the labour
force has resulted in a sustained improvement of living standards in the industrialized world
for a number of years, but is stagnant or on the decline recently (past 10-20 years). This is
because the level of compensation for the majority of workers has not followed the growth
of productivity and profits. To try to compensate for that, more women have entered the
labour force. This decrease of the gender imbalance of the labour force has substantially
affected the economic foundations of patriarchalism and capitalism.

The new job market has seen a parallel growth of highly educated occupations and low skill
jobs, with very different bargaining power in the labour market. This dual structure of the
labour market is related to the structural conditions of a knowledge economy growing within
the context of a large economy of low-skill services, and it contributes to the growing
inequality observed in most societies.

3.1 The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Automatisation at the workplace can be beneficial to the workers. For instance, not having
to do dangerous work anymore and therewith there will be fewer injuries on the job. It
contributes to capital and could make a loss-making company profitable, so that the people
who work there can keep their jobs. Yet, automatisation typically has the consequence of
firing employees. Also, if all the automatisation in industry continues, it would destroy
capitalism, for then it cannot generate the surplus it gets from ‘underpaying’ workers—i.e.,
their wages are lower than the value they add with their work—as one cannot underpay a
robot as it does not have a wage.

This raises several questions that have no easy answer. Among others:
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• What to do with the people who will lose their jobs when more and more tasks are
automated? • Is it ethical to make people redundant due to the software you developed, and
are you morally obliged to find alternative gainful employment for the people affected? •
Whose responsibility is it to mitigate this effect, if anyone?

• Do you have an idea how to solve capital’s inherent contradiction?

These changes—both the general drive toward automating manual tasks in software, like
your online registration process at the university as compared to filling in a paper form and
handing it over to a human to process it, and by robots3—are expected to very profound in
the upcoming years to the extent that it has been dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, or, less glamorous, industry 4.0, is said to be driven by a
set of technologies, notably including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things
(IoT). The use of IoT in industry generates lots of data, which is then analyzed with AI
techniques to try to make sense out of the generated data. This combination then is
expected to make ‘intelligent’ cyber-physical systems that can configure themselves based
on the input it receives, adjust its configuration accordingly, and, finally, optimize its
operations autonomously as well: see Figure 2.

Figure 2: A pyramid architecture of a cyber-physical systems-enabled manufacturing

system.

Artificial Intelligence is a branch in computer science and IT that concerns the theory and
development of computer systems that can carry out tasks that normally requires human intelligence,
i.e., it aims to simulate ‘intelligent’ behaviour in computers. This include subfields that focus on
techniques for automated learning and reasoning using, among others, logic, statistics, and language.

The Internet of Things extends the commonly known Internet infrastructure with connectivity of
devices that are not regarded as computers but do have embedded electronics so that they can be
interacted with remotely, such as sensors, fridges, and other smart home appliances like a security
system.

This extends also into agriculture, where it is known as precision agriculture to automate
farming: sensors collect data about the environment, such as the temperature, humidity,
and any pest infestation, and make decisions based on that to manage the plants (e.g., to
spray pesticides and to increase or decrease irrigation).
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Overall, this means that a lot of jobs are set to disappear. While this is a fairly common
process, it is unclear where new ones will be created, if they required the skills that people
have that were made redundant (probably not), and whether that will be a similar amount of
jobs that are expected to disappear in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. There are both
arguments for excitement and caution regarding the fourth industrial revolution. Whichever
way it goes, it is expected to have a major impact on society.

3.2 Robots

Robots speak to the imagination and fear that humans have, and have featured
prominently in popular culture. The idea of trying to constrain their use can, perhaps, be
traced back best to Asimov’s laws of robotics, which have been debated widely, extended,
and made fun of ever since. Some of the main questions of the technology are: What
should robots be allowed to do and what not? Why? How to regulate it?

The Three laws of robotics were formulated by science fiction write Isaac Asimov, in an attempt to
control humanoid robots in his science fiction novels. They are:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict
with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or
Second Laws.

For instance, they could be deployed in an earthquake zone to search for survivors in the
rubble, which may be too dangerous to do for human rescue workers, or in underground
mines to save lives. An issue that has arisen is scope creep in built-in robot features, or: the
robot can do more than it was supposed to be doing.

3.3 New Jobs

The network society also may be attributed with job generation. The existence of online jobs
may seem to give the individual more control over who to work for and when to work.
However, it also replicates the existing patterns we see in the manufacturing sector where
the opportunities available to certain individuals are limited. In the manufacturing sector, it is
known that proletarians, especially in developing countries, are likely to work for low
salaries in sweatshops producing material for large companies.

A recent variant is the so-called “sharing economy”, such as Uber and Taxify for a cab ride,
where software is used for matchmaking between clients and service providers. Put
differently: there is a software platform to support peer-to-peer economic activity, where a
percentage of the proceeds goes to the company that developed the software. Societal and
economic advantages and disadvantages are widely debated (e.g., [1, 95]) and its effects
investigated, including in South Africa [49]. Overall, it does seem to create new jobs, but, as
with other areas of the workforce, there is a polarisation of the labour market [6, 14].

Section 4: Digital Divide

The adoption of the Internet and other ICTs have not been uniform throughout the world.
This inequality is often referred to as the digital divide. By 2009 rates of penetration reached
more than 60% in most rich countries and were increasing at a fast pace in countries with
emerging economies. By 2018, it is about 90% in Europe and North America, with Africa
 SOCIAL AND PROFESSIONAL ISSUES
trailing at 36% yet having seen about 10000% growth since 2000. Global Internet
penetration in 2008 was still at around one-fifth of the world’s population and fewer than
10% of Internet users had access to broadband. However, since 2000, the digital divide,
measured in terms of access, has been shrinking.

Digital Divide refers to the disparities in the penetration of the Information Society in terms
of access and use of Information and Communications Technologies. It is the gap between
those who have access to the Information Society and those who are deprived of such
access.
It mirrors and exacerbates existing disparities in society:
• Gaps in education (for example, illiteracy)
• Disability
• Location (rural-urban)
• Gender
• Race
• Income level The South African Digital Divide grows out of our history of division and
historical backlogs for large groups of people.

OECDa: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is an international economic
organization of 34 countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. It is a
forum of countries describingthemselvesascommittedtodemocracyandthemarketeconomy, providing a
platform to compare policy experiences, seeking answers to common problems, identify good
practices and coordinate domestic and international policies of its members.

Figure 3: Screenshot with some data about internet access. Top: by region in the world; bottom: a
selection of countries in Africa (Source: internetworldstats).

This is especially dangerous in the context of rich and poor countries as it creates the notion
that rich countries have reached the final destination of information utopia. Furthermore, it
 SOCIAL AND PROFESSIONAL ISSUES
may lead to rich countries using poor countries as dumping sites for their old infrastructure,
called trashware. These countries may do this to avoid the costs associated with
responsible disposal of the infrastructure. As highlighted, the simplistic definition of the
digital divide has the potential to imply that there are two distinct groups with a gap between
them [116]. In such a scenario, one group is motivated to bridge the divide because ICTs
may give people the ability to compete economically [116]. The continued exclusion of
disabled individuals, and possibly poor countries, may be seen as useful by some to the
functioning of current societies.

4.1 Developer Biases, Assumptions, and Values

The designers of software have certain preconceptions about the users of their software,
stemming from implicit assumptions or from what came out of the requirements engineering
phase of the software development process. Likewise, developers tend to come with their
own expectations about the audience for which they are building software. This
phenomenon has been studied by Huff and Cooper [54]; the authors studied the impact of a
designer’s views on educational software for children. They found that designers tend to
create gamified tools for boys and learning tools for girls.

Section 5: Interactive Media and Mass Self-Communication

The World Wide Web offers a means of interactive communication since the “Web 2.0” that
started around the 2000s and that made ‘posting’ content a lot easier than before. A result
is that the boundaries between mass media communication and all other forms of
communication are blurring. With its diverse range of applications, it is the communication
fabric of our lives, for work, for personal connection, for information, for entertainment, for
public services, for politics, and for religion.

Web2.0 describes World Wide Web sites that emphasise user-generated content, usability, and
interoperability. It is not a technical update but rather refers to an emerging way in which the web is
used.

The Semantic Web (Web 3.0) is an extension of the web standards by the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) and refers to W3C’s vision of the Web of linked data and knowledge. Semantic
Web technologies enable people to create data stores on the Web, build vocabularies, and write rules
for handling data.

The developments outlined above have now resulted in a different form of

communication:mass self-communication (included in Web 2.0). As people have
appropriated new forms of communication, they have built their own systems of mass
communication, via SMS, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, wikis, and the like. File sharing and peer-
to-peer (p2p) networks make the circulation, mixing, and reformatting of any digitised
content possible.

This is mass communication, but user-generated content is a very different means of mass
communication to what was ever seen before. Unlike traditional broadcast media, anyone
can post a video in YouTube, with few restrictions. In most countries everyone is a publisher
and there is equal freedom in what is chosen for viewing. A user selects the video she
wants to watch and comment on from a huge listing of possibilities. Pressures are of course
 SOCIAL AND PROFESSIONAL ISSUES
exercised on free expression on YouTube, particularly legal threats for copyright
infringements. There can also be government censorship of content.

Section 6: ICT for Peace and Warfare

6.1 Peace building supported by ICTs

As we have come across “ICT4D”, there is also an ‘ICT4Peace’, which aims to use ICTs for
peace building efforts (that may well include ICT4D elements). This is the context of the
United Nations definition of peace building toward the notion of positive peace as compared
to only the absence of physical violence.

Peace buildings includes a “range of measures targeted to reduce the risk of lapsing or relapsing
into conflict by strengthening national capacities at all levels for conflict management, and to lay the
foundation for sustainable peace and development.”

6.2 Building explicit bias into a system

An area within ICTs that can go either way in praxis, is software development: one can use
the technologies for the benefit of society or destruction, but also build bias into it. This was
already mentioned in Section 2.4.1 for what may be called implicit bias. It is a different story
for explicit bias, where the system’s design is driven by political opinion and political
agendas [63]. For instance, you are tasked with the development of database to record the
incidences of protests in South Africa.

6.3 Destructive ICTs

Thus far, we have seen a multitude of aspects of the social context of ICTs. They tried
either to be positive to society, or have some unpleasant ‘side effects’. There is, however,
also a strand of work in computer science and the deployment of ICTs that has the intention
to do harm. At the time of writing, there are two popular topics: Information Warfare and
Autonomous Weapons System.

An Autonomous Weapons System (AWS), colloquially also called killer robot, is a system
(hardware+software) that makes decisions autonomously, i.e., withouthumanintervention,
fordefenceoroffencepurposes, causingphysical harm.

As one can have the “self-configuration” etc. in cyber-physical systems to bring a new era in
industry on could use such theories, methods, and techniques to, say, have a drone self-
configure to find the target, self-adjust if that target happens to be moving, and self-optimise
toward maximising damage caused by the bomb it drops.
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A Very Short History of IT SUMMARY
It was during the Second World War, and in its aftermath, that major technological breakthroughs in
electronics took place: the first programmable computer and the transistor. Yet it was not until the 1970s
that new information technologies became widely diffused, accelerating their synergistic development
and converging into a new paradigm.

Big Data has no single definition, but there are either 3 Vs or 5 Vs associated with it: Volume, Velocity,
and Variety, to which Veracity, and Value have been added more recently.

Machine learning focuses on algorithms to achieve good predictions based on large amounts of training
data

The term filter bubble refers to that what you see in the search results of a search engine

Echo Chumber defined as a situation in which people only hear opinions of one type or opinions that
are similar to their own.

Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among people.

Localization is not the opposite of the term “globalization”.

Digital Convergence refers to the fact that we no longer need separate communications channels for
different media (such as voice, video, text, etc.) because they are all digitized and can share the same
connections and platforms.

Artificial Intelligence is a branch in computer science and IT that concerns the theory and development
of computer systems that can carry out tasks that normally requires human intelligence, i.e., it aims to
simulate ‘intelligent’ behaviour in computers.

The Internet of Things extends the commonly known Internet infrastructure with connectivity of devices
that are not regarded as computers but do have embedded electronics so that they can be interacted
with remotely, such as sensors, fridges, and other smart home appliances like a security system.

The Three laws of robotics were formulated by science fiction write Isaac Asimov, in an attempt to
control humanoid robots in his science fiction novels. They are:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with
the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or
Second Laws.

Web2.0 describes World Wide Web sites that emphasise user-generated content, usability, and
interoperability. It is not a technical update but rather refers to an emerging way in which the web is used.

The Semantic Web (Web 3.0) is an extension of the web standards by the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) and refers to W3C’s vision of the Web of linked data and knowledge.

Peace buildings includes a “range of measures targeted to reduce the risk of lapsing or relapsing into
conflict by strengthening national capacities at all levels for conflict management, and to lay the
foundation for sustainable peace and development.”

An Autonomous Weapons System (AWS), colloquially also called killer robot, is a system
(hardware+software) that makes decisions autonomously, i.e., withouthumanintervention,
fordefenceoroffencepurposes, causingphysical harm.

Check your Progress !

1. Enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of using robots.
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TEST I. Briefly discuss the following:

1. What is meant by the term “Globalisation”?

2. Is globalisation affecting all peoples equally?

3. Discuss the impact of the trend of globalisation that is being driven by information
technology.

4. In what aspect of our lives has the information technology driven revolution had the most
impact recently?

5. Castells speaks of a “paradox” of the new economy (with the global networked financial
market). What is he referring to?

6. What is meant by digital convergence?

7. Contrast the terms “Web 2.0” and “Semantic Web” (or Web 3.0).

8. Explain why we might prefer to talk of “Effective Use” rather than “Universal Access”?

9. What sorts of ICTs are appropriate in the developing world? Give two examples and
justify by explaining why you think it is the right technology.

10. What is meant by “Universal Access”?

Prepared by: Check by:

PRINCESS JOY L. SARMA, BSIT EMAR JHON F MANIPON, MIT

Instructor Dean, CICS

Approved by:
EVELYN L. PASCUA, Ph. D, CESO III
Vice President for Academics