Last semester I took a course on ethics in computing. It only met for 50 minutes a week and I rarely attended class but the assigned readings made me do a lot of thinking. All the talk about robots taking over the world and engineering new ways for us all to kill ourselves really made me wonder what it is that governs how our society will react to new technologies and what the possible outcomes could be.

I just finished watching a documentary for a class on just this topic, the origins of technology and the various inequalities it has engendered in the world. Basically, the way I see it, people are for the most part very much the same. That being said, when someone stumbles onto a new idea that seems beneficial to society, they share it with their community. Because it is difficult to reproduce the mindset that person was in when they made this glorious discovery, it's likely that a few people will find it difficult to see the benefit of this new idea. With some creative explanation and a basis of trust, the community as a whole may come to accept this new idea, thus we have advancement.

If a community or society were to make several of these discoveries and come to accept them as commonplace or common knowledge, they would begin to feel very good about themselves. As time goes on, the community will want to spread and take these ideas with them. It is when a more advanced community or society comes across one in which these various ideas have yet to be discovered that problems arise. When coming to a new community, there is a lack of trust between the involved parties and it becomes increasingly difficult to convince the various members of a new community to go along with the flow.

As a general rule, the new, or less developed society will be made up of people with vastly varying degrees of willpower. Strong willed individuals will cling to their own ideas, the traditions of their society, and the cultural and religious values already in place. Others will be more easily swayed, being more open to new ideas and less reticent when it comes to change. Those who will not be swayed will break away, or in more extreme cases, fight back against the intruders with their revolutionary claims. For those that simply break away, they will continue on as they were, without making a leap forward. The fighters become known as fundamentalists or reactionaries by the likely more powerful, intruding culture.

Everyone else is assimilated and educated in the "new ways" and help to make further advancements for society. This is the fundamental engine fueling global inequality in our world. Strong willed individuals who believe themselves to be the most intelligent among their people are reluctant to accept ideas to which they did not come themselves or are not endorsed by people they respect as their intellectual equals. For this reason, new ideas brought from unknown cultures, no matter how magnificent or revolutionary, will be scrutinized mercilessly and found unnecessary.

It is this, and not the color of our skin which makes us so extremely different. Some cultures are lucky enough to come to certain conclusions before others, whether it be because of their geographical location or the species of plant and animal life around them, they were blessed by the wheel of fate. Other cultures, held back by the cards they were dealt, will find it difficult to see the thought processes leading to a new technology because they lack perspective.

One of the greatest factors influencing whether or not a society accepts the teachings of an intruding society is religion. Religious leaders will rationalize that the gods or goddesses have blessed the people with everything they need and nothing this new people has to offer could possibly bring anything but hardships upon them. While this is not always the case, I would argue that a lot of the time, some skepticism regarding new technologies is a good thing.

More often than not, a new technology gains a mass following before some of its downfalls have been discovered, and this can cause hardships for sure. For this reason, it is important to scrutinize these discoveries as they come about rather than blindly accepting. Similarly, it's important to keep an open mind and allow yourself to see the various benefits of a new technology and weigh the options.

Time for class, more on this later.