CSPC 2018

Organized by: Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Peter Severinson

Rapid development of transformative new technologies – such as social media, artificial intelligence, and new health technologies – is creating important opportunities and challenges for governments, businesses, the research community and society at large. Too often, however, the social implications of such developments are overlooked.

Emerging technologies bring with them important new challenges. In recent years we have learned that our reliance on social media has created new risks to our democracies, with partisans and foreign actors able to rapidly spread falsehoods that exploit social divisions and erode public trust. The rapid development of artificial intelligence is raising questions about whether a new wave of automation threatens to dramatically reduce human jobs and accelerate inequality. Development in the medical sciences continually challenge historic social conventions and ethical norms.

We need to better understand how society is affected by emerging technologies in part to address the risks but also to help us unlock the potential benefits: to train workers able to make the best use of new capabilities, to make smart decision about how to employ new technology to address society’s most pressing problems, and to ensure the benefits of new technologies are effectively shared throughout our diverse society.

In this session we will explore whether the Canadian policy and research community is doing enough to understand and address the social implications of new technologies. We will consider how multidisciplinary approaches can help us address multiple dimensions of technological change and better understand the roles of diverse actors, including the natural scientist, the philosopher, the engineer, the behavioural scientist, the historian and the policy maker.

We will also explore the skills and knowledge needed to achieve the full potential of new technologies and to avoid the dangers, including scientific literacy, digital competency, creativity, openness, cultural awareness and sound ethical foundations. Finally, this event will engage the audience in a discussion about which new emerging technologies demand increased attention from the research and policy community and how we can work together to addressing their social implications.