Global Corporate Citizenship

In this course, we have addressed the repercussions of advances in technology: biomedical technology, Internet of Things, mobile technology, cloud computing, artificial intelligence,sustainable energy, driverless cars, robotics, social media, water management, GMOs, etc.
Choose any three of these technologies. Write an essay addressing each of the following:
How do these technological shifts promise to benefit businesses, consumers, and broader
society?
What potential dangers arise from these technological advances?
What measures should be taken to manage the risks of technological change?

Introduction

The technological advances have made the society today dependent on technology in many duties. The advancement has occurred over years which have caused a change in people’s behavior on product purchase. The continued improvement has brought a change in the whole life aspects hence a new world of technology. Furthermore, the technology has worked to raise the standards of the products with new inventions going on. For instance, the cell phones have evolved from the most straightforward model to the smartphone.  The advancements have occurred as a result of the consumers demand to use more advanced telephones hence the new inventions. The effects of technological advancements have also been felt in other fields where improvement has been made such as the business sectors. There have been the online apps explicitly developed for goods exchange. It is meant to boost the ways of improving business in the society. The web pages are also designed to support the online marketing which helps to save time and cost of goods. The broadband such as 3G/4G has enabled the small businesses to prosper and reach their target markets. It is super-fast as well as efficient hence many entrepreneurs prefer its services. The advancements have also posed some dangers to the web users due to internet conflicts. It has led to the society experiencing risks in business and productivity. In this paper, the technological advances discussed is artificial intelligence, robotics, and social media.

Artificial Intelligence is one of the products of technological advancements. According to the father of artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, define artificial information as the science and engineering of making machines with intelligence in similitude to that of human intelligence, and most likely, the intelligent computer programs (Michalski, Rayszard, Jaime et al. 82-89). The machines are made to think intelligently just like a smart human being usually believe therefore the accomplishment of artificial intelligence is as a result of studying the human mind; how a man feels, makes a decision and solves critical problems. The principal objectives of artificial intelligence are to implement the human brain in machines as well as the creation of expert computer systems. The artificial intelligence was first founded in the year 1923 in the 20th century where Rossum’s Universal Robot was made. It had undergone several modifications over the years until 2000 when the interactive and locomotive robots were introduced.

Artificial intelligence (AI) was mainly created to support the entrepreneurship of the states and has to some extent, worked towards the achievement of its goals. However, artificial intelligence can quickly get out of control. Hence it fails to serve its primary purpose of creation. Artificial intelligence has created a wider gap between what it promised and the reality. It has accomplished very few tasks since it was programmed to bring benefits to the society, but it uses a destructive method of handling the goals and objectives. It occurs due to failure in the alignment of the human targets and AI goals, which have been proved difficult to attain.

The technology of artificial intelligence can pose several dangers to the society. AI is usually designed to perform overwhelming tasks such as the autonomous weapons. They are programmed to kill, and if they happen to be in the wrong hands, they may be used as agents of mass destruction. The weapons are usually challenging to turn off hence humans get out of their control. It poses risks to the society. As a consequence, curbing the dangers caused by AI, human’s goals need to be aligned with those of the Artificial Intelligence to avoid making it super intelligent.

Robotics forms another product of the advancement which has been commonly used in almost all industries, to perform mechanical duties. It is known as a domain in the artificial intelligence which usually deals with the study of intelligent creatures and robots. The robotics have the important objectives of replacing workforce in a working set up by performing the repetitive duties without getting bored (Paul & Feigenbaum 165-172). It has the aspects of electrical engineering to power and control the machinery. Computer science on the other hand aids in the determination of what, when, and how a task should be performed. Finally, the mechanical aspects function to determine the shapes and designs in line with the type of work to be accomplished.

The robots were created majorly to reduce human intervention in most industries and businesses and to increase the efficiency of the operation. This fact seemed much promising in raising the business productivity in several states. The speed of the robots could replace the human’s inefficiency. Adoption of robotics then looked advantageous to the countries and personal duties.

Despite the advantages as mentioned earlier of robotics, there are also disadvantages that accompany the technology. Some of the dangers of robots include replacement of human workforce in different sectors in the industry. Massive job losses have been experienced in sectors which adopted robotics. There is also an increase in internet fraud where people are deceived, for instance, the dating sites such as tinder have been hacked hence people interact with the robots, therefore, manipulate the users. Some consumers may end up into dangers of revealing their credit card information to the fraudsters.

In order to curb the dangers of robotics, there is need to expand the reach of consumer protection agencies to guide the robotic actions. Creating the new policies on robotic-centric can also help avoid deception from the robots. Strict boundaries should be drawn to prevent the risk of robot deception. Finally, the human labor should be involved in other sectors of the business, because as long as robotics increases the productivity of the state in general, they lead to a reduction in personal growth through the loss of jobs.

Lastly, social media was also brought as an advancement of the technology and currently is the most common of all the techniques. Social media are defined as the computer-mediated technologies which are created to facilitate the information and idea sharing. The primary goals of social media were to give input to business growth through connecting people with other entrepreneurs and groups (Michalski et al. 82-83). It has got several branches hence it is the primary source of information from simple devices to the complex ones. Social media had a noble goal of increasing the income by creating business platforms hence benefiting people at a personal level as well as the society as a whole.

Just like robotics and artificial intelligence, social media has its disadvantages. Some of the dangers of social media include frauds in the issues pertaining business. The online store is accessible and saves time whereas there has been a tendency of products being of low quality or not in excellent condition. Following up on the same issue on the political podium is also inefficient. Due to the lack of transparency of the online goods supplies, the online business has dramatically gone down since untrustworthy between the consumers and the supplies exist. It has also lowered people’s concentration in job markets as well as other activity. Involvement in social media does not give room to the individuals to be attentive to the specific task that they are assigned. It lowers the productivity in business as the consumers are denied the required attention and services.

In order to reduce the level of negative impacts caused by social media on businesses, the goods should be sold manually if the consumer and the supplier are total strangers. The online business apps such as OLX should also be guarded by rules and policies from the respective administration.  The business platforms should be made official to keep off the fraudsters and malice information. The security codes should also be high enough to avoid risks of hackers, and lastly, the products and services should be patented to reduce service ownership conflict.

Conclusion

The technological advancement had highly promised to work to the advantage of the society in many ways. Some of the promises were able to be fulfilled before the technology shifted its objectives to pursue other functions. Some dangers are associated with the technological shift which have lowered business productivity. These flaws should be eliminated to avoid the associated risks to the society.

Work Cited

Michalski, Ryszard S., Jaime G. Carbonell, and Tom M. Mitchell, eds. Machine learning: An artificial intelligence approach. Springer Science & Business Media, 2013.

Cohen, Paul R., and Edward A. Feigenbaum, Eds. The handbook of artificial intelligence. Vol. 3. Butterworth-Heinemann, 2014.