1.

1 Learn the evolution of science and technology in society

 + - Intro
o + - What is Science, Technology
 Science - The intellectual and practical activity encompassing
the systematic study of the structure and behavior
of the physical and natural world through
observation and experiment.
- The reason why something happens.
Technology - The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes,
especially in industry. “advances in computer technology"
- Science applied into something useful.
o How is it related to the community?
o Isn’t it better off with Science related courses?
o Why do we need to study it?
o Branches of science
 + - SCIENCE
 + - Formal science
 Mathematics
 Statistics
 Logic
 + - Social science
 Sociology
 Economics
 Law
 Political
 Psychology
 + - Natural science
 Earth
 Geology
 Oceanology
 Meteorology
 Paleontology
 Life
 Zoology
 Botany
 Ecology
 Genetics
 Physical
 Chemistry
 Physics
 Astronomy
 + - Applied science
 Engineering
 Computer
 Civil
 Electrical
 Mechanical
 Health
 Medicine
 Dentistry

Prelim Science, Technology & Society: ELEMENT 1 P age |1

  Pharmacy
 Agriculture
 + - Scientific method
 Ask a question
 Background research
 Construct a hypothesis
 Test hypothesis by experimentation
 Replicate
 Change a variable
 Analyze data and draw a conclusion
 Communicate results
 + - Importance of science
o Sweden and Switzerland
2 to 3% of their GDP (Gross Domestic Product)
which is the total income the country produces in a year to science and technology
Alters our conception of ourselves and our place in the universe
Sixteenth and seventh century
Scientific revolution
Galileo - argued that the is not the center of the universe
Darwin - hypothesized that man product of natural process
This century.
Physicists - The universe is probabilistic.
- Big bang theory.
- Continents are plates constantly move and collide with each other.
- What is Pangea?
- Mars is a place where Alien bacteria were found.
Nineteenth century.
Science based tech - began to transform whole industries.
- Made warfare more dangerous.
- Nuclear weapons can wipeout humanity.
- Rapid onslaught of computerization & communication.
Scientific knowledge is always a product of human activity.
• Knowledge produced by people: thinking,
believing, arguing, and sometimes making
mistakes.
+-
Pro's & Con's
 Pro's
 Created new jobs
 Pharmaceuticals' can now cure some deceases
 Enjoy the games
 Antibiotics that heal
 Con's
 Wiped-out most Jobs
 Pharmaceuticals' did not know the negative impact of these cures
 We tend to forget about unemployment
 Medicine causes mutation of bugs
 + - Things to contemplate
o Science is always a product
of human activity?
 Onward march of technology

Prelim Science, Technology & Society: ELEMENT 1 P age |2

  Progress of science
Scientific knowledge has always been produced
by people thinking, believing, arguing and
sometimes making mistakes.
Humans can always decide what research is being
done and what is done with the results.
The time of receiving an occupational training that
would last a lifetime has now passed.
Flexibility and adaptivity are important attributes
in retaining a good job.
Human Products that, Shape and are shaped
by the society emerged.
 + - Basic terms
o Science - is most effective way of understanding our world.
- Concise Oxford dictionary "Systematic,
organized Knowledge" and this Systematic
nature sets it apart Science from other
types of understanding.
- Concerned with theory.
Scientific evidences - comes from experiments,
though some do not, astronomy and geology
Alan Chalmers - 1982 introduction to nature of science
dealing with famous philosophers like
Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend.
Technology - most people consider technology as
applied science.
- Scientist produce knowledge and
technologist turns it into products.
- Science did not begin to be
incorporated to the production
systems.
- If technology is applied science
therefore, there is no technology
before science.
- Grate pyramids of Egypt, china’s
great wall, India & Sri lanka's Irrigation
system.
- Craft " an activity involving skill in
making things by hand.
- body of skills and knowledge by which
we control and modify the world.
- It is being influenced by scientific knowledge
- Military technology "bows & arrows” &” knights’ armor"
- Shipbuilding and navigation that lead
Britain to conquer a quarter of the world.
- Medicine is also a technology.
- R & D (Research and Development) - Activities
concerned with developing new scientific Knowledge,
Technology and Processes.
- Key point in STS Studies - Activities are not isolated,
rather, they are carried out in social, political and

Prelim Science, Technology & Society: ELEMENT 1 P age |3

 economic context.
- Scientist & technologist; work in Colleges,
Firms or Research groups not in isolation.
- Questions about "Ethics and conduct", "how these
groups are financed", "how they are best organized".

1.2 Apply the basic concepts of science and technology in a social and historical context.
 Face the future
o +-
Hunter-gatherers
 Homo-sapiens spent 200,000 years as a
hunter-gatherer.
rate of change during this period was so slow.
mankind lived off Nature
+-
Agrarian societies
 12,000 years ago, spread and
supplanted hunters and gatherers.
it brought with its towns,
specialization and new technologies.
we learned to tame and control
Nature’s richness through cultivation.
+-
Industrialization to today’s
Information society.
 Using the power of machines instead of manpower.
Introduction of chemical production processes.
A mere 200 years ago lives were transformed
yet again by the technologies of industrialization.
The population as a whole experienced
sustain improvements in its standard of living
 Explosive population growth.
 The organization of labor.
 Establishment of city societies as we know them today.
we started to form Nature.
Digital Revolution
 Began sometime between the
1950’s and the 1970’s.
Transition from analogue, mechanical,
and electronic technologies to digital technologies
During the 1990’s, things went to the
next level when the Internet became ubiquitous.
Information Society - has created a knowledge-based
society which is important in itself and which has also
had a significant impact on both the manufacturing
and service sectors.
Digital products have a number of characteristics that
set them apart from the physical products we are familiar
with today.
- can be replicated ad infinitum without any loss of integrity

Prelim Science, Technology & Society: ELEMENT 1 P age |4

 and can be transported to the other side of
the world in a matter of seconds.
- Smartphones -
already several thousand times faster and over a
million times smaller and cheaper than the
world’s fastest computer was in 1968.
- A plethora of technologies -
This includes robots, artificial intelligence (AI),
biotechnology, and 3D printers.
- A.I. is the ability of machines to make decisions
based on input from their environments.
- do our bidding and may even take the
initiative on our behalf.
- The world around us is awakening:
"Age of intelligence".
Age of Intelligence -
- First stage Smart appliances
- Second stage Smart Cars
- Third stage Smart phones
Biology
- First phase it will be superior to any
doctor at making diagnoses
and developing therapeutics.
- Second phase start to manipulate human
DNA (Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid)
- Third phase print new organs in a 3D printer
and manufacture
nanorobots that repair
Humans are in a position to mold Nature
 Change
o Has always been met with open resistance
because it often eliminates people’s livelihoods.
Incumbent institutions, such as
political and religious hierarchies,
cannot cope with the complexity that
the new technologies introduce.
new technologies can often be
considered a threat to the very
foundations upon which our
society is built.
1.3 Develop knowledge on how science and technology progressed into what it is today.
 +-
Computers, network, and
the social life of a refrigerator
o Exponential Acceleration is a way to describe
the rate of change we are facing
 An annual population growth of 3%
or an interest-bearing bank account
with an interest rate of 1%,
Moore’s law – we need to be

Prelim Science, Technology & Society: ELEMENT 1 P age |5

 vigilant and agile.
After 30 years of increasingly faster
and cheaper computers.
15 years of increasingly faster
telecommunication technologies.
Amount of data that we can store on a hard
disk (in bits per dollar) or the amount of data
that we can transmit wirelessly (in bits per
second) is also growing exponentially.
Plot the number of bits per dollar in RAM as a
function of time, the curve goes from one bit
per dollar in 1965 to 100 million bits per dollar
in 2010: exponential growth with a doubling
time of approximately 18 months.
Significant improvements in fiber-optics, optical
switches, etc. We are moving towards
a cable-free world.
The curve representing bits per second per dollar for
wireless data transmission as a function of
time doubled every 11th month (1990-2004).

+-
Creative crossing
 a way to describe the creation of a new technology, a
new product, a new process or a new procedure by
crossing two or more existing
technologies.
Smartphones – a cross between computers,
phones, cameras.
Amazon – born at the intersection of bookstores,
websites, and mail order forms

Searching for a creative crossing between computing

power and data transmission speed doesn’t
make much sense. It is precisely this
convergence that is the wellspring from which
the vast majority of technological developments
emanate.
+-
Cloud computing - ability to run programs or store
data on servers with internet access,
located remotely from our own computer.
 The old software development paradigm of
developing, releasing, and subsequently
patching the software.
Microsoft - Office 365

Prelim Science, Technology & Society: ELEMENT 1 P age |6

 Google - google docs and classroom
Antivirus software - subscription based
Today, versions are launched in beta before
they are completely finished.
Agile is the new black. There is razor-sharp focus on
customer value, the business model is either a
subscription-based model or revenue from
secondary revenue streams, and the life
expectancy of any given product is often short.
+-
Intrinsic Disruption
 + - Intrinsic Disruption 1
 Used to describe those situations where an
established trend or development path suddenly
comes to an end, and the boundary conditions
change drastically.
The fall of the "Berlin Wall".
The fall of the "Arab Spring."
Facebook and Instagram
Snapchat, Tinder.
“Unicorns” (companies valued in excess of
1 billion US dollars).
Neural networks - AI that does not require
humans to program them.
IBM Watson, analyze X-ray images.
Facebook reportedly knows more about population
densities and distributions than any other
organization.
It’s about how we can imagine and create
more than what was before.
It’s about understanding how new technologies can
be crossed with each other to create
new products, new markets, new customer
needs and values.
 + - Intrinsic disruption 2
 + - 1. HERE YOU GO - IT’S FRE
 Most products are free for the average user, and
services for companies are sold as subscriptions at
very competitive rates.
Revenue is generated from supplemental
services, advertising, and data mining.
How will your company survive if your
competitors give away their products for free?
The rationale behind these developments can be
found in the relationship between the digital product
itself and the exponential growth of the performance-

Prelim Science, Technology & Society: ELEMENT 1 P age |7

 to-price ratio.
Joseph Bertrand, and his axiom from 1883:
“In a free market, the price will approach the
marginal cost.”
 +-
 2. EVERY HOME A HOTEL,
 EACH CAR A TAXI.
 Gives companies with digitally based business
models an awful lot of room to scale up their products
and generate revenue in a variety of different ways.
Airbnb is well on its way to becoming
the world’s largest hotel chain.
 +-
 3. THE SINGULARITY AND LOST ARTS
 Ray Kurzweil;
- maintains that the growth of computing
power will bring us to a point where machine
intelligence will surpass our own,
- we will begin to integrate with the machines
before that point.
Jonathon Foer -in his book
- “Moonwalking with Einstein,”
talks about why memory techniques
(mnemonics) have become a lost art,
- Rationalizes along the same lines, that unlike
Cicero, we no longer have to commit
speeches to memory.
In the future, will it be possible to have a
cache surgically implanted?
Wirelessly connect the brain to an external memory?
Have Wikipedia in the cerebral cortex?
What other faculties of the mind like mnemonics will?
disappear when we are continuously connected to
the “Cloud”?
+-
The Internet of a 1000 Things
 The idea is that when both computers and
communication technologies become abundant and
cheap, it’ll be worth our while to build them into
physical objects around us.
Our smartphone is a platform that can spawn a
fantastic number of new possibilities.
+-
Virtual or Augmented reality
 + - Virtual reality
 The vision was that by putting on virtual reality goggles

Prelim Science, Technology & Society: ELEMENT 1 P age |8

 one could experience computer-simulated worlds
(such as for training or games) or explore large
datasets (such as financial or medical data)
Predates augmented reality 15 years earlier.
Where the latter is an offshoot of the previous.
2016, three players each launched their own
new VR equipment: HTC and Oculus
(which is owned by Facebook and Sony)
and Google with it google cardboard.
 + - Augmented reality
 described as enhanced reality.
you can enrich the reality you’re
looking at with digital information.
LAYAR application
Pokémon Go
Facebook's "Face recognition"
+-
Artificial Intelligence
The perfect worker
 Chess a sign of intelligence
"Mechanical Turk"
- late 18th century
- Toured Europe
- Automaton (Robot)
- a life-sized mannequin torso, decked out in a
turban and with a long beard.
- built into a desk with a chessboard.
- played a pretty good game against
its human opponents.
- Turned to be a hoax where human
operator was hidden inside the desk:
- Became a reality in 1997 when IBM’s computer,
Deep Blue, beat Gary Kasparov in a chess
tournament.
- Kasparov used creativity and intuition.
competences that humans i.e. human intelligence.
- Reason Deep Blue won was because it could
compensate for these shortcomings by being able
to calculate faster than Kasparov. Much faster
- Could analyze an impressive 200 million
positions in a minute
- Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer vied for the
title of World Champion in Iceland in 1972.
Framed as a duel between the ideologies of
the Soviet Bloc and the Free World.

Prelim Science, Technology & Society: ELEMENT 1 P age |9

 - Technology is always fascinating, and when it
surpasses the abilities of humans in a particular
field, the performance of humans in this field
suddenly becomes boring and uninteresting.
Siri - occasionally not-so understanding
assistant on your iPhone.
- speech recognition capabilities and access to the
functions on your phone.
- Has access to answer engines such as
Wolfram Alpha.
- Can answer simple questions.
- Other examples of weak AI include autopilots,
warehouse robots, or Wilson, IBM’s Jeopardy-
playing savant.
Strong vs Weak A.I.
- Turing Test - Proposed by Alan Turing in 1950.
- Strong if, after conducting an extended dialogue
with an AI via a neutral communications channel
(for example, text-based communication via the
internet), we are convinced that we have been
communicating with another person.
- "Intelligent" is anything that demonstrates a
versatile ability to understand ambiguous
communication - and with which we can
establish a rapport.
- John McCarthy - coined the term Artificial
Intelligence (AI) in 1956,
- He defined it as intelligent machines
- a flexible, rational agent that understands the
environment in which it finds itself and acts in a
manner, which maximizes its chances for success.
A.I - is a multifaceted field with many interdependent disciplines.
- At the core: The Cognitive functions such as
problem formulation, analysis, and interpretation.
- Flexibility and “fuzziness” here (call it creativity
and innovation).
- Input-output functions; such as speech synthesis
and speech recognition.
- Physical functions; Can in turn also be
split into subcategories.
♦ Research performed in such diverse academic
fields as computer science, mathematics,
psychology, linguistics, philosophy,
and neuroscience.
♦ One would think that the objective is to
recreate human intelligence, but the

Prelim Science, Technology & Society: ELEMENT 1 P a g e | 10

 long-term objectives are also to recreate a
general-purpose A.I.
- We call it a functionality, an algorithm, or maybe
even machine learning, but not artificial intelligence.
- A.I. is also inseparable from robotics.
- A.I. can therefore have a physical embodiment in
the form of a robot, or be software that runs on a
computer.
+ - Exponential Acceleration in this field
 + - First
 IBM’s True North project
- Develop a chip that in many ways resembles the
way the human brain is structured and which can
perform complicated calculations using
considerably less electrical power than traditional
computer chips.
- currently simulate 1 million digital neurons that
communicate with each other via 256 electronic
synapses.
- It can perform 46 billion synapse operations
per second while consuming only 70mW of power.
 + - Second
 Growth of the amount of knowledge available in an
electronic format and that can be tapped into by AIs.
huge amounts of data in and of themselves
create a need for AI.
the data is the training material we need to
be able to train the AI effectively
 + - Third
 Open Source and the Network Effect.
Both Google’s TensorFlow and R,
a programming language for statistical computing,
Tools are available to everyone with an internet
connection and are powerful enough to develop
complex solutions.
Online Education - A factor that strongly contributes to
strengthening the level of competency in general
within the field of AI.
- More talent needs to be trained for this work.
- Udacity and Coursera, two online education
platforms, offer free courses that cater to all levels.
- These technologies will have an impact on some
of the most fundamental assumptions upon which
our society is based
Education - The centralization of schools is based on
the premise that both teachers and buildings are

Prelim Science, Technology & Society: ELEMENT 1 P a g e | 11

 scarce commodities and that the educational
system is an important element of nation-building.
- Globalization and the digitization of the dissemination
of knowledge have altered this basic assumption
Changes in education:
• First wave - Content will be democratized and the
learning experience itself will be digitized.
• Second wave - artificial intelligence will enable
unprecedented customization of the learning
experience.
• Third wave - we will be able to incorporate
machines into our bodies:
- Gravitate towards a decentralized organizational structure.
- Everyone will have access to high quality material
from relevant schools.
- The digital universe will gradually take over more
and more of the learning process.
- The technology is capable of simultaneously
providing us knowledge when we need it, where
we need it, and in a format.
- In the near future, augmented reality will
enable us to be briefed on a given topic.
- Will shift from being “push” based to “pull” based.
- most effective way to learn is through mentoring
with customized learning materials.
- Next gen. software will be able to ascertain the
users need based on the output and adjust
course of action
- Industrial revolution mindset - Mass Prod. of
students similar to a factory.
Ray Kurzweil - first half of the 2020’s, these virtual
environments will be so compelling that people
will prefer them to being physically present.
- The next big revolution will come when we are
able to integrate non-biological memory with our brains.
Energy - Mankind is in a synergy with Nature.
- Energy is pivotal in the Environmental Ecosystem
- Run more and more realistic climate models
Health and Longevity
- Life Extension Researcher Aubrey de Grey’s goal
is to stop the aging process itself.
- Aubrey de Grey and Ray Kurzweil are convinced
that new research will enable us to increase that
number to 5, 6, and 13 months per year.
Work and Manufacturing
Disruptive Companies

Prelim Science, Technology & Society: ELEMENT 1 P a g e | 12