A writer and researcher from Belarus who studies political and social implications of technology. Morozov expresses skepticism about the popular view that the Internet is helping to democratize authoritarian regimes, arguing that it could also be a powerful tool for engaging in mass surveillance, political repression, and spreading nationalist and extremist propaganda.
Issues of science and technology are intertwined with politics, economics, and social issues. It’s not just about what we do with the power of science and technology, it’s about who holds that power and to what ends is it used. But STS itself is not political…
One of the central issues that interests me in STS is the debate over blaming technology. When we look around us in our modern world and see aspects that have changed for the worse due to some manifestation of “progress”, we necessarily start trying to figure out where the fault lies. This is what brought me to STS. But I concede that the answer isn’t simple. If our technology is making our lives worse, who or what is to blame? Where is the root of the problem?
In 1980 Winner proposed that technologies embody social relations i.e. power. To the question he poses “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, Winner identifies two ways in which artifacts can have politics. The first, involving technical arrangements and social order, concerns how the invention, design, or arrangement of artifacts or the larger system becomes a mechanism for settling the affairs of a community. The second way in which artifacts can have politics refers to artifacts that correlate with particular kinds of political relationships, which Winner refers to as inherently political artifacts (Winner, p. 22, 1999).
A Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, superintelligence risks, the reversal test, and consequentialism. In 2011, he founded the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, and he is currently the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.
A critical historian of technology, science and education, best known for his seminal work on the social history of automation. In his final years he taught in the Division of Social Science, and the department of Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada.