IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2022 - 95

Last Word
A Golden Jubilee: Trumpets, Technology,
and Tenacity
Christine Perakslis
School for the Future of Innovation in Society,
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281 USA
 Our cOmmunity is celebrating our 50th anniversary.
Golden jubilees are marked by traditions
such as sounding trumpets, reconciling factions,
provisionally relinquishing private ownership for
communal usage, restoring property to original owners,
and, naturally, celebrations. We celebrate our
milestone by persisting in our decades-old mission.
Yet, we also blasted trumpets to awaken a slumbering
world lulled to sleep regardless of (or perhaps
by) the faint ticking of technological bombs [1]. We
continue to celebrate constructive technology; our
peers used it to gather the scattered and guard well
the mentally unwell. We critically considered artificial
general intelligence (AGI) as well as foreseen
artificial superintelligence (ASI); we are reminded
of the benefits, yet also the complexities when aligning
such technologies with diverse human values.
We were challenged to focus on outcomes (values)
over outputs (business).
Society is moving into socio-technical systems
requiring evolving reconciliation(s) between
human and nonhuman stakeholders. Our community
recognizes that this coevolution could result in
human devolution [2], [3] without the necessary
questions asked and safeguards implemented.
Thus, we questioned. How do we justify the use
of chat bots who cannot empathize; are the risks
too high and the benefits too low when nonhuman
actors replace expert humans who serve our disadvantaged
members of society? How do we avoid
defining such constructs as privacy too narrowly?
How do we avoid loss of liberty, property, or rights
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2022.3148605
Date of current version: 9 March 2022.
March 2022
when emerging legal technological systems are
employed with biased AI techniques that can exacerbate
subtly embedded value issues?
Many of our researchers also shifted from participatory
methodologies toward veritable codesign
methodologies, thereby relinquishing far more ownership
of decision making to the people impacted
by the technologies. Our community also leveraged
technology to restore intangible property as mixed
reality is being used extraordinarily to return historical,
cultural, and geographic ma¯tauranga (knowledge)
to a diasporic Ma¯ori community.
At Our 50-yeAr milestone, we reassert our commitment
to sound alarms and proactively address
technologies that move society from disorder to
order in the service of creating more (unintended)
disorder [4], [5]. Though we might be grappling
with more sophisticated technologies when compared
with yesteryear, we will persist in our decades-old
mission of addressing tenaciously the
social implications of technology.

 References
[1] N. Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers,
Strategies. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014,
p. 259.
[2] J. Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence
and the End of the Human Era. St. Martin's Griffin,
NY, USA: Thomas Dunne Books, 2013, pp. 209-218.
[3] R. Granger, " Toward the quantification of cognition, "
Aug. 2020, arXiv:2008.05580. Accessed: Aug. 17, 2021.
[Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.05580
[4] E. D. Schneider and J. J. Kay, " Order from disorder:
The thermodynamics of complexity in biology, " in
What Is Life: The Next Fifty Years: Speculations on the
0278-0097/22©2022 IEEE
95
https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2008.05580
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