1. Security and surveillance.
Information transmitted down wires or by radio waves is inherently more vulnerable to interception than information retained in a vault, and so security measures have been developed to match the increased threat. Chief among these are advanced methods of data encryption using encoding systems that are virtually impossible to break, even by the most advanced computer systems.
2. Weaponry and conflict.
Many of the pressures that have produced advances in the understanding and command of guidance and control systems have arisen from military applications. Warfare has been transformed by advanced technology. "Smart" bombs that seek specific targets, "jamming" devices that interfere with the ability of an enemy to communicate on the battlefield, software viruses that disrupt control systems, eavesdropping on email and digital telephone calls, and electronically disseminated misinformation are all part of the stuff of modern warfare and state security. But smart bombs are not as smart as people are led to believe, and the technology has proved less reliable than military and political leaders insinuate.
3. Work and society.
Information technology significantly alters the parameters governing the way human beings cooperate to achieve their goals. The manufacture of physical objects requires people to be physically present at the site of their construction, in however widespread a way the components are manufactured. Before electronic mail and data communication through the Internet, office work similarly required people to be collected together in their workplaces. Where added value arises largely from the manipulation of data strings—through programming, database design and construction, composing and editing text, and so forth—this physical juxtaposition is unnecessary. People can relate across digital channels through video conferencing in ways that significantly reduce the need and opportunity for physical meetings.
It is not yet clear what the consequences of this shift in work patterns will be, and they are not unique in human history. Just as the industrial revolution drew populations to the cities and the invention of the telephone and radio communication had a major impact on the relationship between society and work, so decentralized but cooperative data-working will effect further changes in that relationship. The threat of loneliness will increase alongside the opportunities for freer work patterns and wider circles of friends, and many have found their experiences of "virtual communities" deeply unsatisfying and unfulfilling.
4. Viruses, hacking, and censorship
The destruction of the modern Eden of computergenerated communication by deliberately made viruses is a story of almost biblical proportions. The fact that computers must be accessible to a public domain to receive email or access Internet websites makes them vulnerable to attack from malicious software that attaches itself to email and downloadable packages. Executable files and attachments, once opened, infect the host machine, and commonly export themselves to other machines by spawning copies of themselves in bogus messages sent to all or some of the entries in the local address book. The cost to commerce, worldwide, of damage caused by viruses is already measured in billions of dollars, and the cost of antivirus software that struggles to keep up with ways to immunize systems against attack by viruses that become more sophisticated every day has added to that cost.
Hacking, as the process of gaining unauthorized access to another computer is known, is also a major problem. Just as authors of software viruses regard every new defensive shield as a new challenge, so all the sophisticated mechanisms that are employed to prevent unauthorized access to a computer represent a similar challenge. Hackers' conventions set up competitions where the winners are those who can most successfully penetrate the defenses devised by other competitors, and there have been many instances where commercial, national defense, and other secure systems have been penetrated. Some hackers are motivated by no more than the intellectual challenge; some are malicious; some are politically motivated; some are disgruntled employees; some are just socially disenfranchised and angry.
5. Reality and virtual reality
Sciences and religions strive to increase knowledge and awareness of what they take variously to be "reality." They have argued extensively and bitterly about the boundaries of "reality," even though their conceptions of reality have grown and changed through the centuries.
The term virtual reality is generally taken to denote that new realm of experience fabricated with the aid of IT from the connections between people throughout the world and the capabilities of software to generate new kinds of communication and even new fictional environments in which they can interact. There is nothing in principle to prevent people living on opposite sides of the globe from donning some sort of virtual-reality headset and sharing the exploration of an entirely unreal virtual habitat.
Virtual habitats are not, of course, new. Every fictional book ever written has created virtual habitats for the human imagination, and so, more recently, have films. It is the interactive capacity of virtual realities that is new and poses sharp questions about what people take to be the nature and purpose of human existence.
Wilfykil answered the question on March 2, 2019 at 07:12