Impacts of technology

Ethical, legal, cultural, environmental and privacy impacts, stakeholders, and weighing them up.

F12.1Technology and societyGCSE15 min

Covers OCR J277 1.6.1 Ethical, legal, cultural and environmental impact · AQA 8525 3.8 Ethical, legal and environmental impacts of digital technology on wider society, including issues of privacy · Edexcel 1CP2 5.1.1 Environmental issues

Do this lesson in the simulator

Print it: worksheet (PDF) · answers (PDF) · as a web page

Every piece of technology changes something beyond itself. A robot in a classroom changes what students learn; a phone in a pocket changes how people talk to each other; a data centre changes an electricity bill and a landscape. This module is about those effects, and how to weigh them up. Exam questions ask you to discuss them, so it starts with the five kinds of impact to look for.

The five kinds of impact

Impact	The question it asks
Ethical	Is it right or fair? Who is helped, and who is harmed?
Legal	Is it allowed by law? Which law applies?
Cultural	How does it change how people live, work and relate to each other?
Environmental	What does it cost in energy, materials and waste?
Privacy	What does it reveal about people, and who gets to see it?

Most real questions touch several at once. A shop's face-recognition camera is a privacy question (it records everyone), a legal one (data protection law), an ethical one (it may work less well on some faces), and a cultural one (people behave differently when watched).

One camera raises four kinds of impact at once. Each box names the kind and the reason, which is what an exam answer needs: the kind, who it affects, and how.

Stakeholders

A stakeholder is anyone affected by a system. Listing them is the fastest way to find impacts:

the users, who gain something and give something up;
the people who are not users but are still affected, such as a pedestrian near a self-driving car;
the workers whose jobs change;
the owners, who take the profit or the risk;
society and the environment as a whole.

An answer that names stakeholders and says how each is affected scores better than one that says only "it is good" or "it is bad".

Weighing it up

Impacts are rarely all one way. Good answers give both sides and then a judgement.

# the two lines every program starts with: the commands, then the robot
from bugbot import *
connect()

# each effect: what it is, and how good (+) or bad (-) it is, from -3 to 3
effects = [("students learn to code", 3), ("plastic and metal to make", -2),
           ("electricity to run", -1), ("fewer jobs in assembly", -2), ("reaches remote schools", 2)]
total = 0
for name, score in effects:
    print(f"{name}: {score:+d}")
    total = total + score
print("overall:", total, "->", "worth it" if total > 0 else "not worth it")

Run this in the simulator

The five effects from the code on one scale: benefits to the right, harms to the left. They add up to +5 and -5: the benefits and the harms cancel out, and the total is 0.

A score like this is a way to think, not an answer. Numbers hide the fact that a small harm to many people may matter more than a large benefit to a few.

Task: weigh up the robots

Each effect in effects has a score from -3 to 3. Print each as <name>: <score> with a + in front of positive scores (an f-string with {score:+d} does this). Then print total: <n>, and on the next line verdict: worth it if the total is above 0, verdict: not worth it if below 0, and verdict: too close to call if it is exactly 0.

# the two lines every program starts with: the commands, then the robot
from bugbot import *
connect()

effects = [
    ("students learn to code", 3),
    ("plastic and metal to make", -2),
    ("electricity to run", -1),
    ("fewer jobs in assembly", -1),
    ("reaches remote schools", 2),
    ("e-waste at end of life", -1),
]

Challenges

Add an effect of your own and see whether the verdict changes.
Group the effects by the five kinds of impact. Which kind has the most entries?
Why can a total like this be misleading? Give one example.