IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021 - 4

President's Message
President's Message
How Universal Is Our Message?
Clinton J. Andrews
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901 USA
 The Social implicaTionS of technology are
a global concern. Technological systems span all of
the continents and connect nearly every human. The
unintended consequences of human innovations
are even more widespread, if you include space junk
and radio noise. Associated ethical dilemmas are
ubiquitous and are not confined to particular cultures
or jurisdictions. We might expect that people
all over the world would want to discuss technology
and its social implications. But that is not the case. At
least not with us.
IEEE members live all over the world, although
they are not present in proportion to the general
population of each country. They are disproportionally
represented in English-speaking countries, especially
in North America. The regional representation
of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology
(SSIT) members is similar to that of IEEE as a
whole except in Asia, where we are vastly under-represented
outside Australia and New Zealand. Even
in India, which has the largest number of Asian SSIT
members, the proportion of SSIT presence is less
than half of the proportional IEEE presence. China,
Japan, and South Korea, combined, represent 21%
of the world's population but have less than 3% of
SSIT members.
Some of the under-representation may be due
to economic barriers, because IEEE and SSIT membership
carry a cost. A while ago, IEEE instituted a
country- and income-based discounted membership
arrangement to try to mitigate this effect. SSIT does
not have such a program, but maybe it should.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2021.3101926
Date of current version: 2 September 2021.
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0278-0097/21©2021 IEEE
Perhaps, it is partly a language barrier. Both the
overall IEEE and the SSIT membership distributions
show an Anglophone bias. As more and more professionals
learn English, and as on-the-fly, AI-supported
online translation services improve, this barrier
will diminish.
Maybe it is partly political. SSIT's publications,
conferences, and web posts address sensitive topics
such as the right to privacy, protection of intellectual
property, pursuit of economic advantage, and
ethics of warfare, for example. Our subject matter is
not only technical, and it may be risky or offensive
to some.
Could it be cultural? Much of what we talk
and write about SSIT applies a critical lens to the
world of technology. Critical thinking is a mainstream
part of some educational traditions, but is it
universally valued?
Critical thinking, according to a widely used
definition, means " reasonable and reflective thinking
focused on deciding what to believe or do, "
and such thinkers are disposed to pursue truth to
the extent possible, represent positions clearly and
honestly, and care about the dignity and worth of
all people [1]. Every clause in the previous sentence
could stir controversy: only some truths have
an objective basis and many others depend on the
eye of the beholder; communication is a culturally
grounded act; and no real society values everyone
equally [2], [3].
Wading further into the deep water, we can
appreciate that claims for universal values are also
controversial. Efforts to measure them find modest
support, in the sense that many people in many countries
recognize values such as power, achievement,
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021

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