Socio-Technological Challenges and Opportunities: Paths Forward

TL;DR

This paper discusses the socio-technological challenges and opportunities of digital advancements, emphasizing inclusive, sustainable, and cross-disciplinary approaches to ensure equitable benefits and environmental responsibility in future technological development.

Contribution

It highlights the need for holistic, inclusive, and sustainable design principles in future computing innovations to address global diversity and environmental concerns.

Findings

Digital technologies drive economic growth and societal benefits.

Inclusive and sustainable design is essential for future technological progress.

Cross-disciplinary efforts are crucial for addressing socio-technological challenges.

Abstract

Advancements in digital technologies have a bootstrapping effect. The past fifty years of technological innovations from the computer architecture community have brought innovations and orders-of-magnitude efficiency improvements that engender use cases that were not previously possible -- stimulating novel application domains and increasing uses and deployments at an ever-faster pace. Consequently, computing technologies have fueled significant economic growth, creating education opportunities, enabling access to a wider and more diverse spectrum of information, and, at the same time, connecting people of differing needs in the world together. Technology must be offered that is inclusive of the world's physical, cultural, and economic diversity, and which is manufactured, used, and recycled with environmental sustainability at the forefront. For the next decades to come, we envision significant cross-disciplinary efforts to build a circular development cycle by placing pervasive connectivity, sustainability, and demographic inclusion at the design forefront in order to sustain and expand the benefits of a technologically rich society. We hope this work will inspire our computing community to take broader and more holistic approaches when developing technological solutions to serve people from different parts of the world.