Being Promethean

Technological progress is often measured by increased speed and efficiency and how it can make humans and society faster, better, stronger, and happier. On the supply-side, 21 century technologies give us the power to “knock at the gates of heaven” (Small & Jollands, 2006), manipulating the very axes of nature: space, time, energy, matter, and life. On the demand-side, today’s tech-savvy, digital native society have an “insatiable appetite” (Fitzgerald, 2012) for technology that permeates all aspects of life (Bennett, Maton, & Kervin, 2008; Smith, Skrbis, & Western, 2012), and is for many the primary mediator of human-to-human connection (Palfrey, 2008; Thomas, 2011). However, there is a growing, fractious tension between our technological capabilities and the human, social structures within which the technologies reside. This tension questions the true extent to which technology makes us faster, better, stronger, and happier. Then there are the side effects – technology’s role in making us more unhealthy, sadder, and exhausted. Contemporary popular press is strewn with examples of technology overuse and addiction (Shapira et al., 2003; Yellowlees & Marks, 2007), technostress (Tarafdar, Pullins, & Ragu-Nathan, 2015), security and privacy concerns (Dinev, Hart, & Mullen, 2008), and the immediate, global reach, and potency of modern weaponry (Small & Jollands, 2006). These competing and co-existing positive and negative impacts and potential impacts of technology, and the technological potency that exists will inevitably lead us to a new, unknown place. Such technological potency should give IS researchers the impetus and stage necessary to inform, create or at least evaluate how technology enables fundamental leaps for humankind to make humans and society faster, better, stronger, and happier without the adverse side effects. IS researchers should be front and centre. However, public debates and societal engagement are much less visible in IS than in other fields of research, such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology, or neuro-computing (Stahl, 2012). While fieldspanning papers question if technology is really enabling a better world (e.g., Sawyer & Winter, 2011; Walsham, 2012), this future focus rarely trickles down to a specific problem or technology that can be operationalised and analysed. Taking ethics for example, most researchers focus on currently available technologies and current organisational and social contexts (Stahl, 2012). While this is certainly valuable, Stahl notes a distinct lack of research on future ethical challenges, a criticism that can be similarly applied to other areas of IS. The current surge of interest in topics such as AI, algorithms and autonomous vehicles emphasise this more than ever.