ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF TECHNOLOGICAL CONVERGENCE ON HUMANISM

Dr.P.Thirumoorthi
Assistant professor, Periyar University, Salem, India peeteem005@gmail.com Introduction

The human being, the best creature of God, blessed with most powerful gift the human brain, while interacting with nature realized the power of systematic thinking. The ever continued process of thinking and experimentation with the nature, led to innumerable scientific breakthroughs in divergent fields. Application of these, gave shape to industries, which in turn started changing the lifestyle of human beings and economy of the society. Technological convergence is the tendency for different technological systems to evolve towards performing similar tasks. Technological convergence occurs when multiple products come together to form one product with the advantages of all them. Convergence plays an important role in society and humanities. It can influence the way in which government develop appropriate policy, enterprises compete in the market; and individuals communicate with each other and benefit from efficient and lower cost, innovative and new value added products and services. Issues: Convergence may involve on technology enabling another technology, as a tool, as a component or as a model. The malleability and convergence of these developing technologies make revolutionary

outcomes likely. Revolutionary outcomes make ethical considerations even more important. It appears important to consider potential ethical issues before and during information technology development, even if the ability to anticipate these by the proposers of the technology can be more difficult due to the complexity and convergence issues on human context. Ethical issues cannot be viewed on the basis of humanism alone; but they can be approached of possible outcomes on humanities. Few issues are briefed below in the humanism context:
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Transparency is an ethical issue throughout the system. The ethical context arises when one party is unaware of the way his, her or its interests may be impacted by third parties

Emerging technologies address the challenge of disabilities and special need. Technology convergence extends life expectancy but reduces reliance on mental infrastructure. This poses challenge on lifelong learning. Children are currently leading their parents online, but communication discrepancies are not unusual when the former employ right brain emotional impressions to adults. With the increase in computing capabilities we shift from a left brain hierarchical mindset world to a more right brained seamless society grid.

Copyright issue highlights challenges from emerging technology convergence that the ethical implications are significant for human being in the form of memory.

Structural challenge in human: the individual shifts from the search to know everything to the knowledge to search for everything, may challenge structures of humanity as we perceive it.

Other issues which are included in this context are human rights, digital divide, gender equality and cyber crime.

This paper attempts to bring out the relationship between humanism and technological convergence in the first part. In the second part it tries to identify possible outcomes and ethical issues on humanism because of technological convergence. Finally it seems to explain the implications of those issues on human factor. Key Words: Malleability, Transparency, Mental infrastructure, Structural challenge, Digital divide

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