Using technology skills for positive change

Advancing Women & Technology: Empowering Futures Through Digital Skills: 2025: News and Resources: About Us: Center of Excellence for Women & Technology: Indiana University Bloomington

In today’s fast-paced digital world, technology isn’t just a career path-it’s a compelling tool for empowerment.

How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026? - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design

We fail to take tech seriously when we do not grasp its full impact on humans

Technology is a Siren Song

Orangutan thinking This started with a question I asked myself: How do our minds change when we can receive a plausible, informed, and convincing answe...

What’s the best technology that doesn’t exist yet?

We analyzed 100+ conversations and essays on positive futures to find out

Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy

An impassioned guide to how computers can fundamentally change how we learn and think.Andrea diSessa's career as a scholar, technologist, and teacher has b

We used to get excited about technology. What happened?

Innovation that truly serves us all is in scarce supply. That’s a problem.

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transform…

12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech

Tech is more important than ever, deeply affecting culture, politics and society. Given all the time we spend with our gadgets and apps…

Appropriate Measures — Real Life

Changing the tech we use is not enough to mitigate the environmental and social harm of mass technology

Care at the Edge of Automation – Topos Institute

Technologies don’t just solve problems, they change us. We invent technologies, and they invent us in turn, shaping our lives and worlds. This is the phenomenon that Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, in Understanding Computers and Cognition (1986), called “ontological design.” It matters now more than ever—along with a second lesson they saw clearly. Technological research is always guided (and sometimes misguided) by deep ontological assumptions about, e.g., the nature of cognition, agency, and communication. If we are to create technologies that truly serve human flourishing and care, we must bring these hidden assumptions into the open and question them at their roots.

The Golden Age Is Behind Us: How the Status Quo Impacts the Evaluation of Technology

New technology invariably provokes concerns over potential societal impacts. Even as risks often fail to materialize, the fear continues. The current research explored the psychological underpinnings of this pattern. Across four studies ( N = 2,454 adults recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk), we found evidence for the role of status quo thinking in evaluating technology. In Study 1, we experimentally manipulated the reported age of unfamiliar technology and found that people evaluate it more favorably when it is described as originating before (vs. after) their birth. In Studies 2 through 4, participants’ age at the time of invention strongly predicts attitudes toward a wide range of real-world technologies. Finally, we found that individual differences in status-quo-based decision-making moderated evaluations of technology. These studies provide insight into how people respond to the rapidly changing technological landscape.

AI as the greatest source of empowerment for all

I’ve always considered myself a pragmatic technologist—someone who loves technology not for its own sake, but for the direct impact it can have on people’s lives. That’s what makes this job so exciting, since I believe AI will unlock more opportunities for more people than any other technology in history. If we get this right, AI can give everyone more power than ever.

After Forty Years, Still No Silver Bullet

As always, technology can help with production. What’s scarce is orientation.