Week 4 - Technology and Ethics

9.13-14.09100min

Warm-up (15min)
What would your life be like without some of your top 5 technologies. Try to imagine how not having these things would change your life.
For example, would not having a cell phone make your communication with your friends and family different? Would the quantity of times spoken to them a day change? What about the quality of those communications?

-POTD

-Vocabulary List

1. chronologic
2. cost benefit analysis
3. ethics
4. embryonic stem cell
5. technocracy
6. scarcity
7. sustainability
8. subtext
9. monetary
10. emergent

Part 1 15-20min + discussion 5-10 (30min total)
Why do some people/societies choose to use some technologies and not others (e.g. stem cell research)?

For example:
TttT (post on blog):
http://www.isscr.org/public/ethics.htm

Questions:

• What is ethics?

• What do they mean by “the ends justify the means”?
• What are the “means” and “ends” identified in this text?
• Do you think the author of this text is in favor or against using Embryonic Stem Cells for research? Why?
• What can the about page on a website tell you?
  

Distribute Project Description + discuss (10min)
Influence%20of%20Tech%20Project.pdf

Part 2 (45min
)
Zeitgeist II (part 3 - technology worship 54min - 1:35.27)

Questions:

• What is the message of the content of the text?
• What is the bias?
• Based on what we can determine is the bias of the text, what can we determine about the information presented in the test?
• The video makes an argument for a resource based economy. What can we predict will be the “message” of this change? Put costs and benefits on these changes.
• Why do you think the text attacks established religion?