This course explores the relationships between technology, and what it means to have a good life. There is no doubt that technologies can contribute to, and detract from, a good life. But what exactly do we mean by this? Good Technology for Users and Society (GTUS) explores this relationship by looking at the key concepts underpinning technology and the good life. We start with an introduction to the notion of the good life, what it means for an individual to have a good life, and the ways that technologies play a role in achieving this or not. However, a person is not an island – society is an essential contributor to a good life. We therefore look at the idea of the social good, social well-being, and the relationships between individuals, communities, and technologies.
All that said, technologies are constantly advancing, and these advancements can cause significant disruptions for individuals and society. The course then looks at the idea of technological disruption, and the different ways that we can understand technological disruption. We then look in more detail at ideas of disruption, technology, and the good life by exploring the idea of the ‘quantified self’. If we can observe, record, and analyse technology’s impacts, this may increase our understanding of the disruptive effects of technology on users and society. However, this urge to quantify ourselves and our society is itself disruptive; GTUS will discuss the ways that more information about our well-being can become detrimental to that well-being.
GTUS closes out by looking at particular sets of technologies, the ways that they disrupt our sense of self and society, and reveal existing conceptual complexities in our personal and social lives. The first example is the Internet of Things (IoT) and the ways that it impacts our notions of privacy. One the one hand, the IoT presents a significant challenge to interpersonal notions of privacy, opening up our most private spaces and activities to external surveillance. On the other hand, however, the IoT can be an ‘inhuman system’ where no human operators access this personal information. So, perhaps the IoT is a privacy protecting set of technologies. Instead, this class will show that while interpersonal privacy may be protected (in some cases at least) political privacy is a major problem for the IoT. Staying with the IoT, we next look at the way that the IoT spans both informational and physical realms. In this class, we look at smart houses to ask what matters more – informational security, or physical safety? On closer analysis, it looks like we should take a more pluralistic approach, and recognise that there are good reasons to favour the informational realm over the physical, and good reasons to favour the physical over the informational.
The final set of technologies that we will discuss concern human enhancement technologies. In this class, we will see how the particular social context that a technology is assessed in can cause the same technology to be thought of as both an enhancement and a disenhancement. We look in particular at military technologies, in which a technological intervention may be an enhancement in the context of conflict, but may be a disenhancement when a solider returns to the civilian context. We thus see the ways that the good life for individuals and society changes not just on the technology, but changes how we judge that technology. Technologies not only disrupt our notions of the good life, but they also force us to rethink just what the good life means for users and society.

 
Teaching will be centered on a series of lectures delivered to students, together with discussion and in-class assignments, but the bulk of the learning will occur in the students’ own time as they research the different areas using recommended readings and following their own research interests.  This will be supplemented by assessed presentations given by the students regarding a final paper to be delivered at the end of the course.  Help will be offered for both of these assignments through one-on-one meetings with the course professors.