Page 82 - ISLA 240 REVIEW PACKET

forget about the purpose and intention behind their products and how they are really serving people. I also feel that many in the computing field are so focused on taking society to crazy new heights with new technology and innovation, but forget about the less fortunate parts of our society that have to be brought up to speed as well. Yes, innovation is about being creative and pushing new technology, but more importantly I think it’s about looking for ways to find solutions to things that aren’t always perceived as problems. The questions we should be asking should not only be in bugs, not in lines of code, not in crashing, but in who will this product service/not service? To do my part and what I think of as my duty in the technology industry, I started a organization on campus this quarter called CS+SocialGood. CS+Social Good grew out of the need for a unified and coordinated effort at Stanford to organize and connect students using technology to take action and collaborate on the world’s most pressing problems. Our mission is to empower members of our community to leverage technology for social good by inspiring action, facilitating collaboration, and forging pathways towards change. We envision a world where technology is understood beyond the hype and applied thoughtfully as a tool that can help us solve some of our biggest problems.
This class forced me to think about the bigger picture of some technologies. I’d like to think I was pretty aware about the intersection between social justice/affects and technology but this class definitely made think about it more. There’s a difference between the intrinsic value of technology versus the societal value of technology. I think that the intrinsic value of technology speaks to how there is an extremely high potential for growth within the industry. Basically how technology can go anywhere in the near future. To me, the societal value of technology lies in what we, as humans, choose to do with it. This is the whole “with great power comes great