The future world will undoubtedly be in an era of digital technology, yet currently our world, including governance, livelihood, behavior, psychology, education, ethics, economics, and even law and currency, the entire order, paradigm, and moral concept of our society as a whole still belong to non-digitalized traditional era. Therefore, any thinking and discussion about the future, if it does not involve the various possibilities and prospects of the digitalized customer era will be quite absurd. Therefore, it is necessary to define the digital technology era and locate possible orders and paths.
Taking the influence of digital technology on society as an example, Steve Jobs believed that it can be divided into three generations looking at the impact of digital technology on society. The first generation is about digital tools that changed the businesses; this generation can use tools such as Word and Lotus 1-2-3 to improve work efficiency. The second generation is the internet generation; this generation saw changes in people's lifestyles and connected everyone. The third generation is about digital technology, where every product is digital which includes mobile phones, public opinions, newspapers, production, banking, currency and so on, everything is in the process of digitization.
Anbound's scholar Chan Kung believes in the impact of digital technology on the society, there is a process from the material world to psyche world. The profound change is first shown in the material world, and then begins to affect the human psyche and changed the people's lives. Modern medical research has shown that the influence of social media on human life has been very common and profound, but the interventional treatment of various psychology and the qualitative research of the problem are far from keeping up. Many recognize the harm of tobacco and spare no effort to oppose it, yet the harm of the internet is still not clearly recognized, let alone action against it.
The negative evaluation of social media and the growing medical awareness of modern medicine mainly concerns the negative effects of anxiety and emotions. Nowadays, depression is very common, and it affects sleep and nervous system; it is as powerful as tobacco and alcohol and causes addictions that require psychological intervention. Social media can even affect personality and interpersonal relationships. The negative effects of digital cryptocurrency are even worse; its rise and decline have triggered strong concern of the financial world and there are countless discussions about it. In other fields of technology, the use of artificial intelligence has also led to more and more scientific controversy. It is worth noting that unlike the scientific controversy that has produced technological breakthroughs in the past, the controversy caused by modern technology is often not bottom-up, but top-down, often emerging from the question of scientific authority. For instance, Stephen Hawking was strongly doubted the artificial intelligence.
At the end of 2018, He Jiankui, who claimed to be the world's first scientist to genetically modify infant, shocked the world because of the serious consequences and problems caused by the use of gene editing technology. Vice-minister of science and technology Xu Nanping pointed out that such work is "extremely odious." His research has shocked the international scientific community, and many people have expressed strong concerns about the lack of validated data and the risk of exposing healthy embryos to gene editing. Global scientists are worried about the impact of this genetic engineering on humans. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, pointed out that if He Jiankui is in the United States, he would be prosecuted for "violation of public law". In the United States, human cell and therapeutic research require approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
Theoretically, the fundamental goal of digitalization and the progress of science and technology is to strive for the progress of the society, but every kind of technology though achieving theoretical civilizational progress, will also have a huge, possible negative effect; this requires prudent technology policy control. The impact of the negative effects of science and technology in modern society is obvious; many technologies encouraged by science and technology policies have produced results that are quite different from those claimed by their inventors. As a result, the authority of science and technology policies has been seriously questioned, causing the government to become distrusted. For example, the inventor of OFO shared bike has become a dishonest person, while digital currency and trading financial technology have caused a lot of investors to become victims. There are numerous negative effects of social media; online public opinions often hijack the policies and politics.
Hence, there should assessment and prudential control of the impact of digital technology and technological innovation on the society; science and technology policy cannot act as an umbrella to shield their negative effects. Chan Kung believes that the ten-dimensional model consisted of life, politics, finance, law, economy, security, health, public opinion, morality, and education should be created, thereby systematically assessing the impact of the technology. On this basis, a fair, transparent and professional assessment is carried out by expert committees to prevent the technology from hijacking our life, politics, order, and society. To this end, the attitude towards digital technology should be changed, especially in unconditional and unrestricted free and open technology. Control law in the intellectual property system should be implemented to establish effective legislative control, so as to implement the freedom of development, approve the listed science and technology policy system.
Final analysis conclusion:
Prudent science and technology policies are necessary. The commercial signs of the technology developers often aim to build personal dreams, without fully taking into account the effects on society. Experience has shown that science and technology policies based on temporary strategic or industry-specific needs that are not carefully evaluated and often cost a lot of money, would lead us to something we do not necessarily want to have, and more often than not would cause us to lose some other precious thing; this is an aspect that causes limited progress of our time.
