The Social Impact of Emergent Embodied Computing
More and more, personal digital devices—from wearable brain-computers to digital skin tech to implanted computer chips—are being developed by inventors, large technology companies and early-phase start-ups.
The ideas for these “embodied computers” are developed long before they are actually available for purchase or use. The concepts also become familiar to people in the contexts of artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of things, and big data analytics.
In a sense, future digital media are invented, adopted and even celebrated before we have a chance to understand their likely impact on our lives, culture, politics, art and social practices.
Dr. Isabel Pedersen, Canada Research Chair in Digital Life, Media, and Culture, is exploring how immersive embodied technology may change how we act, interact with others, participate in cultures, and understand our identities.
Pedersen and her research team want to shed light on this area by addressing the subjective, rhetorical, cultural, ethical and political challenges posed by these new technologies. In doing so, they hope to address the complex impact these technologies may have on our identities, cultures and value systems.