Philosophical Perspectives on Technology †MyAssignmenthelp.com

Question: Discuss about the Philosophical Perspectives on Technology. Answer: Introduction: Decision making is a continuous activity that people do either knowingly or unknowingly. Decisions are made depending on the persons beliefs or preferences. Choices can also be made depending on the rationality and logical decision making. Tversky, A. (1977). Before one decides to take one thing over the rest, he or she should have figured out in terms of their beliefs, preferences, rationality or existing facts. There are risky and riskless decisions. Riskless decisions are those ones that a person takes a commodity in exchange of a monetary value which could be money or labor while a risky decision is that one which someone has to gamble without knowing the outcome consequences of any choices they make in advance under which the various outcomes hold different probabilities. (Archontaki,Lewis and Bates,2013). Any consequence that comes out of a decision made is in terms of total wealth. The worthiness of results or consequences is that which referred to as value. Normally, people do not think of fairly outcomes in terms of wealth but they think of it in terms of losses, gains or neutral outcomes. Decisions made and the value of gains or losses is in most cases determine how people make their decisions. If the probability of gaining is higher than that of losing, one may chose to go for the gambling rather than going for an option where both gaining and losing have the same probabilities. (Davies,2011) When decisions including the possibilities of unfavorable are made, that is risky prospects, they are characterized by the outcomes of it and the probabilities included. When one gambles over something, the results are framed as gains or losses, addition of assets to the existing wealth or subtraction of value from the existing status quo.( Griffy-Brown, 2011). The occurrence of differences should not alter the order preference during decision making although this statement is in most cases violated by people. United States of America has been given a chance to participate in a world competition over gold mining in a certain country in Africa. The probability of winning the competition is 85% while losing is 15%. On the other hand, USA can go to Africa, look for another country with gold mines and close a deal of which they have 100% chances of finding and an equal probability of100% of not finding.( HORWITZ, REYNOLDS and CHARLES,2014). In such a case, the US has to choose between the two, whereby the first one seems to carry weight over the second option, depending on rationality, belief or preference, a choice shall be made. The value of the loss or gain also matters and the frame of the gains or loss. There are two choices that can be made, the risky or the riskless, if they go for the second option, it will be a risky decision while the first option is riskless. Unintended events that can harm are accidental and not intended. However, most of such events can be prevented from happening. Such things can be caused by various conditions under which human beings are working under. Accidents come about due to human error which should be noted that safety barriers are there but human being very simple mistakes that can cause permanent harms ( Ianni and Grissom,2015). According to Reason (1997), factors contributing to accidents are classified into three. They are follows: organizational or systems, local workplace and unsafe acts. Human beings are not to blame for accident causation but what contributes to accidents could be the situation under which someone is. Reason focuses on the systems present when the event occurred rather that the person who was there when the accident happened, this is because when an error occurs, it is a result of a trigger. In the accident causation model Reason (1990), it is proposed that within complex systems such as hospitals, there should exist barriers to prevent error occurring. There should be guidelines to be followed and policies when carrying out various activities. (Li and Feng,2017). However, barriers that have been put in place may not lack weaknesses. The weaknesses are what which may result to errors despite the fact that there is prevention. Reason (2001) explains way that a failure can occur. It could be that the plans in place are good enough to prevent errors but they are not followed as it should be or the plans go as intended but the plan itself was faulty from the beginning. Therefore, accidents can be prevented not by changing the condition of human being but rather changing the condition under which human beings work( Muldoon,2016) Errors occur if the person working is tired or working under a certain pressure that he or she may forget to follow the precautions and end up causin g severe harm. Therefore, people should work when sober, active and without a hurry to finish up the activity so as to have time for preventing adverse events. In a hospital, there is a complex system of which errors can easily occur and harm the patient. There are cases where a patient can die or have permanent harms not because of the disease diagnosed with but because of error made by paramedics. Take it for example a patient is given the wrong medicine and at the end he or she becomes paralyzed forever. The person taking person and happens to be the one who gave the medicine is not to blame but rather the systems used in the hospital. The nurse who brought the medicine also took it from the pharmacist who followed written instructions from the consulted doctor. The prescription was given by the doctor following results he or she got from the laboratory where the patient was tested.( Scarpi and Pizzi,2012). The whole error occurred because the laboratory technician gave out results meant for another patient and all along the chain, none of the realized the error. According to image theory, decision makers use three knowledge plans so as to put their thoughts in an order when making decisions. Patterns by which decisions are made in accordance are referred to as images. The three schematic knowledge structures are as follows: value image, trajectory image and strategic image. It includes the goals or targets that had been set up before by an individual or organization. This image shows the hopes to achieve something by an individual or an organization on making a certain decision. Image theory personal and organizational decisions This structure entails the principles of the decision maker. The person will therefore make decisions according to his or her own behavior or if it involves an organization, decisions shall be made in considering strict rules and regulations. The decision making therefore depends on the decision makers vision of the future. These are the plans that have been put in place in order to achieve goals set in the trajectory image. Each of the plans follows an order of activities from when the goals were set to the attainment of the goals. When making decisions, there are two options one can take: adoption decisions and progress decisions. Adoption decisions are further divided into two which are screening and choice decisions. In this kind of decisions, certain goals set in trajectory image are completely rejected or some of the goals are eliminated from the list. Progress decisions opt for taking the trajectory goals on board and planning on how to accomplish the goals. Therefore when this kind of decision is made, the original goals determine the future of the individual or organization. Decision maker should be careful enough to make favorable choices that result to good progress and an improved future. A certain company that offers home coffee and ready meal supply intends to buy two vehicles at the end of the year so as to broaden the areas they cover to supply goods and services (trajectory image) . Following the behavior of the company and it principles, in each and every year, there must be an improvement by purchasing something new (value image). Therefore, plans on how to save money to purchase new vehicles shall be put in place to make sure that the aims are attained at the end of the year (strategic image). Decisions shall be made on whether to adopt the goals or not which shall bring in the two types of decision-making which are adoption and progress decision making. At this point, the decision maker will see what suits the company most and the choice that will favor the visions and dreams of the company. The society, technology and economy all together web to bring about the new dynamics in technology. The actor defining technology refines itself to bringing about results in the change of behavior and way of life in the society. The current societal status cannot be compared to the past where the technology was not advanced as it is at the moment. Therefore if one was to clearly analyze the society, it therefore must have something to do with technology hence the study of technology is considered as a tool for sociological analysis. ( Takahashi and Watanabe, 2011). The examination of technology in order to find out more about it traces back to the period where machines used to consume a lot of energy and space. Considering the economies of scale, there was need for change in style and design to smaller and less energy consuming machines hence the improvement of technology in one way or another. Historians and sociologists can use style to Suggest that system builders like artists and architects, have creative latitude. Technology has had a way of bring people together despite the distance they might be. (Todt and Lujn,2014). Therefore, the way the society behaves is an influence from technology in that people do not have to make frequent visits but instead use phones and social media. Hard work does not need to be done using a lot of energy due to presence of machines that have been developed and customized to assume the roles of human beings. In the past around 1920 the way which electricity was generated and distributed in cities was quite different from now. (Vicario,2013). A group of students from Oxford University wanted to relate the technology to the societys way of life. (Wang, 2013) Having studied a lot on the technology ranging from industries, communication and domestic technology, they came up with a conclusion that technology is the key to know the social part of life and the reason people behave as they do (Walker, 2010).This is because with technology, people are able to study from home using e-learning, much work is done by machines like laundry and so many other domestic roles. With the internet, communication has been enabled across. References Archontaki, D., Lewis, G. and Bates, T. (2013) Genetic Influences on Psychological Well-Being: A Nationally Representative Twin Study.Journal of Personality, 81(2), pp.221-230. Davies, S. (2011). 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