Posts in April 17, 2014

The American public is excited about the future of technology, but it's also worried about the growing pains that may be necessary to reach that future, according to a new survey.

That survey, published April 17 by the Pew Research Center, took the outlook of 1,001 American adults from a wide demographic pool to provide a picture of how the nation feels about technology today. Titled U.S. View of Technology and the Future: Science in the next 50 years, the survey was conducted for use in the May issue of Smithsonian magazine, which will look at the interplay between popular science fiction and actual developments in science.

A majority of those surveyed said they believe technology will improve society over the next 50 years. About 59 percent were optimistic about technological advancements, while 30 percent said they think the changes from technology will make life worse for people. Pew Senior Researcher Aaron Smith shared with Government Technology some of what the survey's key findings mean for the world.

“The broad takeaway from this, and I think it's applicable to the government work force, is that in the long-run, Americans are really optimistic about the impact that scientific developments are going to have on their lives and the lives of their children,” Smith said. “At the same time, there are a lot of short-term changes that are going to really up-end some longstanding social norms around personal privacy or notions of surveillance or the nature of social relationships, and people are nervous about that. […] That's a theme we see in a lot of the work we do.”

In general, those with more education and higher incomes tended to take a more optimistic view of technology than others. Opinion in this area showed almost no deviation across age groups – older adults were just as likely as young adults to take a positive outlook on technology. One outstanding result was the deviation between men and women in this area – 73 percent of men surveyed had an optimistic outlook on technology's impact on society, while just 59 percent of women held a positive view.

“At first it seemed odd to us, but then we dug into it and realized that it was more of a class story as opposed to a gender story,” Smith said. “Our theory on that is that in many instances [male college graduates] are the people who have really benefitted from the previous 10 to 20 years of technological advances, so they're the winners of the scientific and technological developments of this era. The winners of today expect that they're going to be the winners of tomorrow.” Men and women were found to be similar across most demographics, Smith said, but among upper-class and highly-educated men, there's a huge spike in technological optimism that throws the numbers off.

Statistics showing the absence of women in technology-related fields supports Smith's hypothesis. Today, American women are more highly educated than men, women taking 57 percent of undergraduate degrees in the country. But in the -- For more information read the original article here.

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