Dr Stephen Eyre

Understanding Technology Through the Human Questions It Creates

Science and technology have transformed how human beings understand the world, communicate, create, work and make decisions. From the scientific instruments that changed our understanding of nature to the development of computing and Artificial Intelligence, technological innovation has repeatedly raised questions that extend far beyond science itself.

Science, Technology, and Society (STS) examines these relationships. It asks how scientific and technological developments emerge from particular historical and cultural circumstances, how they reshape societies, and how human values influence the ways technologies are developed and used.

Artificial Intelligence provides an especially important contemporary example. AI systems can now generate language, images and music, process vast quantities of information and participate in decisions affecting education, employment, healthcare, culture and everyday life. Their development raises fundamental questions about intelligence, creativity, consciousness, authorship, responsibility and what it means to be human.

These questions cannot be understood through technology alone. They draw upon philosophy, history, literature, ethics, politics, law, economics and the arts as well as science and computing.

An Opportunity for Interdisciplinary Study

Participation in Science, Technology, and Society is encouraged irrespective of a student’s principal academic background. No previous technical knowledge of Artificial Intelligence or computer science is required.

The subject is inherently interdisciplinary. Students are encouraged to bring the perspectives and methods of their own academic disciplines to questions that increasingly affect almost every area of study and professional life.

A student of philosophy might examine whether a machine can genuinely understand language or possess consciousness. A literature or arts student might consider creativity, originality and authorship in an age of generative AI. Students of politics, economics or law might explore governance, accountability and the social consequences of automation. Those studying science, engineering or computing can place technological developments within their wider historical, ethical and cultural contexts.

The result is an academic environment in which different disciplines contribute to a shared discussion rather than approaching technological change from a single perspective.

The subject is therefore likely to appeal to majors in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Engineering, Philosophy, History, Literature, Humanities, Politics, International Studies, Law, Economics, Business, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Sociology, Media, Communications, Music, Art and Design, as well as students from other disciplines interested in the relationship between technology and human society.

Oxford as a Place to Study Science, Technology, and Society

Oxford provides a distinctive setting in which to explore these questions.

The city contains extraordinary evidence of the long relationship between human ideas and technological development. Its museums, libraries, collections and academic traditions allow contemporary technologies to be considered alongside earlier attempts to understand, represent and extend human capabilities.

Depending upon the particular course and programme, teaching may draw upon Oxford’s museums and collections, including the History of Science Museum, Ashmolean Museum and Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Scientific instruments, works of art, historical objects and natural-history collections provide different ways of approaching questions about knowledge, intelligence, creativity and human understanding. They also place today’s technological developments within a much longer history.

This combination of contemporary debate, historical perspective and interdisciplinary study is particularly suited to the Oxford tutorial and seminar tradition.

Artificial Intelligence and the Human

The first course offered within Science, Technology, and Society is Artificial Intelligence and the Human: Creativity, Consciousness and Ethics.

Artificial Intelligence provides the starting point for a much broader intellectual enquiry: what does the rise of AI tell us about what it means to be human?

Language, memory, creativity, consciousness and moral judgement have all been proposed as capacities that distinguish human beings from other animals and from the machines we create. Contemporary AI increasingly challenges the boundaries between these categories.

Can a machine use language without understanding it? Can Artificial Intelligence genuinely create? Does artistic creation require intention? Could an artificial system ever be conscious? Who bears responsibility when decisions are made with the assistance of AI? How should society approach questions of bias, privacy, copyright, ownership and accountability?

Students encounter these questions through philosophy, literature, music, visual culture, the history of science and contemporary debates about Artificial Intelligence. Classic arguments about mind, consciousness and language are considered alongside direct encounters with modern AI systems and current questions surrounding generative AI.

The purpose is not simply to study what Artificial Intelligence can do. It is to examine what its development reveals about human intelligence, creativity, responsibility and society.

Study Through Discussion, Tutorials and Independent Enquiry

Science, Technology, and Society is designed around active academic participation.

Teaching combines lectures and discussion with seminars, small-group tutorial work and, where appropriate, engagement with Oxford’s museums and collections. Students encounter contrasting arguments, examine evidence, develop their own positions and learn to respond seriously to competing interpretations.

Independent enquiry forms an important part of this approach. Students are encouraged to pursue questions arising from their own academic interests and to connect the central themes of the subject with their existing disciplines.

The emphasis throughout is on critical thinking: distinguishing technological capability from wider questions about how technologies should be understood, governed and incorporated into human life.

Through this interdisciplinary approach, Science, Technology, and Society provides a framework for examining some of the most consequential questions created by scientific and technological change — and for considering what those changes reveal about ourselves.

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