Below I've included some snippets from the first lecture from my course COMP 3309 - Computers and Society.  In this lecture, I begin with a short presentation introducing some of the themes covered in the course. I've provided the slides used in this presentation below.

I like to begin by getting the students to think about what is technology. Of course, most students focus on the objects or artifacts. I very much want the students to recognize that the concept technology not only refers to things, but also to techniques and to abstract knowledge.

A good place to begin a course on computers and society is to examine the etymology of the word technology. The word is based on the Greek word technologia, which refers to the systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique. This word in turn is based on the two words techne, meaning art, skill, craft, or method, and the word logikos, meaning reasoning or thinking. Techne is supposedly based on the Proto-Indo-Euro word tec, which means to make.

Greek Mythological Point Of View

Technology surrounds our lives. This is generally thought to be especially true of the modern era, or, at the latest, the twentieth century. Yet tool use has been with us since the dawn of civilization. Indeed some of the founding myths of western civilization recognize and question our ability to mediate and control nature via tool use. Given this ancestry, it should not be surprising that there have been different understandings of the relationship between technology and society.

Perhaps the most sublime statement about the problematic nature of  this relationship is one of the earliest: that found in the myth of Oedipus as presented by Sophocles. As the play begins, Thebes is suffering from a deadly plague. The natural world is upside down: crops are not growing, women are not bearing children, citizens and animals are dying. Supplicant children and a priest come to the palace of their new king, Oedipus, who years earlier rid the city of another menace of nature. This menace was the Sphinx, a monster Oedipus defeats by answering her riddle: what walks on four feet, and two feet, and three feet and has only one voice; when it walks on most feet, it is weakest? The answer is man, who walks on four feet as infant, two as adult, then three (two plus cane) when aged. It is this troublesome third foot around which much of the play's dramatic irony revolves.

The third foot is humanity's technê, our ability to craft and use tools and technology. We can use this ability to ease our suffering, to make our lives more bearable. Yet this third foot can also be a sword. Just prior to Oedipus's confrontation with the Sphinx, Oedipus slays a stranger—his father—at a crossroad with his sword. The rest of the play reveals the profound ambiguity of this technological ability. Our ability to create, and by association, our ability to think, reason, and know, is what is praised in the great choral odes of Greek tragedy. Man is the most deinon of all creatures, claims the Chorus in Sophocles's Antigone. To be deinon is to be both terrible and wondrous. Why are we both terrible and wondrous? We are wondrous because we plow the earth, catch the animals, control the beasts, build towns and record our language using our ability to think and to put our thoughts towards practical ends.

"Clever beyond all dreams
The inventive craft [technê] that he has
Which may drive him one time or another to well or ill."
-- Sophocles, Antigone.

It is our craft, our technê, our ability to use technology, that allows us to ease as well as create suffering. Hence man is the most deinon, the most terrible and wondrous creature. It is this terrible and wondrous ambiguity within our technological ability that is the fount of man's tragic history.  Oedipus uses his know-how (his name is a pun on this), his wonderful cleverness, to solve the Sphinx's riddle, and is praised in Thebes as turannos—first among men, power nearest to a god—for his craft. Oedipus thus symbolically holds the place amongst men that humans traditionally hold amongst nature: nearest to the gods. As the tragedy unfolds, Oedipus, his family, and his fellow citizens discover that the turannos, the best of men, is simultaneously the pharmakoi, the worst of men, who in ancient days were ritually sacrificed or expelled from the city to purify it of disease.  Oedipus thus personifies the ambiguity of the human creature, an ambiguity that lies in his third foot, his ability to use his craft-knowledge for good and evil. Sophocles recognized almost 2500 years ago that technology is what defines the human creature; as such the positive and negative characteristics of technology are indivisible and, even more, are indelibly bound up with what it means to be human. The attempt to understand or control technology are at one with efforts to understand and control human beings. In Sophocles, we can clearly see that technology is as political a thing as man himself. Humans, their technologies, and their politics, stand revealed in Sophocles as riddles, as nasty question marks, as enigmas even to themselves.

Another well-known Greek myth also is concerned with humanity's relationship with technology. In the myth of Prometheus the Titan, Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus were given the job of creating humans and other animals. Epimetheus spent all his "build points" giving the animals claws, fur, speed, etc, and thus none were left for humans. Prometheus went up to the heavens and brought back fire as a gift for humanity.

To punish Prometheus's theft, Zeus tied him to a mountain rock and sent a vulture to tear out his liver every day. To punish humanity, Zeus sent Pandora with here box of mischief.

Such are the inventions
I devised for mankind
Yet have myself no cunning
To rid me of my present sufferings
-- Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

In an interesting varient of the myth, Plato described it a bit differently in his dialogue Protagoras. In it, Prometheus stole "wisdom in the arts" from heaven along with fire.

"Although man acquired in this way wisdom of daily life, civic wisdom he had not, since this was in the possession of Zeus."
Plato, Protagoras

Thus, according to Plato, Prometheus (and potentially ourselves) suffer because he stole only part of what we need to live; however, a key part, civic wisdom [politike techne] or the art of politics was missing. That is, having technological mastery without the political virtues of justice and compassion is a recipe for suffering.