Emerging Tech, Labor, and Governance

This unit examines how emerging technologies reshape manufacturing, productivity, work, and organizational governance, with attention to data sources, discrimination, and decentralized systems. Students analyze technical capabilities (quantum computing, smart contracts, DAOs) alongside ethical, legal, and real‑estate implications to prepare for designing equitable, business-aligned solutions in subsequent units.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze manufacturing and production scenarios to quantify productivity changes, assess impacts on physical real estate needs, and compare at least two technology-driven operational models using measurable metrics (e.g., throughput, cost per unit, floor-space utilization).
• Evaluate ethical and social implications of building technologies that may favor certain people over others by identifying potential harms, legal risks, and at least three mitigation strategies; justify chosen strategies with evidence from case studies.
• Apply principles of data sourcing and governance to design a bias-aware data plan for a hypothetical system, including steps for provenance tracking, sampling validation, and measurable criteria for detecting and limiting data discrimination.
• Demonstrate understanding of decentralized technologies by drafting a prototype governance workflow or smart contract outline for a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and assessing its likely effects on jobs and organizational decision-making.