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Computing has impacted the world in a lot of ways. While most of these ways are positive, two largely negative ways are by creating the digital divide and computational bias.
The Digital Divide
Due to the vast digitalization of most opportunities, people with greater access to computing devices and the internet will have more opportunities available to them. This is known as the Digital Divide, and is a big problem even in more developed countries such as the United States. Ever since this problem has existed, people have tried to close the digital divide by doing things such as providing rural and poor areas that do not have access to the internet or cannot afford computers free or discounted access to those.
Computational Bias
When programmers input a set of data into a simulation or use it for artifical intelligence, this may result in computational bias. This is because data sets may not be fully representative of an entire population, causing a simulation or AI algorithm to have "biases" that can cause it to overlook or discriminate against certain groups that are underrepresented. This has happened many times, for example, Amazon used artificial intelligence to find good job recruits, but the data set used for training included mostly men, causing the artificial intelligence to be very more likely to choose men over women.
Relation to Computer Science
Computing has had a very large impact. Understanding that impact will make us better able to be able to lessen the negative impacts, and to increase the positive impacts. If we did not understand these impacts, then it would be harder to improve the impact to be more positive, and the negative impacts would linger and continue to be a problem.
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