Effects of Computing: Benefits, Harms and the Digital Divide
People create computing innovations to do one job well, and those innovations then change how everyone works, plays and learns in ways their creators never fully planned.
Think about how everyday tasks have changed. Homework goes through an online portal instead of a paper stack on the teacher's desk. Directions come from a map app instead of a printed map. A phone tapped at the register replaces cash counted out of a wallet. Each change happened because people picked up a new innovation and rearranged their habits around it.
Can one effect be good and bad at the same time?
Not every effect of an innovation is expected ahead of time. When map apps started steering drivers around traffic jams, few people predicted they would send rush-hour traffic down quiet neighborhood streets. Residents in many cities soon complained about exactly that, and in 2018 the town of Leonia, New Jersey, tried closing dozens of its streets to outside drivers during rush hour.
A single effect can also look beneficial to one person and harmful to another, or both at once to the same person:
How has computing boosted other fields?
Advances in computing have created new kinds of creativity, and expanded old ones, in many other fields:
Some advances came from innovations that were built for something else entirely. Graphics processing units (GPUs) were designed to draw video game scenes quickly. Researchers later discovered that the same chips were ideal for training artificial intelligence and running scientific simulations, and GPUs now power much of modern AI. That is an unintended beneficial effect: an innovation from one field leading to progress in another.
What happens when people use an innovation in ways nobody planned?
Computing innovations are often used in ways their creators did not originally intend:
Some uses harm society, the economy or culture. A 2018 study of Twitter found that false news stories spread faster and farther than true ones, which makes it harder for people to agree on basic facts. Automation can replace some jobs faster than workers can retrain. Recommendation feeds can nudge millions of people toward the same few songs, styles and opinions.
Responsible programmers try to imagine how their innovation might be used, including the unintended uses, and to weigh the beneficial and harmful effects of each. No programmer can foresee every use, though, and the problem grows once a program spreads. The demo shows how quickly sharing adds up when each person passes an app to three new people a day.
Day 1: 4 people Day 2: 16 people Day 3: 64 people Day 4: 256 people Day 5: 1,024 people Day 6: 4,096 people Day 7: 16,384 people Day 8: 65,536 people Day 9: 262,144 people Day 10: 1,048,576 people
One person becomes over a million in ten days. When a program is shared that quickly, or runs for that many users, its effects can grow beyond what the programmer intended or can control:
Check your understanding
A school's grading app sends parents an alert the moment a new grade is posted. Which statement best describes this effect?
What was the World Wide Web originally designed to do?
Which two statements about programmers and the effects of their innovations are accurate? Select two answers.
Select 2 answers.
A program written to animate 3D movie characters is later adapted by surgeons to rehearse operations on 3D models of patients. What does this example show?
What is the digital divide?
The digital divide is the gap in access to computing devices and the Internet between groups of people, based on socioeconomic traits (such as income and education), geographic ones (city or countryside, one country or another), or demographic ones (such as age, disability or race). Internet access varies along every one of those lines, and between countries. The International Telecommunication Union estimated that in 2024 about 2.6 billion people, roughly a third of the world, were still offline, most of them in lower-income countries.
Access means more than a signal. It also means a device that works, a connection fast enough for video, a plan you can afford, and the skills to use it all.
The divide affects both groups and individuals. A whole rural county can lack fast broadband, because running cable out to homes spread miles apart costs more than providers want to pay. Inside a well-connected city, one student whose family cannot afford home internet may end up doing homework in a fast-food parking lot to use the free Wi-Fi, which happened to many students when schools moved online in 2020.
The digital divide raises issues of:
Those issues show up globally, between countries, and locally, between neighbors.
The digital divide is shaped by the actions of individuals, organizations and governments. Governments pay for broadband in rural areas and have helped families with internet bills: the US Affordable Connectivity Program helped more than 23 million households before its money ran out in 2024. Organizations such as school districts and public libraries lend laptops and Wi-Fi hotspots. Individuals donate old devices, or teach a grandparent how to join a video call. Actions can widen the gap too, for example when a bank closes its local branch and moves every service online.
Numbers make the divide visible. The demo below uses an invented dataset to compare home broadband by household income and measure the gap between the groups.
under $30k ############ 61% $30k-$75k ################ 80% $75k-$100k ################# 88% over $100k ################### 95% Gap between 'over $100k' and 'under $30k': 34 percentage points
Practice: measure the divide
Write digital_divide_gap(rates). rates is a dictionary that maps each group's name to the percent of that group with internet access. Return the gap in percentage points between the group with the highest rate and the group with the lowest.
digital_divide_gap({"urban": 92, "suburban": 89, "rural": 72}) -> 20A state wants every group to reach a target rate of internet access. Write groups_below_goal(rates, goal) that returns a list of the names of the groups whose rate is below goal, sorted from the lowest rate to the highest. A group exactly at the goal has met it.
groups_below_goal({"urban": 92, "suburban": 89, "rural": 72}, 90) -> ["rural", "suburban"]An app starts with 1 user. Each day, every user brings shares_per_person new users. Write days_to_reach(goal, shares_per_person) that returns how many days it takes until there are at least goal users. If 1 user already meets the goal, return 0.
days_to_reach(100, 1) -> 7 (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128)Check your understanding
Which two situations are examples of the digital divide? Select two answers.
Select 2 answers.
Which statement about the digital divide is accurate?
The code segment below uses invented broadband rates for four towns. What is displayed?
rates ← [72, 95, 64, 88]low ← rates[1]high ← rates[1]FOR EACH r IN rates{IF(r < low){low ← r}IF(r > high){high ← r}}DISPLAY(high - low)
Exam topics: 5.1 Beneficial and Harmful Effects (IOC-1.A, IOC-1.B), 5.2 Digital Divide (IOC-1.C)