Perceptions of Socio-Technological Shifts and Ethical Risks among Next-Generation Emirati IT Specialists: An Empirical Assessment

The accelerating evolution of digital infrastructures and cognitive technologies has fundamentally reshaped contemporary social fabrics; a complex matrix of systemic opportunities and ethical challenges. However, while the socio-economic dividends of automation abound, the swift and uncoordinated spread of these tools poses significant disruptions to traditional socio-cultural norms, ethical paradigms, and long-standing religious values. For highly advanced governmental and judicial technical frameworks in a rapidly growing economy like the United Arab Emirates, this digital transformation happens during a critical transition through legacy infrastructure disparities, often termed the digital divide, that exist in tandem with advanced governmental and judicial technical frameworks. While sophisticated solutions, including automation and artificial intelligence, such as intelligent legal informatics, predictive machine learning, and nuanced digital forensics, play a substantial role in optimizing security frameworks, compliance architectures, and compliance processes, they also introduce new sources of exploitation for automated bias, algorithmic manipulation, and the erasure of cryptographic evidence. At the same time, rampant deepfakes, organized disinformation schemes, and generative AI systems undermine trust, necessitating strict legal and operational scrutiny of content authenticity, platform accountability, and user cognitive health. This paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of next-generation Emirati IT professionals’ levels of awareness about these sociotechnical vectors. Using an extensive questionnaire-level survey given to about 200 upper-level computer information sciences students, our initial empirical results suggest a rather sophisticated awareness baseline. The participants express considerable critical awareness of the structural, ethical, and socio-psychological dangers of these new paradigms and show a strong cultural and occupational capability to imaginatively think, govern, and steer future technologies responsibly.