For the first two decades of the 21st century, technology advanced at breakneck speed. Its rapid development often left sacrificed accountability, with tech being allowed to interfere with institutions like democracy, personal rights, privacy and ownership.
As it stands, society is approaching a point where social governance is catching up, and a greater conversation about the management of technology is approaching the collective psyches of nations globally.
Denmark, for example, proposed to allow citizens to trademark their faces and body image in response to A.I. deepfakes, a move that highlights how governance is trying to catch up to tech.
This article will outline a handful of technological viewpoints, all of which have been taken from Brock’s POLI 3P93 course taught by Professor Stefan Dolgert — a course that I highly recommend. I will argue that technology is not an inevitable, unmanageable force, but a new frontier awaiting a social contract.
The article will also be drawing from the textbook, Technology Ethics: A Philosophical Introduction and Readings Edited by Gregory J. Robson and Jonathan Y. Tsou. I’ll begin with Martin Heidegger, one of the most prominent philosophers in the field of environmentalist thought. Heidegger, notably, was a prominent member of Hitler’s Nazi regime — a point worth mentioning though it won’t be touched upon further.
Heidegger begins his analysis of technological determinism by defining the essence of technology as a form of “revealing”. In his work, Heidegger creates new language to help explain to the reader what he means by this. By revealing, Heidegger is referring to a way of understanding or knowing how objects exist.
As Heidegger describes it, technology “revealing” views objects, and even people, as resources meant to be refined and made more efficient. To draw a distinction here, Heidegger points to Medieval and Greek ways of “revealing”. To go with a more well-known concept, Medieval ways of “revealing” involve viewing objects and people as gifts from God.
Heidegger is quick to point out that the different ways of “revealing” are not meant to be used and compared as scientific theories, but merely as ways of understanding the world. Fundamentally, there is no “correct” way in a theoretical sense to view an object such as a wetland or grassy plain.
A Medieval way of “revealing” would view this example as a creation of God, whereas a technological way of “revealing” would view it as idling land that could host industry or be cultivated in some way.
This understanding is how Heidegger understands human history — not as a continuous flow, but as a discontinuous flow of different epochs of understanding.
Heidegger is obviously against the trajectory of technological “enflaming”, which is the word he created to define this way of viewing the world. Heidegger warns of a supreme danger that can be found in technology.
He explains that in previous ways of revealing, humans were generally given a carve out as special or rational beings, such as being “made in God’s image”. With technology however, humans are on an equal playing field with other objects in that they’re viewed as resources to the point where it is deeply imbedded in our social psyche — see “office of Human Resources.”
Because of this, humans are less receptive to thinking about different ways of “revealing” as they are not conditioned to think of themselves as anything more than a resource, opposed to previous epochs where humans were comparably favoured.
Heidegger is not a total pessimist though; he states that the solution to this rests in understanding technology. Specifically, by being able to think about the very essence of technology, humans can re-establish the ability to think and delineate the essence of technology to better understand it.
This is just one way of viewing technology. Other writers such as Joseph Pitt view technology as ethically neutral and that sole responsibility for its consequences lies in the hands of humans. In other words, technology is value-free.
I disagree with Pitt, whose thinking goes back to the question, “do guns kill or do people kill?” It is very clearly guns that kill when one examines homicide rates between gun-owning nations versus more restrictive states.
But to peel the onion a bit more, I believe that technology has built in values, and at the very least, some forms of technology do. While you can argue that a hammer is value-free because it can be used to both insert a nail or kill someone, the same reasoning does not work when considering a nuclear warhead.
Pitt proposes that nuclear warheads can be used for mining, but clearly this is a weak argument, as using nukes in mining is neither a common practice nor the reason nukes were created in the first place.
The primary purpose of nuclear weapons is to decimate entire cities and kill crowds of civilians. This means that nuclear weapons do indeed contain values.
To go back to the hammer, I can even make a distinction between war hammers and regular hammers. While both can be used for construction or killing, each is specialized in a specific way to give it one value over another.
Langdon Winner, who wrote “Do Artifacts Have Politics“, has a rather convincing analysis. Winner states that, yes, artifacts (technology) do have politics, and he provides two interesting examples.
The highways of Robert Moses in New York are a form of technology that were designed with the express purpose of keeping Black and other racialized communities out of the parks that Moses had constructed.
The way Moses accomplished this was by designing underpasses for his highways to have clearances that were lower than what would allow buses through. Moses noted that racialized coommunities relied more on public transportation, so designed highways leading to his parks could not be compatible with public transit.
It was noted by Professor Dolgert that members of the right-wing political ideology in America often balk at the idea that a highway or a road can be political, but as Winner notes, the design of these technologies often carry the values of their human creators, both intentionally and unintentionally.
For an unintentional example, Winner points to the automatic tomato harvester deployed in California in the 1970s. The invention had the effect of running all the small tomato farmers out of business, as the cost to use the technology and the scale at which it had to operate favoured large corporate firms which used their increase in profits from using the device to buy up all the small farms.
This rapidly shifted the economic landscape of tomato farming to essentially monopolize it into the hands of a small group of increasingly wealthy people.
The student group that had developed the machine was sued, though they argued that they had not anticipated the socio-economic effects of the automatic tomato harvester. The courts ruled that they could not punish a lack of foresight in innovation of this kind.
In this sense, Winner demonstrates that technology can be political both intentionally and unintentionally.
All of these ways of viewing technology point to the desire to understand this new world that has opened up in society, and the potential need to tie it into some form of social contract.
Technology has a large impact on society, and at this moment, its power is concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires who act like kings from the time of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau.
These conversations are the first baby steps towards a larger conversation on how technology should continue, and what values (if there are any) we want to establish in technology.