What is technology that we should be mindful of it?  Do we mean all that which results from human artifice?  But we tend to exclude religious rituals and works of art, so by technology we seem to mean artifice with a clear and definite, ‘rational’ purpose (to keep us warm, to diagnose lymphoma, to ‘unfriend’ others, etc.)   What of language?  Is it a technology?  Without language and collaborative effort any advanced technology would be impossible.  A technical project can only be successfully executed by means of specialized semiotic representations, more commonly known as equations, schematics, isometric drawings, models, simulations, etc.  But technology is the subject of only an infinitesimal amount of the total linguistic communication going on.  It is a casual beneficiary of our gift of gab.  And in turn technology merely provides occasional new media for our prosaic communication.  Technology and language coexist in symbiosis, as algae and fungus in lichen, but are clearly distinguishable.

    What of the food we eat, is this a technology?   Few of us would be satisfied with a vitamin-laced, bland, grey lump of mush to eat regularly.  Why not?  We go to great lengths to pique our palates.  Is this rational?  Is it destroying the planet?  Arguably.  We also have a rich mythology of what foods are good or bad for us, generally based on scant medical evidence.  This includes ‘natural’, ‘organic’ foods, genetically modified foods, unpasteurized milk, ‘power bars’, etc.  The final essays in Kaplan dwell on such concrete examples.

What of computer dating?  To order up a mate as one orders shoes, just the right size and color and quality.  Putting technology to work in Cupid’s service.  Do more passion and abiding love result, versus the older, community-based ways?  Is it rational?  Arguably not.

  What of philosophy?  That defiant stance to question all.  That restless lateral abstraction, always risking absurdity and irrelevance.  That pretense to ultimate understanding.  Traditionally, few philosophers bend knee to a golden calf such as technology.  I wonder if this is changing.  Can young philosophers also be tech geeks?   Can they avoid it if they wish to communicate at all?

  There seems to be a common denominator to all of these examples, though we are hard pressed to say what exactly.  Technology is a prominent factor in the content of our lives.  Technology gives us stuff we want, and, as Kaplan says, “stuff matters.”  Technology is what is different, and exponentially growing, from the lives of our forebears, although we only know them from what artifacts remain, most of which were technological.  It is useful to recall that, while technology has developed several-fold, we are still operating with the same basic genotypes and resulting brain structures as our tribal ancestors.  I do not mean to downplay the importance of our strong social institutions; we can be far more civilized than our forebears seemed to be.   But the uneasy cocktail of driving forces beneath the social institutions keeps manifesting itself, sadly.  It is also useful to recall that the pace of technological innovation easily surpasses that of our legal and policy making systems, especially given the myriad of jurisdictions in the world and the ease of travel.  In other words, technology flouts any feeble effort to contain it.  Even the most totalitarian regimes struggle with this.

Kaplan counsels us early that essential definition of the term technology is elusive.  Of course, we run the risk of losing coherence in our discussion if there is not something real holding it together.  A similar situation exists with the buzzword complexity.  One might think that its definition is mathematically straightforward and rigorous.  Indeed there are several well-defined types and measures of complexity.  But how do they all relate to our intuitive sense of complexity?  How do we elaborate and quantify an intuition that, for example, ‘things are more complex here on earth than they are on the moon’?  Our intuition should be trusted, but perfect correspondence between theory and application is seldom possible.  Is there a unitary essence that subsumes the species?  We must assume so.

  Kaplan also counsels us that the essays treat the philosophy of technology, not philosophy and technology.  The latter refers to the discipline of applying traditional philosophical categories and tools of analysis to newfangled problems.  An example I would suggest is How can Just War theory be modified to address modern non-state combatants (‘terrorists’)?  How about modern robotic weapons, which gain in autonomy and lethality with every generation?  These are perfectly valid questions that could in principle be discussed with a St Augustine or Michael Walzer.  But what of technology in its own right?  What is it essentially?  Where is it going?  What is it doing to us?  Is there really some vital, Edenic natural-ness that we are rapidly losing?  ‘What does technology want?’ as Jaron Lanier asks, overtly reifying the subject. 

    We start with Heidegger. Whatever else one may say of the master of Freiburg, he never opted for easy answers.  That of course is a very un-technological attitude.  Yet to think of Heidegger as an anti-technological romanticizer of Schwartzwald Bauern is mistaken.  He argues that technology is actually a necessary means of aletheia, of disclosing being.  “When we once open ourselves expressly to the essence of technology, we find ourselves unexpectedly taken into a freeing claim.”  To paraphrase considerably, it seems that the efforts of practical problem solving, of navigating the world of techne, insofar as one does this in good faith, with good understanding, are the best ways to see deeply down to the roots of being. 

A contrasting view is to fetishize technology.  The paramount virtue of the technologist is efficiency.  Humans have worth in such a system in proportion to their utility, to their ability to efficiently produce units of exchange.  After they stop producing they have no value.  While described this way it sounds monstrous, it is hard to not see it as descriptive of the modern economy.

  Living in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, I cannot help but contrast Heidegger’s views with those of my neighbors, the Amish.  The Amish Mennonites are Anabaptists who fled persecution in Switzerland and western Germany in the 1700s.  If glib generalizations are permitted of this diverse group, the Amish are extremely resourceful and proficient with appropriate technology.  While an automobile is far easier to care for than a horse, and many Amish can easily afford an auto, it is just better to keep horses.  Practically, it limits one’s ability to leave the community.  And one is not dependent upon distant, questionable sources of petroleum.  But equally important, keeping carriage horses and other farm animals is a grounding activity.  It touches on all the fundamentals of life, good, bad and ugly. It is plain.  It is not something that can be done carelessly, inauthentically, without risking palpable, foolish loss.  And every Amish person has the strict Ordnung and the community to help guide them and keep them from folly.

I suspect that a few of my Amish neighbors read Heidegger.  I know that some read Hegel, who is almost as theologically suspect.  Is the Amish life more or less free than that of others?  Certainly not free of intrusive neighbors and strict rules.  Certainly not free to explore career paths.  But free to develop as a human being in the demanding arena of crops and cows, broken pumps and dairy chillers, marriage, childbirth, aging.  Free to master one’s role in life, albeit artificially constrained, and to command or lose the respect of one’s peers.  Able to feel deeply aligned with God’s purpose.  I cannot say how much of this is really true of the Amish experience.  It looks mostly that way to a casual observer.

Kaplan suggests that the founders of philosophy of technology, such as Heidegger, Marcuse, Foucault, who have essays included, developed a transcendental approach.  In that view, technology increasingly alienates humans from the natural world and from natural relationships.  Kaplan suggests that the trend since 1980 has been toward a more empirical, contextual, social constructionist view.  This definitely seems to be historically true.  But I worry here, as elsewhere, that social constructivists err in grossly overemphasizing the human element.  Technology is decidedly not a human caprice, but rather a set of possibilities afforded by nature, painstakingly worked out. 

The essays cover ethics.  Technological issues can be addressed with the traditional categories of analysis, but they have a vexing way of blurring traditional distinctions.  Robert McGinn has a good essay describing overpopulation and our duty to future generations and to the planet.  There will never be a preferred universal ethical framework, whether deontological, utilitarian, virtue, (Derek Parfit notwithstanding) yet it is remarkable how well these traditional frameworks translate over into such radically new situations.

The essays cover politics.  It is difficult to evaluate the tradeoff between freedom, health, and new possibilities afford by technology, versus the spreading omniscience and omnipotence of the totalitarian state.  The essays cover increasingly mutable human nature.  Nick Bostrum speaks of how there are now ‘trans-human’ creatures and how this may conflict with anthropocentric tradition.

There are three essays from the always lucid Hubert Dreyfus.  His critique of AI is dated, but still fundamentally correct, I think.  There has been progress (whether good or bad the reader may decide) in military robotics, UAVs, submersibles, AI.  Nothing remotely approaching human intelligence, or even that of a squirrel, but it is remarkable how proficient a purely algorthmic creature can be.  The primary reason, in my view, why we do not see true artificial intelligence is that we do not release mobile, self-sufficient, communicating, learning robots into the world.  For good reason, of course.  Only a creature with existential ‘skin in the game’ can learn in any real sense.

The essays covering science and technology are the weakest in the set, I think.  They are too mired in the Kuhnian anti-realist failed paradigm.  In essays by Joseph Pitt and Don Ihde, for example, the argument runs:  There is a traditional conceit that technology is just applied science.  Natural scientists are simply truthseekers who use rational theory and empirical verification to figure nature out.  The methods they come up with spin off readily as television sets and flu remedies.  This is a highly flawed narrative.  The essayists turn it upside down.  Is not science merely what we discover with our technological instruments?  I am not convinced.

It is hard to imagine a high level policy debate in Washington, or elsewhere, more important than one on the nature and appropriate role of technology.  Nor is there one much less likely to occur.  Technology just happens, as art just happens.  It cannot be programmed to occur or summoned or mandated or eliminated.  It cannot be stopped any more than water through an old roof.  To a large extent, humanity just happens as well.  In all kinds of new, rarified, untraditional situations.  Perhaps this is our saving grace.  It will be interesting to watch it play out.

 

© 2012 Michael L Anderson

 

 

Michael L Anderson (omniapraeclara @ gmail.com) holds a PhD, an MA in Philosophy and an MSEE.  He consults in industry.