I want to ask a set of provocative questions about technology, to point to a paradox about our pursuit of it, and to explore a solution - possibly not very original and certainly only a partial one!
Whose values do technological innovations embody? If they weren't our values, how do we come to use them so readily?
The overwhelming consensus in most modern societies is on values such as speed, efficiency, convenience - basically, the compression of time and effort - and freedom and comfort (the creation of the sybaritic individual). Our notion of "the good life" is determined by these values.
These values are "seductive" in the sense that they bewitch and entrap us into ignoring the consequences of our pursuit of them. We seem prepared to sacrifice other values at the altars of these goddesses. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that while worshipping at their shrines, we seem unaware of the sacrifice that they are exacting from us, because we are utterly entranced by them, until it is too late, and sometimes not even then.
We claim we use them because they enable us or free us up to do other things we want to do, but we seem unaware of the hidden costs that we incur while using them. Our parents - and later we ourselves - devote more and more time to earning more and more money, to be able to afford the speed, efficiency, convenience, freedom and comfort for the ones we love, but for whom (as we one day discover) we have no more time.
Many of us want a car so badly that we are prepared to spend large sums to buy the latest model, because we have come to accept that the car will symbolize our status in society. We want the speed and the efficiency and the convenience - to say nothing of the pure individual freedom of going wherever we can whenever we can. We want them so much that we are prepared to spend hours stuck in traffic jams everyday because every one ELSE in the jams wants the same things we do, and we feel enraged that we have been cheated out of the speed, efficiency and convenience we so desparately craved!
We have more and more powerful technologies for communication (such as this blog!), but do we have more significant things to say to each other? Or has the blog and the internet generally become another channel for the banal and the trite? (Perhaps the questions I am raising are banal and trite!)
What is more paradoxical is that with all these powerful technologies, we feel powerless - both individually and collectively - to refuse the logic by which we imprison ourselves in them. We seem mute and helpless to do anything about the toll that they impose on us.
Is there something wrong with wanting hot water in our baths, mobile and ordinary telephones, electricity, browsers and e-mail, cars?
Is it possible to refuse to be a part of this consumerism? If we made a wrong turn on our way to freedom and happiness, can we turn back? Or is this a one-way street down which we all must walk without turning back? Whatever happened to the freedom that the sellers of these technologies promised us ?
So is there nothing in our technology-driven societies to feel happy about? To celebrate, and, as the ads say we should, to feel empowered and liberated?
A point to note is that the problem doesn't reside in the technologies, but in the minds that created them and the social context from which they arose. We create technologies to solve rather limited problems, and become too entranced by the neatness of our solutions to pay any attention to their unintended side effects, not all of which are bad, but most of which become apparent only in the longer run, and so could not have been predicted at the time they were introduced anyway.
I think we have learnt enough from the history of technology over the last say five hundred years to be able to make the above generalizations. The question I wish to address is: what do we do about this?
One possible answer is: Nothing! Doing nothing could be justified by a view that it's just the way our minds work - they focus on fairly limited aspects of our social environment, identify something as a "problem", create a "solution" to it and release the solution back into the environment - sometimes after testing it under limited and controlled conditions. This is how our minds have evolved to function, focusing on the short and at best the medium term, and we are psychologically incapable of transcending this limitation.
But all this assumes that there is just the one mind doing all the thinking, and even if there is a group of minds, they are inevitable affected by "groupthink", and therefore will tend to think as one. It also assumes that the mind is incapable of learning from experience and from mistakes in particular, and that there is no feedback into the mind from the effects of its output on the environment. Also, the consequence of doing nothing is that we shall continue to do the same thing: i.e., take each unanticipated "problem" created by our technological solutions to earlier problems as another one to be "solved" through further technology. That is indeed what the technophiliac optimists among us promise.
But what if the creators of technologies had to submit their creations to a "court" and an independent "jury", who would examine from various perspectives the arguments both for and against the solution, and indeed debate the very identification of the problem?
One possible objection is that the prospect of submitting new technologies to such a court would immediately dampen any creative impulses for innovation. My answer is firstly, that we know enough about the problem of unintended side effects to wish to find some novel mechanisms to deal with it, other than the rather weak ones we have now; and secondly, the prospect of answering to a jury would concentrate the minds of innovators on anticipating possible objections.
A second objection would be that it would be preferable to expose technology to competition in the market. The most beneficient technology would tend to win out in the end, since the market would simply reject, through the price mechanism, any others. This objections runs up against economic arguments about the imperfections of all real world markets: to mention just two - that prices do not reflect public costs and benefits, and that there are important information asymmetries preventing agents from making optimal decisions based on market prices. The latter is especially true of new technologies.
A third objection is that a jury is assumed to embody a social consensus about harms and benefits. But this consensus is often absent, and there may need to be legally defined standards of adjudication between different valuations of harms and benefits.
Finally, the jury would not be a means of removing the problem I posed at the beginning, but of mitigating it. A jury would also be open to the same kinds of abuses that courts are now. That brings me right back to one of my favourite anonymous quotations: No society can be designed to be so perfect that it relieves the individual from the obligation of being good.
Perhaps we should simply acknowledge that we need some mechanism of social control over technology. A jury is one far from perfect sytem, but better than no control at all. Surely we have learnt enough by now to acknowledge that technology is too important socially to be left to the ethical and political judgments of technological experts alone.
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