NATURE OF TECHNOLOGY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY

•His view/definition of tech is broad:

• Artificial aids to human activities, including
• Instruments, techniques and systems
  • Systems: Transportation systems (car versus bus/train/bike/walk)
  • Techniques: Division of Labor, assembly line

•Phil of tech "examines critically the nature and significance of artificial aids to human activity"
•Importance of phil of tech for a society "so firmly based on countless sophisticated instruments, techniques and systems"
•Modern society has not seriously engaged in phil of tech.
This is because:

• One: "Astonishing hold idea of progress has on society"
• Taken for granted that the only reliable source for improving human condition is new tech (machines, techniques and chemicals)
• A faith that has not been dented by all the environmental and social ills that have come along with tech advancement
• Two: Assumption that techs are neutral
• According to this assumption, technologies are "tools that can be used well or poorly or for good or bad purposes"
  • Can use my knife to slice loaf of bread or stab a person
  • The knife itself is neither good nor bad, but neutral

TECH AS FORMS OF LIFE

• Problem with idea that tech is neutral: It fails to see how techs provide structure for human activity and are FORMS OF LIFE
  • Techs not simply aids to human activity, but powerful forces that reshape activities and their meaning
    • E.g., Introduction of robot to industrial workplace not just increases productivity but redefines what work means in that setting.
  • Tech devices tend to engender distinctive worlds of their own
  • Driver walker example 106
    • Driver tries to ask his walking neighbor over for dinner
    • Honks (annoys walker), slows and shouts invitation (walker wonders who is shouting at him and can't hear him), driver slowed traffic, so person behind him honks
  • How do automobiles affect texture of modern life?
    • Sprawl, difficulty of walking/biking, danger/deaths
• Techs as forms of life
  • As techs built and put to use
  • New worlds being built, new patterns of human activity, new human institutions
  • Not a "secondary consequence" but a primary accomplishment of any new tech
  • A tech system that involves people won't work unless the people change their behavior to suit how it works
    • Consider answering machines or email
  • Modern tech development changed individual habits, concepts of self, ideas of space and time, social relationships
    • Examples? Letter writing? People define themselves in terms of cars? World much smaller place, email community?
  • Eventually new techniques shed tool-like quality and become part of our very humanity
    • We are beings who work on assembly lines, talk on phones, eat process foods, clean our homes with powerful chemicals
      
• Many times tech allow us to do in a different way what we always did (work, talk, eat, clean)
• But they can radically alter how we do these things
• TV as a universal babysitter, as what we spend a 1/4 of our lives doing, as what we talk about
  • In some sense, can't really turn off TV
• Though typically new tech transforms very old patterns of human behavior, sometimes they generate entirely new types of behavior
• Examples
  • Air flight
  • Altering human biology via genetic engineering
  • Settlements in outer-space
• •Tech as from of life is illustration of idea that people are what they do
  • View held by existentialists, pragmatists, and Marx
  • Marx: "As individuals express their life, so they are"

WE DON'T THINK THROUGH AFFECTS TECHS HAVE ON US (And we need to)

• Vast changes in structure of our common world due to tech undertaken with little attention to what they mean
• All we tend to look at are issues like does the new tech:
  • Provide a convenient service or perform a service more efficiently
  • Make a profit
• Tech's broader significance only show up later as surprising "side effects" or "secondary consequences"
• We seldom examine pending innovations with careful awareness of what those changes mean
• With tech we enter a series of social contracts whose terms revealed only after signing them
• Though tech innovation we make a world for us to live in.
• So Winner recommends that we make sure we understand and examine the important psychological, social and political changes that are part of any significant tech change
• Are we designing a world that will enlarge possibility for growth in human freedom, sociability, intelligence, creativity and self-government?
• Or doing the reverse?


• Tech Somnambulism versus Tech Determinism (DT)
• •Rejects tech DT: Idea that tech innovation is basic cause of change in society and that humans have little choice than to watch this ineluctable process unfold
  • He thinks DT is:
• Too strong/sweeping a claim
• To passive: Ignores genuine choices that arise in course tech/social transformation
• He rejects idea that we will just have to endure tech change, for "its going to happen anyway" and we just have to adapt.
• •Accepts Tech somnambulism: We willingly sleepwalk though the process of reconstituting conditions of our lives.
  • He thinks we do this, but that we should not.