The dangerous appeal of technology-driven futures – MIT Technology Review

This view, known as technological determinism, is historically flawed, politically dangerous, and ethically questionable. To achieve progress, societies like ours need a more dynamic understanding of why technology changes, how we change with it, and how we might govern our powerful, marvelous machines.

Technology is not an autonomous force independent of society, nor are the directions of technological change fixed by nature. Technology at its most basic is toolmaking. Insisting that technological advances are inevitable keeps us from acknowledging the disparities of wealth and power that drive innovation for good or ill.

Technology is always a collective venture. It is what it is because many people imagined it, labored for it, took risks with it, standardized and regulated it, vanquished competitors, and made markets to advance their visions. If we treat technology as self-directed, we overlook all these interlocking contributions, and we risk distributing the rewards of invention unfairly. Today, an executive officer of a successful biotech company can sell stock worth millions of dollars, while those who clean the lab or volunteer for clinical trials gain very little. Ignoring the unequal social arrangements that produced inventions tends to reproduce those same inequalities in the distribution of benefits.

Throughout human history, the desire for economic gain has underwritten the search for new tools and instrumentsin fields like mining, fishing, agriculture, and recently gene prospecting. These tools open up new markets and new ways to extract resources, but what the innovator sees as progress often brings unwanted change to communities colonized by imported technologies and their makers ambitions.

The story of the internet shows that modern societies are often better at imagining the upsides of technology than its downsides.

For example, in West Bengal, where I was born, weavers lost such skills as making the intricate narrative motifs of the Baluchari sari during 200 years of British rule. Indeed, Britains first industrial revolution, which introduced the power loom in cities like Lancaster but adopted punitive tariffs to keep out hand-loomed cloth from India, was also a story about dismantling Bengals once-flourishing textile industry. Lost arts had to be regained after the British left. The cost of a radical break with a nations own economic and cultural heritage is incalculable.

The desire for military advantage is another driver of technological change that can, in some instances, benefit civil societybut dual use technologies often retain ties to forces that prompted their development. Nuclear energy, a spinoff from the pursuit of the atomic bomb, was sold to the world by US President Dwight Eisenhower as atoms for peace. Yet nuclear power remains closely tied to the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation.

Similarly, the internet and world wide web, which revolutionized how much of the world lives today, owe much to the US Defense Departments vision of a network of computers. First celebrated as a space for emancipation, the digital world has slowly revealed its antidemocratic features: constant surveillance, cybersecurity threats, the lawlessness of the dark web, and the spread of misinformation. More public awareness of the internets origins might have led to a more accountable cyberworld than the one designed by hotshot technologists.

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The dangerous appeal of technology-driven futures - MIT Technology Review