Technology is not values neutral
consilienceproject.org
consilienceproject.org
> The first idea is that all technological change is a trade-off.
> This leads to the second idea, which is that the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population.
> The third idea, then, is that every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
> Here is the fourth idea: Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. ...A new medium does not add something; it changes everything.
> I come now to the fifth and final idea, which is that media tend to become mythic. ...[Using] the word "myth" to refer to a common tendency to think of our technological creations as if they were God-given, as if they were a part of the natural order of things.
https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs492/papers/neil-postman--...
The first automatic washing machines were introduced in the USA in 1937; a decade later women played important roles in wartime manufacturing during WWII, and by 1970 universities like Caltech finally opened their doors to female students.
It's possible that some new technology - AI-assisted robotic automation in particular - could have a similar societal impact by eliminating many jobs and concentrating wealth in the hands of the owners of the manufacturing lines, although this would seem to be a self-defeating outcome as fewer people would be able to purchase the output. An alternative result would be something like an average 30-hr work week with no change in economic earnings for the vast majority of people.
Not necessarily. It could enable a more radical reversion to something like a palace economy, where political and economic power are fully concentrated into an elite and away from the people, who are then made dependent on gifts from those elites for survival and comfort.
People nowadays concentrate on money like it's something fundamental, but it isn't (e.g. Putin can be richer and more powerful than all of us, without owning a kopeck). Money is only a proxy for prestige and power in our current social system, and other systems are possible.
Musk and co are not suffering.
This culture is a joke. None of us are going to Mars and the beyond but we’re setting us and ours aside for another high minded story about forever human prosperity and growth. Nevermind no science allows for humans to live among the stars. Every frame of reference so far as only seen them tightly coupled to Earth.
It’s clear human biology is capable of a philosophy that diverges wildly from reality. No reason at all to see this period in human society, and the people that make it up, as any less susceptible to propaganda and any more capable of their forever stories than the ancient Greeks.
They may not be spewing the syntax of religion, but the semantic meaning demanded by the powers that be are no different; kowtow to the visions and hallucinations of the almighty.
This precariousness is compounded by international trade, making the value of kopecks at least partly dependent on economic performance. (In a perfectly insular economy, Putin would have much more control over kopecks, including fungibility, but you can't regress to such insularity without destroying most wealth in the country.)
Notably, Putin has plenty of kopecks stashed overseas, presumably partly out of concern for the precariousness of his situation, or at least that of his family's fortunes.
Money isn't power, per se. Control over social media isn't power, per se. Voting isn't power, per se. But it's difficult to discuss power without discussing the mediums by which it's exercised and allotted. In particular, power exercised through one medium might not be readily transferred to another medium.
We are already seeing this outcome. About 2/3 (!) of Americans live paycheck to paycheck [1], 56% of Americans have less than 1000$ in liquid savings for emergencies [2]. In Europe, the situation is better because we have somewhat decent social safety nets, but not that much (e.g. in Germany, thanks to inflation, record numbers of people depend on charities like food banks [6] which are essentially funded by donations from large supermarket chains).
At the same time, a lot of the largest employers [3] in the US - especially Amazon, Target and Walmart - stand to benefit massively from automation gains... meaning that a lot of their staff will be made redundant as technology improves. Amazon is continuously investing in warehouse automation to replace human "pickers", and supermarket chains are investing in automation e.g. to spot spills [4] or monitor shelves for stuff out of stock [5].
Individual companies are not to blame for this per se: capitalism incentivizes a company to reduce costs wherever possible. The answer to the resulting shift of profits and wealth, however, must be in politics - and to be honest, if the wealth gap keeps rising with people like Bezos or Musk being worth hundreds of billions of dollars each while the 99% lose their homes and die because they can't afford basic medicine like insulin, if politics don't do anything, social unrest will only keep growing. Occupy Wall Street, the 2016 election of the 45th, French Yellow Vest protests - they all were, at their core, protests against this wealth disparity, against the effective neo-feudalism towards which we have devolved.
And to make the situation even worse than it already is: taxpayers worldwide will have to pay down the enormous bills from COVID relief debt and investments to combat climate change (e.g. constructing new power grids and renewable-energy plants), the followup costs of the Russian invasion in Ukraine and potentially a third world war - but there is no sign at all in any Western country that the rich will pay their fair share for all this crap.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/11/two-thirds-of-americans-live...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-...
[3] https://largest.org/misc/employers-usa/
[4] https://mashable.com/article/stop-and-shop-marty-robots
[5] https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/retail-hospitality/5-...
[6] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/situation-tafeln-101.html
Modern economic theory is a fig leaf over the raw reality of resource allocation. A better fig leaf than most, but still a fig leaf. In particular, there are many macro metastable equilibrium points, post-WW2 middle-class America being the exception rather than the rule. Fewer people, true, but with vastly higher purchase power than the masses.
Considering how high American incomes tend to be compared to the rest of the world, this seems like a culture of spendthrift irresponsibility.
Meanwhile, the rest of the developed Western world has the government provide healthcare, pension systems, actual sick time that also accounts for longer periods, public transport so you can get away without a car...
It's a cultural issue.
To use a 200 year old quote: "They should eat cakes instead".
Someone with absolutely no money to spare absolutely cannot set aside 10% of their income - and even if they manage to do so, it's all one healthcare or other emergency away from being wiped out.
I don't know why you picked Caltech specifically, but even confining ourselves to the US, women could attend university much earlier - a few examples from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women's_education:
1831: As a private institution in 1831, Mississippi College became the first coeducational college in the United States to grant a degree to a woman. In December 1831 it granted degrees to two women, Alice Robinson and Catherine Hall.
1855: University of Iowa becomes the first coeducational public or state university in the United States.
1866: Sarah Jane Woodson Early became the first African-American woman to serve as a professor. Xenia, Ohio's Wilberforce University hired her to teach Latin and English in 1866.
1870: The Board of Regents of the University of California ruled that women should be admitted on an equal basis with men. With the completion of North and South Halls in 1873, the university relocated to its Berkeley location with 167 male and 22 female students.
"will" is an unnecessary word. That started happening with the electronics revolution in 1970s triggering the robotics revolution and automating factories. That's the reason for increasing wealth concentration. Which, the Western governments tried to combat by floating the economy on debt. That blew up in 2008. So here we are, living the aftermath of the crash of capitalism that Marx said would happen due to increasing technology and automation putting majority of people out of work and there remaining no way for them to buy the products that the economy produces, putting the economy into a crisis.
It frustrated me so deeply when Google removed the compass from their maps application in order to add some buttons to report speed traps or whatever. For a couple years there, the only way to keep any sort of orientation while driving in unfamiliar areas was to make the map always point north regardless of where I was driving.
But, remarkably, enough people complained that they brought the compass back.
Social media technology? 100% political.
Well management technology? 100% a-political.
If your technology is based on funding from a group that has no spine whatsoever (e.g. 99% of ad purchasers out there), then your technology is at the whim of the latest angry tweet.
If your technology is based on funding from a group that is firmly rooted in reality, then nobody cares about politics because they're dealing with something much more important.
"Wells" as in water wells? Or wellness management?
What an absurdly reductionist viewpoint.
Yes, the invention of the box camera did spur changes in, say, the normative definition of privacy in the public sphere. But in doing so it hardly “leverage[d] resource extraction and control”. And most people concerned about it, even if they didn’t own a camera themselves, certainly had access to other resources.
And what about the pulley or the inclined plane? Come on.
Adding accelerometers to phones had wonderful and (potentially) dangerous consequences, but ridiculous nonsense like his framing makes it harder to make assessment and judgement.
Actually, it did. Maybe not in the ways you'd think on inspection.
Prior to cameras, the only way to get a reliable portrait was to hire a skilled painter -- so cameras transferred extraction and control of portraiture from skilled painters to photographers, which meant the barrier to entry into portraiture got lowered significantly, especially so as the price of cameras continued to drop.
In other words, camera technology democratized the ability to produce representative imagery by significantly lowering the barrier to entry.
I'm trying hard not to use the M word because it usually leads to flaming and not reasonable discussion.
He was fundamentally wrong in how he views capitalist societies -- particularly his ignorance of the middle class and how access by literally anyone to equity and capital markets affects society.
Power always concentrates to a few (the Pareto principle alone assures us of this, not to mention unequal distribution of 10,000 other differentiating characteristics between individuals). The question isn't whether that happens, but how and under what terms. When a middle class of educated business owners and professionals exists, and a government that ensures peaceful rule-of-law, a society looks nothing like anything "M" describes.
Same as saying that everything anyone, or any organization, does is political.
Which may be the literal case, but we have to maintain some cutoff threshold to make the phrase meaningful and tractable to think about.
Otherwise, scratching the left or right side of your nose may be a political statement and preferring a trackpad or a mouse may be a statement regarding values.
"Technology that has Y net impact on more than X number of people is not values neutral" may be a better phrasing.
And the challenge will be to find broad agreement for X and Y.
My go-to example of developer hubris is all the language-mangling technology I have to work around everyday, because it's on by default: auto-complete, phrase suggestions, fuzzy searching, etc. I'm perfectly capable of expressing my intent. I don't need a computer to say "well, um, actually I know you really want something else."
Do you mean it's only a trivial insight if you already know it?
> I have worked with many developers who believe that whatever they value is obviously the right values and everybody else just don’t get it. Every time a developer claims they have made a “rational” choice you know you are seeing one of them in their natural inhabitant.
Some of the most pernicious ideological-adherents are the ones who don't realize their beliefs are an ideology, and instead confuse it for reality (or that their values are the only valid values). They have a really hard time understanding anything else, or analyzing their own beliefs.
You see this a lot with people who read a couple libertarian pop-econ books and then run around like everything is a simple question of supply, demand, and prices and that an ideal free market is "values neutral." It's also common in other areas, through (e.g. most deeply-polarized people of whatever party, "the reality-based community", etc.).
Outside of HN it is.
Here the only technology that is ever seen with some skepticism is the blockchain. Everything else is golden.
This isn't keeping things tractable, it's keeping them rational. You're not required to limit your scope to remain rational. In fact, the claim that scope has to be limited can be a way to intentionally exclude things from being evaluated rationally.
If there's a reasonable way that the orientation of a nose scratch can have political implications, then it should be considered. There's not one, though, so we don't really have to worry about it. But I fear that the criterion you're using for your nose-scratching example is the "Oh, come on..." criterion. If someone comes up with a real argument that there's a right way to scratch your nose, you don't exclude it because of "really?"
If everything is political then what's not political? Definitionally nothing. So saying "X is political" becomes equivalent to "X is".
This is a specific case of a broader truth, which is that expanding the definition of a category lowers the information entropy of that category.
The are both trivial (e.g. post-modernism) and non-trivial (e.g. McLuhan, Postman, Ellul) versions of this idea. They have vastly different implications.
All software engineers would benefit from at least some understanding of the non-trivial versions.
For example, I've heard many engineers seriously suggest that it would be for the benefit of the whole society if traditional publishing would collapse and be completely replaced by self-publishing on Amazon. When they say that they have all the imagined benefits right in front of their mind's eye. (Everyone can publish! Cheap books! Fast/digital delivery!) Simultaneously, it's blatantly obvious that they haven't spent even a minute thinking about what that would lead to. (Hypercentralization. Turning books from artefacts to services. Complete demolition of the highly evolved ecosystem that produced good books in the past.) This is how tech people are trained to think.
Extend this example. Search for some articles or comments debating eReaders. Pretty much none of them ever consider anything beyond the immediate tactile experience and convenience. I mean, even people who argue in favor of physical books.
But thankfully not everyone's opinion is of equal competence nor should they be treated as if they were of equal competence. And we don't have to spend much time worrying about these folks.
For example, if thousands in positions of importance started advocating to replace the publishing industry that would be worrying.
But I highly doubt several thousand disgruntled junior folks could destroy the publishing industry, even if they combined their efforts and committed their all to it. And I would bet very few of these folks would ever climb into positions of real importance so they aren't much of a latent threat either.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (p. 11)
No they were not. The author uses "values" too liberally. Those features were in mind but the only value behind the decision to pursue these features is profit from the producer perspective and convenience from a consumer perspective. The same basic principles of supply/demand economics govern commercial technology.
The smartphone is not central to human existence. Billions don't even have access to the internet, hundreds of millions don't have electricity. Even if you take the west alone, most people believe it or not function just fine without smartphones. Both the entertainment and communication aspects are available on laptops. Even without the internet many americans still use dvds! Voice calls and sms. I go out of my way to succesfully avoid using smartphones for any work related purposes (and I work in infosec) successfully. I use uber/uber-eats, airbnb and many other popular apps but they all merely add a convenience. I still eat at restaurants, used taxis and car rentals in recent memory as well as hotels. I do use GPS a lot but I have no problem using a paper map.
Regarding the overall premise of the article: bicycles enabled the women rights movement and cars enabled suburbia and "white flight" and many other features of modern western life. These are effects not values as is with the internet and smartphones. I argue that tech is values neutral unless profit and convenience are what you mean by values. People spread conspiracy about climate change, flate earth and anti-vaccine theories on the same smartphones and internet people use to do the opposite. In other words, technology is usually created out of convenience. Even nuclear tech was created because it was more convenient to use it to win a war than fire bombing and invasion campaigns. Just like bicycles were created because they get you there faster than walking, not specifically to enable women. Make things that are profitable because they solve an in inconvenience and maybe good willed people will be enabled to do good with it.
The author mixes effect with values.
Writing basically allowed the creation of the bureaucratic state. Without writing/record keeping, large organizations are pretty much impossible.
For vast majority of our species' existence, we had no ability to record events permanently, and, as the OP says, this technology enabled the first states to collect taxes and grow beyond a certain natural modest size.
Knowing which side is producing the social effects could go a long way to alleviating the stresses new technology has built onto our societies. I Would be excited to see who would actively work or fund such a project and whether it would actually produce any results.
I never had any reliable sense of direction and felt safe in urban or rural areas :-] Now we have affordable GPS devices and that's awesome. The only bad thing about it is Google/whoever always spying on your location.
Is this an inevitability though? Maybe there really are some people who have barriers about spatial thinking who would never be able to learn to navigate, but I think there's a large group in the middle who tell themselves they "have no sense of direction", and just mindlessly use GPS their entire adult life because they've never put in the bare minimum of effort required to plan and execute a trip without it.
For example, this chicken collection system from hell:
(warning: viewer discretion is advised) https://youtu.be/sH3BZu7Qez0?t=398
Clearly there is engineering involved, but you can see how the design has no regard for the chickens.
This would require an incentive for long-term systems thinking and cooperation.
Turning a profit at the expense of human sanity, dignity and justice is far easier, which is the definition of success today. It's hard to make money without unintentionally causing harm, intentionally doing it however makes it easier. Unless there is an effective oversight, but there rarely is, especially for new markets.
Like Y Combinator here, and many other venture capitalists turning a profit on cryptocurrency scams. They are doing harm, but they can't say no to opportunities, that would just create more incentives for their competitors to say yes. Inflicting a few of the thousand cuts routinely inflicted on society is the government's problem anyway. To be fair it can be trully hard to avoid harm, or even figure out what's the harm, if any. Our world is rather big and complex. I'm just saying that there is a selection for not even trying to, because someone else just wouldn't, and it's a competitive advantage not to.
Thats precisely how the current Internet was funded, developed and evolved. There are a similar, even higher amount of scams and failed attempts in the Internet's earlier history when compared to crypto.
The progress will be the same - out of dozens of scams and hundreds of failed crypto attempts, one startup will invent one use case that the public gets on board, and that will set the standard.
Crypto has no such potential, it couldn't support a restaurant. It can only support speculative financial products, mainly pumping and dumping. Blockchain technologies can eliminate the double spending problem trustlessly and tolerate a large amount of faulty or malicious nodes by making the voting power depend on the computation effort, but such a heavy-handed approach is not needed for most services. They either don't have a double spending problem (if they only have invariant confluent transactions they don't require consensus at all) or they only have a small amount of nodes.
Blockchain technologies ultimately can only give you confidence in their immutability, though the blockchain can be forked away from any point, which is what happened to Ethereum. Money buys you voting power and let's you sway the stewards of the network, which is fundamentally inequal and unfair.
https://ethereumclassic.org/why-classic
The point is that I don't want this to be the future, this technology is fundamentally inefficient and unfair.
This seems greatly exaggerated.
The "GDPR effect" will be seen in many other areas in the coming years, and I (as a EU technology-focused diplomat) feel that most US corps haven't realized the scale of what's lurking around the corner.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-se... https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-european-union-ai-act...
Digital computers are technology, smartphones are a social movement.
The internet is technology, Reddit is a social thing.
GPS (the system that gives you a fix using satellites) is technology, everyone relying on turn by turn navigation is a social movement.
You can make up whatever categories you feel are useful (the author here chooses to include values as part of technology, by example), but don't forget that categories tend to make people overestimate the difference between things.