Unexamined technology: How might we shift our attention towards technology into a moral act?

Unexamined: ‘not investigated or examined: widely held but largely unexamined preconceptions.’

Why unexamined technology?

Socrates, on trial for his philosophical views considered sacrilegious by his peers, famously defended himself by implying that he’d rather take poison and die than live without his calling to practicing philosophy. His statement “the unexamined life is not worth living” suggests that philosophy as ‘the love of wisdom’ is the ultimate way to examine one’s life.

Our contemporary life is immersed in technology. Therefore, for most of us, examining one’s life cannot exclude our relationships to technologies.

Why would that matter to you? I propose that too often our relationship to technologies remains unexamined. With that, I don’t just mean that we direct attention to technologies - such as screens - without reflection, but also, and perhaps more importantly, how we do that in a way that aligns with the second part of a dictionary definition of ‘unexamined’ - by employing preconceptions that are widely held but largely unexamined.

Using technology scholar Langdon Winner’s terms, we sleepwalk through changes brought by technologies that fundamentally change our terms of relating to the world. Such as mobile phones.

Today, as I write this, we are told that we will ‘get left behind’ if we do not begin using ‘the 50 greatest AI tools’ or whatever the clickbait headline of the day is. Alerted by the prospect of one’s seemingly inevitable irrelevance in the job market, many who sign up to the ethos of such recommendations also sign up to the myths of progress and productivity; that indeed humanity is on a continuous path of greater progress - without examination.

Unexamined attention to technology is not worth cultivating

Unexamined relationships with technology stem from fascination, both intellectual and aesthetic, or need to adapt. Humans have built machines and devices that exert control over nature in extraordinary ways: by manipulating nature and its resources, or communicating over vast physical distances in milliseconds. ‘We create technology in order to compensate for our finitude’, writes Philip Hefner (in “Technology and human becoming”, p. 658).

Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, characterises the type of pull that technologies have. The dictum has captured many—myself included—from an early age. Intellectual curiosity, a sense of agency gained from ‘making stuff’ with technologies, and the fascination with technologies’ seemingly magical qualities fuel careers in technology.

In my lifetime, computers have accelerated this development through the simple fact that they can simulate various other technologies and operate them. However, this veil of magic often hides the fact that we are terrible in estimating the complex socio-economic and the cultural impacts of technologies. For example, no-one foresaw how automobiles influenced urban planning and made many cities the car-dominated spaces they are today. Or, how the plow privileged male strength in tending to the land and eventually lead to subjecting animals to physical labour (and being mistreated) for human purposes, to scale the production of food for profit.

Technologies are regularly analysed in how they work as tools and how they embody scientific discoveries and innovation. Yet their qualitative effects on societies, cultures, and individuals over generations cannot be underestimated. The accelerating rate of technological innovation from the past decades has led us to where we are now: to the environmental crisis, to the mental health crisis, and varying degrees of socio-economic divides. Philosophers and sociologists speak about ‘polycrisis’, or the ‘metacrisis’ that stems from, for example, unquestioned emphases in our children’s education that are not going to help in solving the polycrisis - because the same emphasis led us to the crises.

I haven’t heard anyone in the technology space discuss either term.

This omission is critical because the technology market creates divisions between ‘makers’ and ‘users’ - cohorts we all belong to, whether one is working in technology or not. Jonnie Penn, a scholar studying the social implications of information technologies, refers to such divisions and suggests that Clarke’s statement about the magical qualities of technologies creates a boundary worth questioning:

Arthur C. Clarke's popular Third Law About the Future boasts, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." … This literary "law" is often cited in salesmanship that surrounds the AI Revolution. It is used to paint a boundary between those who create technology and those who merely witness it. - Jonnie Penn, “Algorithmic Silence: A Call to Decomputerize”

Waking up from technological sleepwalking

Mere witnessing amounts to having no agency. It evokes another famous dictum I will refer to again: Langdon Winner’s notion that we are sleepwalking through technological changes that fundamentally change how we live our lives and how we pay attention to things and people around us.

Unexamined technology is about waking up into cultivating an examined relationship to technology, a relationship that cultivates human flourishing. This newsletter will also be about finding useful guidance from the wisdom traditions, both secular and spiritual.

I hope to translate some of these connections to an audience in technology; read literature and gleam insights from it that you would not necessarily have to - even if I recommend reading yourself, and therefore I always use exact references.

I don’t claim to have answers. But the first step is to find the right questions. I have chosen to take a step back and promote what are known as ‘critical technical awakenings’.

The next post will elaborate on that, but for now, it suffices to say that with waking up I refer to the relevance of complementary and morally sound world views external to technological development. This step can help us put technologies in their place, as something fundamentally human but also as symptoms of our deluded needs to grab things and manipulate our surroundings. Instead, we can embrace opportunities to understand what really matters and what is eternal - virtues such as striving for what is true, good, and beautiful.

What to expect from Unexamined Technology

In future posts, I will explore how various lines of thought can be used to examine human-technology relationships to foster new perspectives. These include, to begin with:

• Various views on technology and ethics, e.g. Hans Jonas’ prescient questions about the reach of ethics in a connected world and Shannon Vallor’s contemporary call for ‘technomoral’ virtue ethics in the 21st century

• Perspectives to how we embed values in technologies and create and capture value with technologies without reflecting what drives that

• Related to the above, how contemplation seems to be technologies’ other - how technological rationality, hand in hand with capitalism, has created a culture where technological manipulation of reality is privileged over other relationships to reality or contemplating it

• Writings on the relationship of technology and spirituality and how substituting time spent with technologies with spiritual practices can reframe technologies’ role in our everyday life in healthy ways

• Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis and its manifestation in relation to technology - I argue that our fascination with technology can be read as a symptom of privileging the brain’s left hemisphere and its narrow stance to the world; making things to grab and manipulate other things without seeing the limits of that approach nor the complex contexts that surround the activity of making (hence the recurrent problems with technological innovations and ethics)

• Philosophy of technology and how technologies work in tandem to promote an absolutist and at times arrogant and chauvinistic attitude towards other ways of knowing than the natural sciences and positivist assumptions, such as that only what is knowable and thus intellectually graspable and possible to express in a language is worth exploring and worth our attention

• How access to technology to make more technology is often unequal and suffers from a lack of diversity, thus re-enforcing views of individualism and separateness from something thought of as other (such as gender or ethnicity)

• How we use e.g. entertainment technologies to distract ourselves from who we really are; to fill our minds with illusions of contentment instead of quieting our minds, and how that is increasingly leading to us disconnecting from nature and what is ultimately real and sacred

• John Vervaeke’s notion of the meaning crisis, and related thinking about ‘metacrisis’, and how technology and education plays a part in both

• How our relationship with technologies have contributed to a wide-spread secularism or, by minimum, how it has reframed religious and spiritual practices - yet, how spirituality can orient and balance technology development anew

Examined life, with technology

All the above will become to constitute particular perspectives to examining technology. I will not hesitate to bring up viewpoints that my fellow technologists might find uncomfortable, from spiritual traditions in particular - that will be the unique selling point of this newsletter. However, regarding terms such as ‘spiritual’ I always want to be very specific with what I mean. I believe a loose use of words leads to loose thinking, and we can’t afford that given the situation the planet is in.

‘Unexamined technology’ as a title does not refer to established critical and/or responsible approaches to technology. I will cite them and acknowledge their usefulness, but I want to go beyond analysing the implications and potential harms of technology. 'UT’ tries to capture what it means to reward both everyday and advanced technologies productive, moral, finely proportioned attention.

In practice, that means letting go of habits and adopting new ones - where and when it is possible - for a more fully lived, examined life.

If you read this far, I am most grateful. Please subscribe so you don’t miss the next post.

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At the end of each post, I will intend to leave you with a contemplative piece of algorithmic art authored by myself.

With love and kindness,

Aki