Wanted: critical technical awakenings

An invitation to a community

With this publication, I am exploring alternative and more conscious ways in which we direct our attention towards technology. I am writing in particular to people working in technology. Having spent over two decades in this space, these are my people. Yet, I think our relationship to technology benefits from examining and reconsidering.

The great spiritual teacher Krishnamurti once said, “When you teach a child that a bird is named ‘bird,’ the child will never see the bird again.” What they’ll see is the word “bird.” That’s what they’ll see and feel, and when they look up in the sky and see that strange, winged being take flight, they’ll forget that what is actually there is a great mystery. They’ll forget that they really don’t know what it is. They’ll forget that that thing flying through the sky is beyond all words, that it’s an expression of the immensity of life. It’s actually an extraordinary and wondrous thing that flies through the sky. But as soon as we name it, we think we know what it is. - Adyashanti. Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering (p. 7).

Phil Agre and Critical Technical Practice

Such inquiries have the potential to lead into a revelation of sorts. In an essay from 1997, computer scientist and AI researcher Philip E. Agre, working on AI, describes his personal awakening to alternate viewpoints to the technological mindset that had dominated his life. Agre describes ‘waking up’ from his inability to learn nontechnical disciplines on their terms:

As an AI practitioner already well immersed in the literature, I had incorporated the field's taste for technical formalization so thoroughly into my own cognitive style that I literally could not read the literatures of nontechnical fields at anything beyond a popular level. The problem was not exactly that I could not understand the vocabulary, but that I insisted on trying to read everything as a narration of the workings of a mechanism. - Agre, Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI

Agre went on to suggest a need to adopt a “critical technical practice” that has subsequently inspired technologists, despite requiring “a split identity — one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique.” By reflexive critique, Agre means comprehensive examination of the assumptions underpinning technological disciplines.

More recently, Maya Malik and Momin M. Malik have taken Agre’s views as a starting point but emphasise the awakening aspect by suggesting the term ‘critical technical awakenings’:

when people from technical disciplines, previously committed to a narrow technical view of the world, “wake up” from that perspective to what we identify as seeing the world through a critical, constructivist lens. - Malik & Malik, Critical Technical Awakenings, p 365.

The fallacies of technological knowing

Often the awakening requires letting go of an absolute belief that the technical-empirical world view is the primary way to approach problem-solving, complex questions, and ultimately have a grasp of reality.

In practice, this mindset frequently manifests as resentment towards other modes of inquiry and knowing, such as social sciences, cultural studies, or philosophy. In contrast, the world view privileges ‘techno-solutionism’, ‘techno-optimism’, and a general belief that any technological development equals progress and that technology alone can solve critical problems.

Technical disciplines in particular are frequently positivist without realizing that it is a specific position, or that it is not the only way to see the world. Part of undergoing a critical awakening is coming to be aware that a technical perspective is only one way of looking at the world, and starting to recognize its core underlying assumptions—and reject them. -Malik & Malik, Critical Technical Awakenings, p. 368.

At the same time, I would rather not discount the fascination that technological innovations can bring about. I have been under that spell for most of my life, and as a consequence, my LinkedIn feed is full of examples where this or that ‘cool thing’ enabled by a technology is celebrated. I have a son with a medical condition who can live a mostly normal life thanks to technology — to which I am eternally grateful.

Therefore, it is important to remember, even with a critical hat on, that technology can solve problems and represents a powerful means of applying scientific findings into practice in the form of inventions and tools. Technology is fundamentally a human activity — and exactly for that reason, it falls into the realm of ethics and our moral acts toward other living beings and the environments they inhabit.

The lure of technology

Our deepest hope as humans lies in technology; but our deepest trust lies in nature.

- W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (p. 16).

The reach and impact technologies have today are so overpowering that we need to re-examine what ethics means, but that is a topic for future posts. Another aspect I want to question going forward is the time we spend making ‘cool’ things, and how that time and attention could be directed in a more thoughtful way.

Looking at the multiple crisis we are facing as a planet, the dominant attitude in developing technology clearly has not managed to make technology into a panacea. We need to be more aware of how we direct attention to technologies, both as users and makers.

Following and paraphrasing Agre and the Maliks, I acknowledge that any critical engagement with this phenomenon should begin with an appreciation of the experiences that have made extreme technical views — i.e. absolutist views that discount other views — so compelling. At the root of such fascination is a certain hubris about epistemology, i.e. how we are to know things in the first place. Technological world view tends to lean towards a grip of things that does not recognize its handicaps, and thus thinks that everything is knowable once one breaks it apart via analysis and intellect, i.e:

the aesthetic appeal of positivism and specifically its realist ontology: the world is fundamentally knowable. Furthermore, the technical person experiences the satisfaction of having command of the sole means by which to achieve that knowledge. Malik & Malik, Critical Technical Awakenings, p. 368.

Awakenings

Computer scientists and designers have been inspired by Phil Agre’s approach and have developed critical technical practices further as means to bring marginalised views in technology development into the centre. My take is that they have been especially interested in the critical, reflective part in critical awakenings. And that is very welcome and useful. But the thing is, I am more interested in the awakening part.

Such awakenings exist beyond Agre’s example, as Jeffrey Kripal demonstrates in his book The Flip. He refers to the accounts about several ‘flips’ - radical awakenings that scientists and medical professionals have experienced. These have been triggered, for example, by near-death experiences or other types of mystical phenomena. As a result, the subjects have experienced a conversion from materialistic notions of reality, and conducting science from a third-person perspective, into putting consciousness first and appreciating the first-person view as a valid premise for scientific and professional inquiry.

Unfortunately, the predominant intellectual and professional climate has by and large been such that confessing to a flip runs the risk of professional suicide. Kripal writes:

The materialist interpretation of the world and of science itself is protected not by the facts or by the data of our honest experiences, but by what is essentially social and professional peer pressure, something more akin to the grade-school playground or high school prom. The world is preserved through eyes rolling back, snide remarks, arrogant smirks and subtle, or not so subtle, social cues, and a kind of professional (or conjugal) shaming. - Kripal, The Flip, p. 57.

Nevertheless, there is another path for technologists - while a transformational event, such as childbirth, divorce, or a mystical experience might trigger the flip, such drama is not necessary. One can gradually let go of the old world view, and by doing the work on studying other perspectives, find how to foster care in the context of developing technology.

Embracing spiritual caretaking

Aden Van Noppen, founder of Mobius, writes about spiritual caretakers and how they have been omnipresent throughout history in all cultures. She argues that when people seek refuge in Siri and Alexa with their suicidal thoughts, or commit self-harm due to misinformation and abuse via social media, we are living in a time when spiritual care is provided by algorithms:

This means that the technologists who create them are de-facto spiritual caretakers of our world. Unfortunately, caretaking is a role that computer science degrees do not prepare people for, few business models optimize for, and algorithms can not easily solve. - Aden Van Noppen, Creating Technology Worthy of the Human Spirit, p.309.

If technologists designing such algorithms are not conscious of the responsibility they carry, imagine if these algorithms become unexplainable outputs from an AI solution? How do we recognise and audit the intent behind such outputs?

Van Noppen promotes two practices that us who work in technology companies can adopt for a responsible and care-focused attention to our work:

technologists must recognize that what we create is an expression of our own inner state. Our spiritual and emotional health is inextricably linked with our ability to build technology with responsibility and wisdom. Second, technologists must create an empowered seat at the table for those with the expertise and orientation needed to care for our spiritual and emotional well-being - Aden Van Noppen, Creating Technology Worthy of the Human Spirit, p. 310.

For centuries, spiritual caretaking has been practiced through communities and the ecologies of practices they cultivate. I suggest a technologically informed community is needed to continue such activities to keep pace with the developments in AI, spatial, and quantum computing and all their applications across various sectors.

Community of collective intelligence

individual-level awakenings play a central role in building communities that effectively work towards positive structural change -Malik & Malik p. 366.

I have finally arrived at the invitation - thank you for reading this far.

An online community around an examined relationship with technology has the potential to function as a technology itself - namely, a psychotechnology that cultivates both self-inquiry and compassionate relations to others. I will return to the notion of psychotechnology in detail in later posts, when I propose how and which spiritual practices can reframe our relationship with technology.

For now, it is useful to think of psychotechnology as something that enables a set of practices around thinking and being in the world with an ethical, philosophical, and spiritual stance. This has the potential to build collective intelligence through collective coherence and clarity of thinking, but not just with intellect but also with the heart. As with the bird in the Adyashanti quote, there is so much more to any technology than its pure functionality and the label we use for it.

Thank you for reading. As always, I leave you with a short piece of contemplative creation:

With love and kindness,

Aki