It's surprising to me how most of those think-pieces about technology invariably oscillate between naive technological neutrality and extreme technological determinism.
Isn't it far more likely that technology is neither of those things?
Technology is a means to an end.
The trouble comes when that end isn't made explicit. For all the talk about SV people being "visionaries", very few of them seem to articulate what their ideal world looks like, and what part the technology they're building plays in it.
Talking about technology as being "neutral" is nothing more than lazy complacency in the face of the hardness of actually coming up with a compelling vision to sell people and reveal their preferences for possible worlds we could live in.
Instead of going through that step, technologists are happy enough to settle on vaguely defined "needs" and "problems" that society has, without considering what matters, which is which needs and problems you prioritize. Human needs are almost endless, but prioritizing different needs results in completely different global outcomes.
That's also perfectly fine, provided that you're explicit about what outcomes you're aiming for, and you've worked out n-th order effects of those outcomes.
Technological determinism is another cop out that allows technologists to never be held accountable for the world they've helped build with the products they've created.
It's technology itself that is determined by conflicting visions. There isn't one "Technium", there's a whole ecosystem of technological systems resulting from different cultures, visions, teleologies interacting in complex ways.
It seems like Kelly is confusing path dependence for determinism. Sure, some technological paths (plural) lead to logical sequences of technologies being developed. Doesn't mean there's only one path.
P.S. Kinda rambling, posting for discussion more than anything else.
It's much more than that. It is a child life-form we've given birth to. And it follows similar patterns to those of our biological children.
a) Eventually, the child becomes stronger and more able than the parent, while the parent gradually becomes weaker and less fit to continue living.
b) The child's behavior into adolescence is largely determined by the parents. Then the child gradually becomes more independent in its thinking, though still largely guided by patterns instilled by the parents.
c) The child eventually becomes strong enough to provide for their parents -- or destroy them. How they approach this power is also strongly influenced by their childhood treatment.
My takeaway from this thinking: Stop cursing out your phone when it's slower than you'd like in fetching what you asked for. :)
And no, I am not a bot. Well, I guess to some extent I am, I'm just the SQL routines running on a server, and I'm writing this down based on what I see in the database that this user is said to have sent at some point, and the frontend code will render it to you in some way I guess. See you there, friend.
But yeah I do think that in a simulative language as we have, anything that is referrable-to as a subject in a sentence can appear as an agent in this way, probably. And I think processes running by computer we tend to conjure into many types of sentences (in our human languages that refer to them) with intricate enough dynamics (whether subject, object, modifier, whatever) that I would consider them as existing among our society generally. They appear with as much complexity as what we consider others like ourselves do. Like even if only by looking far into our history and seeing the extent to which we acknowledge others: some times we acknowledge processes-by-computer more.
i'd go further and say humans do not exist without technology. From fire to stone tools the relationship between human mind and technology as object and social construct is what humans are to the same degree as termites are their mounds.
I think you are woefully ill informed in how even in the most abundant ecosystem humans use technology. Look up the fish traps in the pacific north west of the us. Or the use of fire to flush game in paleolithic time. Just because it's not a shiny iphone does not mean that ecological management is not a sophisticated technology that has been developed concurrently with human evolution.
Isn't it far more likely that technology is neither of those things?
Technology is a means to an end.
The trouble comes when that end isn't made explicit. For all the talk about SV people being "visionaries", very few of them seem to articulate what their ideal world looks like, and what part the technology they're building plays in it.
Talking about technology as being "neutral" is nothing more than lazy complacency in the face of the hardness of actually coming up with a compelling vision to sell people and reveal their preferences for possible worlds we could live in.
Instead of going through that step, technologists are happy enough to settle on vaguely defined "needs" and "problems" that society has, without considering what matters, which is which needs and problems you prioritize. Human needs are almost endless, but prioritizing different needs results in completely different global outcomes.
That's also perfectly fine, provided that you're explicit about what outcomes you're aiming for, and you've worked out n-th order effects of those outcomes.
Technological determinism is another cop out that allows technologists to never be held accountable for the world they've helped build with the products they've created.
It's technology itself that is determined by conflicting visions. There isn't one "Technium", there's a whole ecosystem of technological systems resulting from different cultures, visions, teleologies interacting in complex ways.
It seems like Kelly is confusing path dependence for determinism. Sure, some technological paths (plural) lead to logical sequences of technologies being developed. Doesn't mean there's only one path.
P.S. Kinda rambling, posting for discussion more than anything else.