How Philosophically Should/Can We Think About Technology?
I don’t know a lot about Phil Collins but he and I seem to agree on something at the moment. I too can feel it coming in the air tonight, and I’m sure when Phil said “it” he meant the reimaging of institutions which define how we think about society’s relationship with technology.
Now we’ve filtered down readers to true fans of tech philosophy, dad jokes and Phil Collins (what a gang) let’s get started.
How can we think about the societal effects of technology?
Just over a year ago I laid out my thinking for why I was setting off to study a master’s in tech policy at Cambridge. In brief, I wanted to consider our society’s technological legacy and create selection pressures to facilitate technology to evolve in ways that create increased human fulfilment into the future. Thankfully, the past year has questioned/developed my thoughts and I am about to embark on a continuation of this journey, but this time looking at even more fundamental elements of tech…
When rereading my writing from a year ago I noticed gaps and assumptions which I also saw in much of the discourse around how we collectively imagine the future of technology. In particular, what it means for tech to be ‘ethical’, ‘responsible’ or any type of normative qualifier to make it ‘good’. Simply put, this sort of moralising of tech is hugely subjective and from what I can see, leads to adversarial friction due to a sometimes patronising tone whilst allowing a type of greenwashing for organisations that continue to perpetuate existing exploitative practices. Let’s then develop new ways of thinking about technology rather than relying on existing paradigms (I’ll add some details to this vague statement shortly). This is an enormous and nuanced challenge with many noble voices more informed than my own. The approaches which have resonated most with me are: All Tech is Human who have curated an excellent community and jobs board for anyone wanting to find work in responsible tech; Omidyar Network’s Responsible Tech team who have some useful resources on their website; and Tanya Filer and her team who are pioneering ‘Public Purpose Tech’ at StateUp who have a great substack with concise essays from excellent affiliated specialists.
The reliance on old paradigms was particularly prominent in what was taught in my tech policy master’s at Cambridge (which is probably not surprising to many of you given the university is one of the oldest institutions in the world…). I am very appreciative of the academic staff and friends who developed my thinking during the master’s and I would recommend the experience to some people. However, I think it is crucial to recognise that a large part of this type of education felt more like a way to learn and recite decades-old canonical examples which were repeated across several separate modules, a few examples from my experience were Kodak v FujiFilm, Blockbuster v Netflix, mobile phones’ effect on Keralan fishing). This again is a nuanced topic and I can only make claims on my experiences, I am not attempting to take on academia as a whole! I raise this because I feel this sort of groupthink limits the way we are able to conceptualise our future. For example, this summer Sajid Javid, the then UK health secretary, used one of these canonical texts to somehow try and make the analogy that the NHS is Blockbuster but should be like Netflix…? If we teach policymakers and their speech writers to simply use tenuous analogies of past technologies then we limit the future to be a strange amalgamation of the past’s mistakes rather than embracing truly new opportunities.
Expanding our imagination
So what? I don’t think we need to scrap using historical examples entirely but let’s search for more compelling means to understand how we as a society influence technology and in what areas we are open to letting it influence us. Personally, I have found speculative fiction hugely developmental in expanding my imagination, by removing the context of our contemporary world but keeping human nature it displays how technology may affect the ways we think about ourselves, others, and the environments in which we live. If you’re looking for suggestions, I can deeply recommend Richard Powers, Octavia Butler, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Isaac Asimov and Ted Chiang (happy to recommend specifics or others if you reach out).
One caveat to relying on speculative fiction is to consider the sinister elements discussed rather than idealising and trying to build the future simply based on what was one person’s thought experiment. The futuristic goals (which are also scary to many) of tech execs seem to pick just the positives from their original setting. Prominent examples include the metaverse (the word is taken directly from Stephenson's novel Snow Crash), SpaceX (most prominently inspired by Iain M. Banks and Douglas Adams), and longevity (often unfortunate endings for people trying to live forever in so many parables throughout history…).
Developing and applying novel thought
Now we’re all open-minded and imaginative what can we do that will affect the world (rather than just speculate on it)?
New thought and its application calls for novel approaches. Fortunately, there are a few pioneers of this more fundamental approach to understanding and supporting technology. They’ve done some of the initial heavy lifting to develop organisations (and convince others to provide funding) so you can participate in the existing framework (as I am, for now) or learn which gaps are still left.
An overarching question for me at the moment is what type of new institutions (both in terms of the practices and organisations) can be developed if, as many people seem to claim, many of the established ones are crumbling (e.g. democratic politics, public healthcare, education, housing, privacy) as at least a partial result of technology? What structures must be included or avoided to remove the risk of being subject to the same issues as those currently under threat?
The answers to these questions are currently unfolding in front of us with many examples in different areas of life. I will list just a few institutions I’ve had exposure to that are working on the fundamentals and use Entrepreneur First (EF) as a detailed example since I spent a few years working there - I would be very interested in suggestions from any other areas if you want to send them to me.
Talent investing and breaking away from traditional VC
EF provides opportunities to become an entrepreneur to exceptional people who do not currently have the means to start a company. For context and to oversimplify, over three months, individuals in a highly select cohort find cofounders, develop a business idea, and then pitch this in the hope they receive an ~£80k initial pre-seed investment and opportunities to work with EF’s rich network of practitioners and investors. EF has been going for over a decade and during my two years there I witnessed many challenges and immense growth. Many of the challenges are social and required initial hunches to be tested in an empirical approach in order to find workable long-term options. Some examples of questions include: how to convince people to leave their (often very promising) careers as academics, software engineers, lawyers etc. to join the cohort? How to raise money for EF’s own investment funds when the approach is (or was at the time) so unusual? How to provide the correct type of support for entrepreneurs so they produce companies that the market genuinely wants in the long term rather than what has the most hype at that moment? How to identify talent capable of building globally important companies rather than select talent which is only able to present itself in a compelling way but can’t deliver?
The list of questions goes on and in an unsponsored (but not unbiased) plug, if you are interested then EF’s founders, Matt & Alice, have written a whole book which will give more detail. However, for this post, it is the theme of these questions which will be discussed.
A few other examples of organisations:
Polaris - nine-month programme to provide “freedom, resources, and privacy to pursue mastery of the established and the discovery of the heretical”. In reaction to “institutions which promise clarity and direction only to deliver a narrow list of sanitised options within which work is primarily justified as preparation for eventual real, impactful work, to be taken on later, elsewhere.”
Antikythera - a six-month programme evolved from the Terraforming program (which has since disbanded) with an objective to “develop new models, programs, and speculative projects that steer computation towards a viable future” by making computation “a philosophical, technological and geopolitical force”.
Texistential (now dormant, but worth mentioning for the small personal plug and segue to the next section) - a not-for-profit I founded in 2020 with the intention of helping people “design purposeful, fulfilling and enjoyable technology habits” through interactive workshops and content. Ultimately, I came up against too many why questions regarding my positioning and felt I needed to develop a more fundamental understanding of the societal effects of technology.
ToftH (Transformations of the Human) - a research institute, where I’m currently working, focussing on identifying the philosophical stakes of technology r&d and through working with companies realising the potential to “positively shape the new”.
Technology as a philosophy in itself
I recently joined ToftH in the Bay Area as a fellow where, alongside the other fellows and researchers, we will investigate technology at a philosophical level, by working on questions such as: what is tech’s conceptual history? What are the common assumptions? What opportunities arise when we relinquish these assumptions? What is genuinely new about technological developments? How can tech be treated as a force which introduces and disrupts the ways we think and live? If you are interested in this I would urge you to look at the website, get in touch, or just stay tuned for more.
I’m only a month into the fellowship and have found it’s changed my thinking considerably - so far we have studied the histories (from classical Greece to 20th-century thinkers) and implications for some of the major concepts which define our lives today. We started with the development of conceptual thinking in itself, then moved to ‘the human’, ‘nature’, and we’ll finish off with ‘technology’ in December.
Now you might be thinking '“that sounds like an interesting exercise but what’s the point?” (or at least that’s what I’ll project onto you if that’s okay). I really appreciate the vagueness and abstraction of these sorts of fundamental questions from the very pressing issues at hand such as the climate crisis, algorithmic bias, political polarisation, the perceived erosion of democracy and [INSERT YOUR FAVOURITE DYSTOPIAN CHARACTERISTIC HERE].
I certainly have wondered about this approach too, largely around the simple question of whether there is space in the current paradigm for an institution like ToftH. From my perspective, it seems like a big challenge to question and develop the fundamental philosophies of technology and actually have them willingly implemented by organisations with so much institutional reputation (and capital) at stake. But, based on the traction, commitment and conversations I’ve had so far at ToftH, I’m cautiously optimistic - I look forward to being able to share more specifics soon!
From sewage to cybersecurity
One compelling perspective to ground this optimism is from Patrick Collison (co-founder of Stripe) in a recent interview with Ezra Klein. They discuss that what we perceive to be the most significant periods of progress (e.g. industrial revolution) was initially chaotic and worsened quality of life. James Plunkett (tech policy expert and author) extends on this from a historical policy perspective to suggest that the responses to this chaos are where the long-term social benefits came from. In the case of the industrial revolution, what started out with child labour and human waste being thrown out into the street evolved into pioneering experiments in state schools, national healthcare and public sewage systems. It's unclear what our current equivalent stage is in the digital revolution but I certainly think that there is enough ‘digital sewage’ building up for us to realise that serious efforts must be made to create mitigating systems.
I can only play a small role in this but hope that by dedicating time and effort alongside the other excellent ToftH fellows and researchers this can promote a movement which integrates itself into the wider tech industry and ultimately the minds of the public when they come to think about technology.