Tech as ugly regress not progress

What if new technologies are breaking us?

It is “humanity’s ability to ask what is suitable – what is good, what is bad, what is progress, what is regress – that separates it from other species.”

In Here be monsters: Is technology reducing our humanity? (or see here) author Richard King urges the reader to commit to a bold ambition for a more democratic technological future.

Writer Andrew Hamilton identifies where the text is particularly valuable:

King names three constitutive qualities of human identity that have developed over millions of years of evolution and are now under threat from unconsidered technological development. They are, first, the human sociality that is expressed through our physical presence to one another. This is threatened by the presence at a distance inherent in digital and information technology.

The second quality is embodiment, threatened in our culture by the prevailing image of the world and human beings as machines that are reducible to their smallest parts. This encourages the view that human nature is provisional and alterable. Nanotechnology and genetic engineering make it possible to alter humanity and its gene pool from within, leading to unpredictable consequences for the human future. 

The third quality is agency, embodied in the nature of human beings as tool makers. It is associated with a self-reflective as well as instrumental intelligence. The developments in human technology dissociate human beings from their tool making and risk making them the objects of technology and not its masters.

In response, King affirms the value of technology but insists that it must be subject to conversation in society about its purpose and its human consequences. This is difficult in a culture that establishes a gulf between our brains and our bodies. It sees our brains as subjects of human development and our bodies as its objects. A neo-liberal economic culture with its focus on individual choice then further reduces the worth of human beings to their competitive achievement.

And an intellectual culture that restricts valid questions about the world to ‘how’ questions leaves no room to ask why and to what benefit technological developments should be allowed. It leads to utilitarian ethics and leaves little basis for conversation based on respect for each person’s value as a bodily human being with an active and self-aware intelligence.

The immediate task for us is to become alert to the degree the philosophical concepts dominating this tech age are shaping and reshaping the human being and large swathes of the world not all as yet, and to ask fierce and urgent questions, re-purposing Dylan Thomas's urging: Do not go gentle into the night. Key questions relate to how the new tools are using us, and how we must act to regain our essential humanity.

 King, an Australian author, critic and poet, has this message:

From genetic engineering to Chat GPT, from cybersex to cyberwar, and from mood-altering pharmaceuticals to the widespread automation of work, new technologies are rewriting the terms of our existence. We celebrate this as ‘progress’ but often these developments are in line with the priorities of power and profit. The bright young things of Silicon Valley celebrate their ability to ‘move fast and break things’. But what if new technologies are breaking us?

As science, technology and capitalism fuse ... it is not enough to let the market decide which technologies are good for us. We need to ask what we want from technology. And the question of what we want is a question about who we are. 

And we won't know the answer to that unless we are open to recognising our God-given dignity. 

Ω See also previous post:

Vision Pro device threatens more isolation

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