Generally, technologists, including myself, have tended to assert that technology is neutral. What we do with it determines whether it’s good or bad. This has been convenient for both technologists and companies that sell technology, for such an assertion brooks no argument. It absolves us of any moral responsibility for what we invent.
I am now much less convinced by this argument and believe that the answer to the question ‘Is technology neutral?’ is rather more nuanced. While it’s true that we can do both good and bad things with technology, the important question isn’t whether technology is moral but rather whether its very existence and design influence human behavior.
As I argue in later chapters, technology is an artefact that we create and as such has no moral agency. Nor should we accord it any. On this basis it cannot be moral. Yet it’s clear from history that it has had a profound impact on society and individuals. The information age of the late twentieth century has ushered in changes at an unprecedented pace in human history. Society has had no time to pause and consider the impact of the internet, social media, cryptocurrency, and even less AI, on humanity.
To Print or Not to Print?
The invention of the printing press provides an early example of the different ways in which people thought of disruptive technology. Johannes Gutenberg, who invented the printing press in Europe in the 1430s, met strong opposition from some who saw their work being replaced. Johannes Trithemius, an influential German Benedictine abbot, cryptographer and occultist, argued for the moral supremacy of handwriting over mechanical printing in a tract written in 1492:
He who gives up copying because of the invention of printing is no genuine friend of Holy Scripture. He sees only what is and contributes nothing to the edification of future generations. But we beloved brothers shall keep in mind the reward of this sacred occupation and not slacken our efforts, even if we were to own many thousands of books. Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in spelling and appearance. The simple reason is that copying by hand involves more diligence and industry.[1]
1. J. Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes (De laude scriptorum), trans. R. Behrendt (Lawrence, Kans.: Coronado Press, 1974), p. 475, retrieved on 6 September 2019 from <http:// williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/TrithemiusScribes.pdf>.
Trithemius died in 1516, a year before Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg, leading to the Reformation and eventually the printing of the Bible in the common language of the people. Perhaps Trithemius was concerned about monks losing their jobs, but in any event he did not see the printing press as morally neutral!
Changing Culture
Political theorist Langdon Winner, Thomas Phelan Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, made this observation in 1986, in his study of technology out of control:
If the experience of modern society shows us anything, however, it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity, but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning. The introduction of a robot to an industrial workplace not only increases productivity but often radically changes the process of production, redefining what work means in that setting. When a sophisticated new technique or instrument is adopted in medical practice, it transforms not only what doctors do but also the ways people think about health, sickness and medical care. Widespread alterations of this kind in techniques of communication, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and the like are largely what distinguishes our times from early periods of human history.[2]
2. L. Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 7.
If technology does influence us individually and we see it also influencing our society, then isn’t the answer just to choose not to use those technologies that we consider to have harmful effects? This brings us back to the neutrality argument that says it’s what we do with it that counts. Reflecting on the role that television plays in society and how much time Americans spend watching it, Winner suggests it’s no longer as simple as just choosing to turn it off:
Those who wish to reassert freedom of choice in the matter sometimes observe, you can always turn off your TV. In a trivial sense that is true . . . But given how central television has become to the content of everyday life, how it has become the accustomed topic of conversation at workplaces, schools, and other social gatherings, it is apparent that television is a phenomenon that, in the larger sense, cannot be ‘turned off ’ at all. Deeply insinuated into people’s perceptions, thoughts, and behaviour, it has become an indelible part of modern culture.[3]
3. Ibid., p. 12.
The reality is that the availability of technology itself has a profound influence on individuals and society. Put a gun in your hand and the balance of power changes. It now becomes so much easier to kill someone, as the spate of shootings in the USA and elsewhere powerfully illustrates. Clearly, the perpetrators were disturbed, criminals or terrorists and their intention was to do bad things with the weapons. The fact is, however, that access to powerful weapons gave them more options for evil.
Weapons are created for a purpose: to kill people. And while we might see that as positive in the context of winning a just war, the manufacturers are less concerned with who uses weapons and how they’re used than with sales. Guns fall into the hands of terrorists, criminals and juveniles, even innocents who accidentally set off a gun and kill or maim a family member or friend. Even if we’re to concede that weapons are needed as a deterrent and are an important component of winning a just war and ensuring peace, ethical questions still surround their use, such as: whose peace and what’s a just war?
This piece of technology isn’t neutral in its influence: it was designed to take life, and that means that it comes laden with the values and world view of its creators and manufacturers. I could use a gun as an effective doorstop or hang it in a glass case to look at, but that’s not what it was made for.
The printing press is an early example of the way in which whole societies and cultures both in Europe and Asia were shaped through the influence of the printed word. The ability to get the message out to many people, previously not feasible with handwriting, enabled many in Europe to hear of Luther’s theses and concerns about the Catholic Church. Yet some of the violence that resulted was not the outcome Luther desired.
The printing press eventually allowed ordinary people to read the Bible in their own language instead of its being the preserve of the educated priest, who could read Latin. That was surely a good outcome!
Take another example of how technology changes culture. Monks first rang bells and then used early developments of the mechanical clock at the beginning of the fourteenth century to enable them to keep the canonical course of their liturgy. The development of timekeeping, both the habit and the devices that could mark out the passage of time, eventually revolutionized European economies, leading to the Industrial Revolution. As David Landes puts it in his influential book Revolution in Time, ‘Punctuality comes from within, not from without. It is the mechanical clock that made possible, for better or worse, a civilization attentive to the passage of time, hence to productivity and performance.’[4]
4. D. S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 7.
Technology expands the possibilities available to us and in so doing immediately offers us choices – choices that humans are sometimes bad at making. We could choose to do the right thing but sin crouches at the door.
A Hidden Addiction
While not going so far as to talk about sin, philosopher David Morrow argues that for two reasons technology isn’t value neutral. Either it induces short-sighted behavior, rather than valuing future benefits, or it creates or exacerbates collective behavior problems.[5] For most, instant gratification trumps doing something that will bear fruit later. So, with the best will in the world, we might prefer to spend an hour online rather than spend the time practicing the instrument we’ve been wanting to learn for years, or doing the boring chores that await!
5. D. R. Morrow, ‘When Technologies Make Good People Do Bad Things: Another Argument Against the Value-Neutrality of Technologies’, Science and Engineering Ethics 20 (2) (2013), pp. 329–343.
Morrow cites overfishing as an example of where technology creates a ‘collective behavior problem’. Although there are rules in place, the tendency is for selfish accumulation at the expense of others seeking to fish in the same waters. Overfishing occurs because of the efficiency with which factory ships operate. It would be an unlikely problem if fishermen were just using a fishing rod.
While technology is neutral, in the sense that an artefact possesses no inherent values or moral agency, there cannot be a neutral reaction to its use, especially in the case of what we might call ‘digital technology’. This is because it has been designed by people with values and a world view that shape its purpose and functionality.
In the case of AI, the algorithms require data to learn how to pattern-match and this can exacerbate the influence of the creator because, as we’ll see later, this data is often biased, sometimes by race or gender.
Google Duplex is a research and design project to allow people to ask a digital assistant to make appointments or book restaurants by itself. When you listen to sales talks and techies talking excitedly about this and other products, such as the iPhone, the talk is all about making life better, more convenient. But at what cost and who really benefits? My point is that while the techies may genuinely be excited about their inventions, the corporations who pay them have profits, not human benevolence, in mind.
Because that’s what drives income from their advertisers, the big companies behind AI have one goal in mind: increasing traffic and usage of their platforms. The more people become addicted to their convenient digital assistants, the greater the revenue these companies make, with most people unaware of how they’re being exploited.
While the technology may offer convenience, it has been designed thus and to create addiction for the purpose not of making one’s life easier but of driving profits. One might argue, ‘What’s wrong with that? Don’t all products in a free market work in that way?’ We buy something because it offers us a benefit, and naturally the company that sold it to us profits. The distinction here is that some products, some technologies, appear to do that, but are by their design exploiting our vulnerabilities, influencing us as individuals and as a society in ways that are diminishing what it means to be human. A bread toaster is convenient and useful in the kitchen, but it hardly affects what it means to be a human being, except when we burn our fingers trying to extract the toast!
My thesis, then, is that technology isn’t neutral in its effect on people for two reasons. The first is that technology is designed and sold by people for a purpose, and that purpose is laden with values and a world view. Rarely are these values purely benign, because profits are needed to fund research. Profits come from products that people want to buy, or from third parties such as advertisers, when products or services are offered for free, as Facebook and Google do.
The second reason that technology isn’t neutral in its effect is that users are fallible people and products are designed to offer us more possibilities. They suck us in by exploiting human weakness, the vices such as greed, vanity, lust, insecurity and anger. A consequence of the impact of technology on individuals is that culture is eventually shaped by it as more and more are drawn in. The world has never before experienced such a rapid shaping of cultures due to the accelerating development of digital technologies such as the internet and AI.
New Is Better than Old
Behind the seduction of digital technology and AI is the Enlightenment idea that progress is good and progress is driven by science and technology. The Age of Enlightenment began in eighteenth-century Europe and gradually spread around the world, fueling the Industrial Revolution and the free-market economies of the West. Human reason was seen as the source of knowledge, and progress would be achieved through scientific discovery and empiricism. French philosophers championed the idea of individual liberty and the separation of the state from religion.
Today science and technology are widely seen as the drivers of progress that will allow humanity to flourish. These ideas are embedded in much of our thinking and behavior regarding new technology. New is better than old – we’ve all watched the queues for the latest iPhone, every time hailed as ‘the best iPhone we’ve produced’.
It’s not surprising therefore that there’s an assumption that AI technology is good, that it will make our lives easier and more comfortable, and that it will enable humanity to flourish. Businesses strive for greater efficiencies, and we become people driven by what’s convenient, without ever asking what we’re losing and what this technology is doing to us.
Taken to its extreme, the transhumanist philosophy that many leaders of hi-tech companies subscribe to is nothing less than the transformation of the human condition through technology, including AI. Followers of this philosophy see the potential for humanity to be transformed into different beings, posthumans, with greater abilities than mere humans, even potentially defying death through genetic engineering, drug therapy or uploading one’s brain.
Losing Consciousness
An assumption that technology represents progress and that progress must be good has dulled our consciousness of whether it’s right. We engage with social media, the internet, online shopping and the latest gadgets without ever pausing to think about what it may be doing to the image of God in us, or how it may be changing our behavior and relationships.
The fast pace of change is making us breathless and restless for the next new thing, so that we expect to move from job to job and even relationship to relationship, looking for something new, something better, something that will leave us more fulfilled. Churches feel the need to innovate so as not to seem old and stale, to attract the younger trendy set who are constantly on the move. Mission embraces social media and other digital technologies without stopping to think about the values being supported or the data being farmed. Church leaders tweet their thoughts to millions and publishers want their articles liked and the pithy quote retweeted.
We need to step back, pause and regain consciousness of what’s happening around us. Not necessarily to discard new technology, but rather to engage it with informed minds – minds that have a clear view of whether it helps or hinders our walk with God, our relationships with others and our desire to become more like Christ.
How does technology, AI as we now know it and as it will develop in the next few decades, influence our image bearing as people made in God’s image? In order to help us answer this question we need to remind ourselves of all that it means to be made in his image.
