Why our values should drive our technology choices

How technology evolves

As individuals, we have many different interests in technology. Some are interested in technology itself, but most are interested in the impact technology could have. These interests are often competing, and sometimes downright conflicting. Here is a simplified overview:

the customer is looking for an affordable solution to a given problem, whereas the designer seeks to improve a given product;
the innovator strives to demonstrate that her idea will work, while the investor is keen on the return on his investment;
the corporate manager is committed to increasing his company’s revenue and market share, whereas the regulator focuses on questions of
the citizen wants to maximise her freedoms and have her rights protected, while the politician tries to balance all the aforementioned interests in devising policies for the benefit of all.

This massive entanglement of interests includes technological ideas, economic and business interests, societal needs, and political considerations. Most of us, most of the time, pursue several of those interests in parallel: certainly as customers and citizens, but also as individuals and members of communities that affect our thinking and the choices we make.

None of these considerations are predetermined, nor are the resulting choices and decisions. Therefore, the collective outcome cannot be predicted. We cannot pre-state the developmental path of any technology. However, it would be hare-brained to conclude that technology follows a path of its own or that we have no influence on technology at all. Quite to the contrary, we all influence technology development, only, this influence is rarely direct or immediately visible. The complexity researcher W. Brian Arthur summarised our multi-faceted relationship with technology as follows: “Technology areas co-evolve together with society in a process of mutual adaptation.”

In other words, our choices today affect the trajectory of a given technology’s further development. That development will in turn present new opportunities and challenges that we will respond to, and this response will influence the further evolution of that technology in an open-ended process.

Take the steam engine for example. This machine marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when it was first introduced to pump water from coalmines. That successful application triggered further imagination, as developers and users alike came to look for other problems a steam engine could solve. Those considerations led to the mechanisation of agriculture and manufacturing, so that the steam engine would ultimately replace horse and oxen as humankind’s primary power sources. The story did not end there. Railroads, factories, work contracts, and labour unions all emerged in response to that new technology. None of these long-term impacts were foreseeable, intended, or planned. Rather, they were the result of mutual influencing of technology and society.

Shaping technology

Any attempt at shaping the trajectory of a given technology faces a genuine dilemma between today’s knowledge about the future and the available means to affect or change that future. David Collingridge was the first to frame the major challenge of policy making on emerging technologies: “When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen ; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult and time consuming.”

We are literally caught between a rock and a hard place. For a nascent technology, we cannot know all its future applications, nor can we anticipate all its future impacts. Still, at this time, we can exert some control over its development path. In the future, when that technology is mature, we see its full impact. We can thus define what we would like to change. Alas, because the technology is already in the market, broadly distributed and widely used at that time, our means of control are very limited.

We are struggling with a fundamental characteristic of technology development: the principle uncertainty inherent to an open-ended process without a knowable end-state. We cannot know in advance the future target for today’s policy intervention. But what can we actually do? Would it not be a fair choice to accept the limits of our knowledge, to simply “let things run their due course”?