Unethical Innovation: On the Technocracy and Uneducated Engineers
Technologists push blindly forward with such pace that many of the problems that demand innovative solutions were produced by a previous innovation.
Technological innovation has become synonymous with progress throughout much of modern society. Technologies are created through the application of knowledge; thus, ironically unlike the act of knowledge creation, they produce tangible impacts — hence society’s present obsession — but it is simply naïve to assume that all innovations and improvements result in societal progress. This misconception stems from a poor interpretation of the reality that technologies regularly alter societal structures through the creation of new opportunities, but these opportunities are inescapably accompanied by new — largely unforeseen — problems. For a technological innovation to truly contribute to societal progress the collective benefits must outweigh the detriments. Although this may seem obvious, it is a reality lost on many.
Since the Industrial Revolution, we have been conditioned to associate improved machinery and technology with the forward march of progress. The conditioning has been so effective, that most technologies avoid holistic evaluation and regulation prior to implementation and until negative consequences are realized. Part of the lack of comprehensive analysis is derived from the inherent difficulty of assessing the impacts levied on society by new technologies, for humanity and novel inventions tend to interact in complex ways, and the impacts of innovations can reach far beyond the intended area of effect. The difficulty is exacerbated by society’s convolution of growth, technology, and progress, a distressing lack of educated engineers and technologists, and a consumer-driven approach to innovation. These aspects of modern society reflect a desperate need to adjust our approach to technology.
Society’s contemporary relationship with technology results from Enlightenment-era interpretations of humanity’s complicated development over the millennia since civilization first evolved. Homo sapiens’ unique abilities to make observations of the natural world, recognize patterns, and develop and utilize tools to take advantage of these patterns has led to the Anthropocene emerging as a period in the geologic record: potentially as recognizable as the Jurassic or Cretaceous. The Age of Humans would not have emerged — and humans almost surely would have gone extinct — without our ability to create and pass along knowledge as well as invent tools to compensate for our lack of naturally offensive and/or defensive adaptations. As Enlightenment-era thinkers reflected on the history of humanity they regarded it as an unbroken line of continual progress, and they viewed scientific knowledge and technological innovations as the key drivers. The technocratic view of science and technology has permeated society and created what Daniel Boorstin referred to as a “Republic of Technology”.
Since Boorstin wrote his book, the transcontinental Republic of Technology has grown dramatically, largely facilitated by the advent of the Internet. The Internet has enabled the rapid exchange of information and ideas across great distances and connected people from disparate parts of the world through shared experience. This innovation has the potential to bring people together, bridge divides, create a global community, and build support for societal progress. In a sense, this is how it has been utilized. Technocratic views have proliferated throughout the Internet and a global community has emerged that views increased and improved technology as the primary means for creating a better world for all humanity. The widespread nature of these views in the Republic of Technology simply reflects society’s twofold belief about technology: it is both the means to the end of expansion and growth of humanity and its own end.
I shall investigate that belief by breaking it down into its two parts and begin by interrogating technology as a means for expansion, then discussing how it became its own end. Through the application of knowledge, humanity has developed tools for asserting a dominance over the natural world and bending it to the will of humans. These tools are invented, produced, and improved with increasing rapidity due to changing perceptions of the relationship between humanity, nature, and technology. During and after the Enlightenment, Western Society came to collectively aspire to liberate its passions and desires through the development of technology for manipulating nature for the perceived benefit of humanity. This was the foundational belief that fueled the Industrial Revolution and continues to drive modern developments. This aspiration has created an environment where any expansion, growth, and/or development that leads to further opportunities and enhanced abilities to pursue passions as an inherent good.
With this has come the idea that resource scarcity is the root cause of humanity’s problems and by creating an abundance of resources society’s problems will naturally sort themselves out. This is a philosophy purported by many in the modern Tech industry to justify their rampant innovation. Peter Marquez[ testified before a United States Senate Subcommittee that resources derived from mining asteroids are needed to “increase the quality of life for all people living on Earth,” and Peter Diamandis supports this view in his book Abundance: The Future is Better than You Think, where he argues that through innovative technologies humanity can produce an abundance of resources and goods to satisfy the needs of humanity.
It is not that the technologists are neglecting their responsibility to society, but that they are not aware of methods to properly evaluate the impacts of their technologies.
This viewpoint neglects the reality of technology and resources: technology produces its own demand, and increased technology demands increased resource utilization. This creates a feedback loop resulting in the insatiability of humanity. Furthermore, resources and technology have never been equitably distributed throughout societies and, until systems are put in place to rectify the imbalanced distribution, increasing resource availability primarily benefits the privileged individuals in society. The idea of expanded availability of resources and opportunities serves as the primary justification for technology innovation. Simultaneously, in some circles, technologists and engineers have begun to view technology as its own end.
Throughout the last few decades, advanced technologies have found their way into schools, businesses, homes, and practically every aspect of human life in developed nations. The increased visibility of, and daily interaction with, technology has helped to spread the view that technology is essential to improving human quality of life. Beyond that, technology has become such a fundamental aspect of human life and society that many engineers no longer feel the need to provide justification for their developments, and they fail to evaluate the human element of their innovations, as a result.
It is not that the technologists are neglecting their responsibility to society, but that they are not aware of methods to properly evaluate the impacts of their technologies. As I stated previously, there is an alarming dearth of educated technologists. That is not to say that engineers have not completed some form of education. I fully acknowledge that nearly all engineers have graduated from 4-year universities with Bachelor’s of Science and/or Engineering degrees, many even have Master’s degrees or PhDs. However, these degrees — especially in The United States — primarily function as technical training programs; students are rarely able to escape their departments to be exposed to the humanities and/or liberal arts. This has created a field of hyperspecialists: individuals that are exceptional at solving the technical problems placed in front of them but unable to fully examine themselves, their work, or the world within which they operate. Our engineers are highly trained, but they lack the broad education necessary to properly evaluate the complex interactions between technology and society.
This results in the engineer approaching these interactions with a cold logic and a fundamental assumption that technology should result in societal progress if used correctly. They believe that their responsibility for their technology ends once it is released into society: any negative consequences that arise do so from the misuse of the technology, which is neither the responsibility of the technologist nor a failing of the technology. If given a broader education, technologists could begin to understand that the misuse of technology by humans is somewhat inevitable, and, as the creator, they are responsible for limiting the consequences of misuse and ensuring as much as possible the proper utilization of the technology. However, instead of having engineers shape their technology to conform with ethical standards — beyond a basic utilitarianism which I will discuss later — we force ethicists and moral philosophers to shape their ethics to combat runaway innovation.
Through [utilitarianism], technologists evaluate their developments based upon the impact that it has on the happiness of the consumer, whether directly or indirectly, and ignores the effect the innovation could have on the overall structure of society and the way groups of people interact.
Modern ethics is quite dissimilar from its ancient analog. In ancient ethics, man was subject to the laws of nature and obliged to obey them, but modern ethics has been shaped to believe that through technology we can make nature bend to our will. We have neglected to realize that our technologies, even though designed for short term goals, may have lasting impacts on society and Earth’s biosphere. Technologists no longer take the time to ask fundamental questions about the impact of our technologies on society and instead blindly march forward down the path of “progress:” leaving moral philosophers to rapidly evaluate the ethical implications of technologies as they are being integrated into society.
Technologists push blindly forward with such pace that many of the problems that demand innovative solutions were produced by a previous innovation. Currently, ethicists are forced to approach technologies in terms of how they can best be regulated to limit the impact on society and the natural world, and specialized disciplines (e.g. bioethics) have emerged to attempt to tackle the unique problems posed by highly complex sciences and technologies. The preferred approach would be for engineers to consciously evaluate the potential consequences of their technologies during the conceptual phases of development.
Seldom will an engineer reflect on the ethical implications of their projects, until they have entered the implementation stage. When evaluations are made, technologists are apt to take a utilitarian, consumer-driven approach. Coeckelberg regards this approach as an oversimplified moral philosophy focused on the maximization of individual happiness, and society is a collection of individuals equivalent to the sum of its parts. Through this framework, technologists evaluate their developments based upon the impact that it has on the happiness of the consumer, whether directly or indirectly, and ignores the effect the innovation could have on the overall structure of society and the way groups of people interact.
The result is that some technologies have negative impacts on society without being misused, rather they have been ill-conceived due to the limited scope from which the engineers approached their development. Take, for instance, the innovation of social media platforms. These platforms are design to utilize the internet, the hallmark of the Republic of Technology, to connect people from across the world based on their mutual interests and shared experiences. Companies like Facebook and Twitter have designed their algorithms to maximize the amount of content that you will “like,” because that correlates with a positive impact on their consumer. Therefore, they can consider their services as contributing positively to society.
However, society is not simply a collection of individual humans. Society is a network of groups. When the algorithms continue to show individual people content that they agree with, it serves to confirm biases and build larger divides between groups with contrasting views. The overall impact of these platforms is a decreased interaction and dialogue between groups and an increasing polarization of society. This has arisen because of the approach employed by the consumer-driven, hyperspecialist developers of social media companies and start-ups. Even many outside observers evaluate technologies with an individualist framework, but Coeckelberg argued that the methods of political philosophy should be applied to technology to perform comprehensive evaluations of their larger impacts.
The simplest starting point is for engineers and technologists to receive education in the liberal arts and humanities: to broaden their scope and increase their ability to contribute positively to public philosophy.
As I have described above, technologists and society presently struggle to adequately analyze the innovations that are produced. This comes from the technocrats’ perceived correlation between innovation and progress, a population of purely technically-trained engineers, and the lack of an appropriate system for evaluation technological impacts. The result is a society under assault from an unrelenting barrage of disruptive innovations. It has become seemingly impossible to fully evaluate the potential impact of a technology before another novel innovation is on the scene. The technological society no longer seeks to ask questions about the fundamental goal of emancipating the passions of humanity nor identify where all this “progress” is taking us.
Identifying the problematic interactions between engineers, technology, and society is only half the battle. The more important — and difficult — work is producing a solution to the problem, but that is a task for more than a single individual. As Calder suggested, the best hope for humanity is for a group of wise and knowledgeable individuals from a variety of technical and non-technical disciplines to come together in search of realistic solutions.
Fundamentally, there needs to be a paradigm shift that causes society to critically evaluate its dependence on technology and, ideally, aspire to something beyond the liberation of desire. The simplest starting point is for engineers and technologists to receive education in the liberal arts and humanities: to broaden their scope and increase their ability to contribute positively to public philosophy. The result will be, at worst, a maintenance of the status quo or, at best, a society that truly strives for a peace and equity by acknowledging the underlying problems that have plagued civilization for centuries and that technology might not necessarily be the solution to all of our problems.
