The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

Speculations on the Future of the Scientific Method

The following essay was published 20 years ago (January, 2006) on my blog The Technium. I edited the intro here, but the speculations are basically unchanged.

What is Technology?

Chapter 3 of Technological Metamodernism

The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, Second Edition

“In an age in which the inexhaustible power of scientific technology makes all things possible, it remains to be seen where we will draw the line, where we will be able to say, here are possibilities that wisdom suggest we avoid.” First published to great acclaim in 1988, Langdon Winner’s groundbreaking exploration of the political, social, and philosophical implications of technology is timelier than ever. He demonstrates that choices about the kinds of technical systems we build and use are actually choices about who we want to be and what kind of world we want to create—technical decisions are political decisions, and they involve profound choices about power, liberty, order, and justice. A seminal text in the history and philosophy of science, this new edition includes a new chapter, preface, and postscript by the author.

Care at the Edge of Automation – Topos Institute

Technologies don’t just solve problems, they change us. We invent technologies, and they invent us in turn, shaping our lives and worlds. This is the phenomenon that Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, in Understanding Computers and Cognition (1986), called “ontological design.” It matters now more than ever—along with a second lesson they saw clearly. Technological research is always guided (and sometimes misguided) by deep ontological assumptions about, e.g., the nature of cognition, agency, and communication. If we are to create technologies that truly serve human flourishing and care, we must bring these hidden assumptions into the open and question them at their roots.

Technological parables and iconic illustrations: American technocracy and the rhetoric of the technological fix

This paper traces the role of American technocrats in popularizing the notion later dubbed the ‘technological fix’. Channeled by their long-term ‘chief’, Howard Scott, their claim was that technolo...

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transform…

Has technological innovation lost the plot? An interview with AI ethicist Dr. Shannon Vallor | Chicago Policy Review

Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also appointed in Philosophy. Professor Vallor’s research explores how new technologies, especially AI, robotics, and data science, reshape human moral character, habits, and practices. She is […]

Technology is a Siren Song

Orangutan thinking This started with a question I asked myself: How do our minds change when we can receive a plausible, informed, and convincing answe...

Technoableism

Technoableism is a belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for. It’s a classic form of ableism—bias against disabled people, bias in favor of nondisabled ways of life. Technoableism is the use of technologies to reassert those biases, often under the guise of empowerment.

The Folly of Technological Solutionism: An Interview with Evgeny Morozov - Public Books

Evgeny Morozov, a former denizen of the technology world, gained notoriety as a skeptic of that world with his 2010 book The Net Delusion, in which he argued that technology enthusiasts or “cyber ...

Taking on the Technosphere: A Kitchen Debate

In his original writings on the technosphere from the early 2010s, Peter Haff identified its existence as a grand metabolizing system. Back in early 2016, spurred on by the preparation for HKW’s Anthropocene Campus: The Technosphere Issue, a vehement debate sprang up in the home of science and technology scholars Gabrielle Hecht and Paul N. Edwards: How valid is Haff’s approach? What is its overall reality? And what is its heuristic purpose? In this republication of their dispute, you, the reader, can engage alongside Hecht and Edwards in the ongoing question of whether the concept of the technosphere is indeed “a useful tool,” “silverware,” or “a barren gadget” in understanding the current and future condition of planet Earth.

The 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Real World of Technology"

Technology has always been a part of human existence. Today though, says the experimental physicist, Ursula M. Franklin, technology has large-scale effects on culture itself. Ursula Franklin is an experimental physicist, University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, a former board member of the National Research Council and the Science Council of Canada, and a companion of the Order...

In Tech We Trust - Second Renaissance

The god-like authority of technology in the modern age – and what it means to set a wiser course

AI as Normal Technology

A new paper that we will expand into our next book