Technological tangles

Grant poses some challenging questions for those who argue that technology is neutral in the sense that it does not impose on us how it should be used. He points to the automobile: Weren’t we free to use it in any old way, or refuse? Grant finds that kind of naivete delusional, and characteristically modern, in the sense that it assumes the utter freedom of the human will.

He applies a similar line of thinking to the computer: “‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used’ asserts the essence of the modern view, which is that human ability freely determines what happens.” But the exaltation of the will implied in “does not impose” undermines the force of all “shoulds.” The “should” is only a masquerade that “cushions us from the full impact of the novelty it asks us to consider.” The full impact is evident when we penetrate past the technology itself to the anthropological assumption being made. If we are as masterful as the statement implies, then no “should” can stand in our way.

More broadly, “The coming to be of technology has required changes in what we think is good, what we think good is, how we conceive sanity and madness, justice and injustice, rationality and irrationality, beauty and ugliness . . . . the result of this is that when we are deliberating in any practical situation our judgment acts rather like a mirror, which throws back the very metaphysic of this technology which we are supposed to be deliberating about in detail. The outcome is inevitably a decision for further technological development.” Elsewhere, Grant makes this point concerning modern political life: Progress, defined in terms of technological advance, is the raison d’etre of modern political systems; as a result, political deliberation about the “limits” of technology (eg, should we clone humans?) is predetermined in favor of unlimited technical progress.