Not So Fast

Maybe Let's Be More Precise In our Criticism of Technology

The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. - George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, 1946

I jumped on a plane with five other guys last week and flew to a distant city where we attended a two-day conference. During the conference, speakers addressed a variety of questions related to living as Christians in the midst of an adversarial culture. The conference, which I have attended for several years now, really punches above its weight in terms of the quality and notoriety of the speakers it is able to attract. It is also very small as conferences go - no more than 350 attendees - so those who attend are often able to engage the speakers in meaningful conversations between sessions. Such conversations, with people whose books you have read and benefited from, are fun and one of the reasons I have attended for several years.

Because of the subject matter being addressed at the conference, you might not be surprised to learn that modern technology was hauled out by the various speakers to take a beating. The effects of digital technology in particular, and artificial intelligence most especially, were roundly condemned.

But something about hearing the critique of all things technological, from so many different speakers at once, started to raise some questions in my mind. I had already been pondering similar questions due to some of my Substack reading along similar lines. There is a sub-culture on Substack that does a lot of writing and thinking about how to mitigate the increasingly negative effects of numerous different technologies. I am in sympathy with these concerns. Indeed, I am no stranger to writing about them myself. I am a follower of multiple Substacks which are prone to cast a gimlet eye in the general direction of technology. For the most part I tend to agree with their critiques and I applaud their creative suggestions of ways to blunt the negative effects of an intensely online life.

But over time I have found myself slowly becoming uncomfortable with at least two things. First, I have a growing discomfort with the lack of specificity that often attends these critiques. Very often the specific technology which is the source of actual concern remains unclear. At the conference I attended last week, “digital technology” and “artificial intelligence” were much maligned. But, in practical ways, the terms “digital technology” and “artificial intelligence” are so over-broad and vague that any specific meaning has to be filled in by the listener. Pacemakers and heart-lung machines are “digital technologies”. So are automotive engines and MRI machines. I myself am only alive today because of “digital technology”. I’m confident the speakers at the conference didn’t have these “digital technologies” in mind. They were, I’m pretty sure, generally referring to attention-capturing and/or digital surveillance technologies. But they did not precisely specify what they were referring to.

With similar fluidity, AI can reasonably be expected to do everything from tell bald-faced lies to improve early cancer detection. Under such a range of possibilities, should we really assert that AI as a technology is bad? Or is it rather the case that there are certain applications of AI which are bad? Perhaps not all applications of the mathematical core of AI are bad but the use of it in dehumanizing ways is the thing we object to? (e.g. Providing AI “girlfriends”.)

If we really want to maximize discernment, we need to go out of our way to avoid the use of slovenly language. I don’t think I’m being pedantic here. It will be a mistake if our objections to specific applications of technology cause us to spiritualize, or make a virtue of, technological aversion in general.

In the interest of full disclosure, I myself am very involved in creating new technology. I have been for 40 years, and even now I wake up most days and write code. I am a named inventor on dozens of patents and have filed multiple patent applications this year alone. But while I work in the field of technology, I am not blind to its problems. Neither do I confine myself only to criticism. I have previously offered my own thoughts on how to have more discernment in this area.

The lack of specificity being employed by many, who reasonably intuit that something is amiss with technology, has the effect of leaving the range of problematic applications excessively broad and ill-defined. An affirmative framework for differentiating between humane and inhumane applications is sorely needed. I’m afraid the lack of such a framework may leave listeners/readers tempted to indiscriminately throw all technologies under the bus.

I’ll close with one other observation. I suspect we all find it easier to blame technology than to blame people. Unfortunately, technology on its own is morally inert. It is the application of technology by foolish or malevolent people that is the source of our actual concerns. (e.g. The use of intermittent rewards is not inherent to social media as a technology. Those companies are choosing that technique in order to manipulate the attention of their users.) In addition to being more precise regarding offending technologies, we should probably become much more critical of the offending technologists themselves. But even in this there can be challenges that warrant caution. It is often the case, commonplace even, for technologies developed by one person or company to be put to use by other entities in ways never anticipated by the original developer(s). To cite just one example, it is likely that the software developers who originally designed the network protocols, on which the internet runs, did not have in mind the goal of facilitating an explosion of pornography. But that is what has happened. Nevertheless, the same network protocols being exploited by pornographers are also saving lives, even as I am writing this post, among the victims of hurricane Helene.

There is plenty to criticize about our current technology milieu, but “digital technology” and “AI” are not ipso facto bad. Taking less of a broad-brush approach to dismissing technology - becoming more precise with our critique - would probably improve the quality of our thinking and allow us to be more discerning along the way.

Just a thought.