1

They automated my job and put me out of work.

Jobs Cartoon

2

I said to myself, I’d better get some skills.

Jobs Cartoon

3

So I went back to school forsome high-tech retraining.

Jobs Cartoon

4

Now I have a good job writingsoftware that puts other people out of work...

Buffalo

Jobs Cartoon

5 Buffalo

They automated my job andput me out of work. I said tomyself, I’d better get some skills, so I went back to school.......

Jobs Cartoon

6 Buffalo

Now I have a good job.....

Jobs Cartoon

7

Who is in charge?

“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

Winston Churchill.

“Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and becomes a host, and then a master?”

The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran

8

TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM

9

Questions

Why did the development of computing work out like it did?

Is technological development an autonomous process? What role do market forces play in the development of

technology? What role does society play in shaping technology? Is technology neutral? How should one study the impact of IT on society?

10

MAIN READING

The Social Shaping of Technology. D. McKenzie, J. Wajcam (eds), Open University Press, 1985. S-LEN 600 M5 i) Introductory Essay ii) Do Artifacts Have Politics?

Other Sources [1] Rosenberg, Chapter 3. [2] Does Technology Drive History?

M Smith & L Marx (Eds). MIT Press, Cambridge, 1994. ARTS 301.24.N47 [3] Civilizing Cyber Space. S Miller. Addision-Wesley 1996. (Behind

Counter). [4] Technological or Media Determinism. Daniel Chandler.

http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/tecdet.html [5] Information Society Ireland Strategy for Action. Report from the Irish

Government’s Information Society Steering Committee. http://www.infosocomm.ie

11

TECHNOLOGY

3 levels of meaning.

1. Artifacts (e.g. a hammer, a PC.)

2. Human activities that utilise artifacts, (e.g. steel making, electronic banking).

3. The knowledge to design, repair, create etc. technology as defined in 1 & 2.

12

SCIENCE

TECHNOLOGY

The Technical Development Process

Science discovers the laws of nature.

Technologists apply science to give new technological devices.

The process is autonomous.

13

SCIENCE

TECHNOLOGY

SOCIETY

Technological Determinism A commonly held view which says that

technical development is an autonomous technical change causes social change.

Of course other factors also shape society but it can be argued that technology is the most important factor shaping society.

14

The Technological Imperative

“Because a particular technology means that we can do something then this action either ought to, must or inevitably will, be taken.” Ozbekhan quoted in [Chandler].

15

Examples

The steam engine => Industrial Revolution.

E = MC2 => Hiroshima.

The stirrup => feudal society.

“Man is a tool using animal”, Benjamin Franklin.

16

Dolly the sheep => ????

17

Ramifications of Determinist Viewpoint

Carry out Impact Studies.

The question to be answered is

“How can society best adapt to changing technology?”

18

APPLIED TO IT

Turing => ENIAC => Mainframes => PCs

A logical progression. With transistors, semi-conductors, von Neumann and others helping out along the way.

Impact automation & work, networks & globalistion etc. etc. etc.

are also logical progressions.

19

Examples Fast forward 20 minutes into the future. You are awakened by your

TV - a wide screen on the wall like a large painting - which reels off a list of appointments and teleconferences. Meanwhile downstairs your son is downloading information from a database for a school project via another TV and your daughter is playing the latest video game, also called up on a flatbed TV screen....... [Irish Times]

“Early in the next millenium your right and left cuff links or earrings may communicate with each other by low orbiting earth satellites and have more computing power than your present PC. Your telephone won’t ring indiscriminately; it will receive, sort, and perhaps respond to your incoming calls like a well trained English butler”.

Being Digital. N. Negroponte,1995.

20

The Mighty Micro

“This book is about the future….it is a future which will involve a transformation of world society at all kinds of levels….a future which is largely moulded by a single technology… the computer”.

The Mighty Micro, C. Evans, 1979.

21

Forbairt

Ireland: the digital age, the Internet A report commissioned by Forbairt.

http://www.forbairt.ie/internet.html

“The Digital Age will be a period of dramatic and profound change. It will be driven by the rapid advances in computing power, in telecommunications networks, and in the applications software. It will bring changes in society such as:…..” p 1

22

Information Society IrelandStrategy for Action

Report from the Government’s Information Society Steering Committee.

http://www.isc.ie

23

Information Society Ireland

““Life and work are dramatically altered by the use of information and communications technology”. p3

“Information and communications technologies (ICTs) will transform Ireland's economy and society over the next few years. This report sets out a strategy to prepare Ireland for this future, called the Information Society - a society in which advanced technologies are used to improve the living and working conditions of all our citizens.” piii

“For Ireland's workforce, the opportunities of the Information Society will include more fulfilling jobs using advanced technologies and a net increase in employment.” p iv

24

ISI Goals

“Goals - In light of the assessment of Ireland's preparedness, the following goals are essential:

1. To ensure popular support for, and participation in, a future Information Society in order to secure the full benefits for all citizens and enterprises in every part of the country.

2. To have an advanced telecommunications infrastructure capable of supporting enterprise and citizen (community) demands in the Information Society.

3. To ensure that educational and training practices incorporate the appropriate use of information and communications technologies in order to enable people to benefit fully from the Information Society both educationally and vocationally.

4. To ensure that Irish enterprises adopt and use information and communications technologies and that they participate successfully in key growth markets in the Information Society.

5. To deploy information and communications technologies in government for the provision of citizen-centred services and to develop and implement policies that support the transition to the Information Society.” p-v

25

The Road Ahead

“This report highlights the pace and widespread implications of change arising from advanced technologies. Such speed demands that Ireland act quickly and decisively.” p xiv

26

Related Theories

Climatic determinism Genetic determinism

Nature v’s nurture debate Linguistic Determinism

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - our thinking is determined by language.

Inuit words for snow. The “empty oil tanker”. Describing quantum mechanics.

Media Determinism McLuhan “The media is the message!”

27

Other Views

28

Society A

Society B Society C

NewTechnology

Adopted

Not Adopted

IMPACT IS NOT SO SIMPLE

It can be argued that the characteristics of a society play a major part in deciding which technologies are adopted Japan train tickets, washing machines, bank ATMs, birth

control. Chinese gunpowder but no guns.

29

Society A

Society B Society C

NewTechnology

Adopted

Not Adopted

Impact

Impact

Different Effects

the same technology can have different effects in different situations c.f. the relationship between automation and

employment in Japan and the West. London v’s LA.

30

Understanding Society

To analyze the effects a technology will have on a society one must have a good model of how that society works.

“...security systems in the future can be implemented into the home, the neighborhood and then the whole town can be linked into the same security system. If this was so, then crime could become a thing of the past. Every street corner would have a video camera....” [BA6 Essay]

Beware of quick technological fixes.

31

Technology

Science

What Shapes Technology

Q. What Has Shaped The Technology That Is Shaping Society?

A. Science.

32

Technology

Science

Society

BUT

Society shapes science. Technology shapes science.

33

Science and Technology

Rate of scientific progress depends on society. c.f. The Renaissance

Models and images used in scientific theory are often drawn from the wider society. Newton and the 7 colours of the spectrum.

Science and Technology have not always been so closely linked.

Technology helps shape science IT in scientific research.

34

Technology 3

Technology2

Technology 1

Technology Shapes Technology

Progress is incremental and inevitable. Newton “if I have seen farther it is because I have stood

upon the shoulders of great men”. “Given the boat and the steam engine is not the steam boat

inevitable”. Ogburn 1922.

35

Other Candidate Shapers

Technological Paradigms A successful model being used as the basis for future

work, e.g. V2 rockets. The set of beliefs, values and techniques shared by

members of a given scientific community. Technological Systems

Technologies do not come stand alone but as parts of bigger systems.

A washing machine needs electricity, water and drainage so these other technological systems will shape washing machine technology.

36

Economic Shaping of Technology

Technological Push v’s Demand Pull. To what extent are technological developments targeted at

producing economic benefits. Edison and the light bulb. Fuel efficiency in cars only became a major issue after

the Oil Crisis. The first IBM PCs had to sell for $3,000 Software upgrades.

Technological development is influenced and shaped by economic considerations.

37

Social Shaping

If one accepts economic shaping of technology then it is a short step to accept the idea of social shaping in the widest sense.

“Economic Laws are not universal but are specific to particular forms of society”. Marx.

Technology can be deployed to in different ways to meet different social needs. e.g. Machine tools example.

State controlled shaping of technology military Japanese cars

Gender as a shaping force. The baby’s feeding bottle as (ignored) revolutionary technology.

38

DIFFERENT QUESTIONS

If one rejects technological determinism then other questions become possible.

“How can society best adapt to changing technology?”

becomes

“How can technology be developed to meet society’s needs”?

39

Neutral Technology

The social shaping and other viewpoints argue that technology is neutral, all that matters is how society chooses how to use them.

Winner points out that technology can be consciously (or unconsciously) applied to achieve certain affects. Robert Moses and the road system in New York. Disabled access to buildings and public transport.

Asks can technologies actually require (or at least have a natural affinity for) certain social patterns. Railways required a nationwide hierarchical management

structure. Nuclear power and guarding waste/bomb material. [Do Artifacts Have Politics? Langdon Winner.

In “The Social Shaping of Technology”.]

40

Technical Constraints

Technology can have long term effects constraining the degrees of freedom of future generations. Rail and Road Networks. National Power Grid. The Information Super Highway!

“people make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please....they make it under circumstances ...transmitted from the past” Karl Marx.

41

Technological Autonomy

“The whole trend in technology has been to devise machines which are less and less under direct control”, Asimov. Chipped pebble..spear..fire and forget.. The internet!

“Technique has become autonomous; it has fashioned an omnivorous world which obeys its own laws and which has renounced all tradition”, Ellul. The technological society, 1954, English translation1964. Technique “the totality of methods rationally arrived at which and

having absolute efficiency (for a given state of development) in every field of human activity”.

42

Ellul’s Viewpoint

“The technological society requires men to be content with what they are required to like; for those who are not content, it provides distractions - escape into absorption with technically dominated media of popular culture and communication and the process is a natural one: every part of a technical civilisation responds to the social needs generated by the technique itself. Progress then consists in progressive de-humanisation - a busy pointless, and in the end, suicidal submission to technique. The essential point is that technique produces all this without a plan; no one wills it or arranges it to be so. Our technical civilisation does not result from a Machiavellian scheme. It is a response to ‘the laws of development’ or technique.”

Merton’s synopsis quoted in “Sleepers Awake”, Jones.

43

Henry Thoreau

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate..... After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important message...."

"...so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance.... Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which is already but too easy to arrive at….” From Walden by Henry Thoreau, 1818-1862.

44

Quo Vadis?

45

Bill Joyhttp://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

Part of the answer certainly lies in our attitude toward the new - in our bias toward instant familiarity and unquestioning acceptance. Accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology - pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once - but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control.

What was different in the 20th century? Certainly, the technologies underlying the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) - nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) - were powerful, and the weapons an enormous threat. But building nuclear weapons required, at least for a time, access to both rare - indeed, effectively unavailable - raw materials and highly protected information; biological and chemical weapons programs also tended to require large-scale activities.

The 21st-century technologies - genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) - are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

46

Bill Joy

But now, with the prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable. Having struggled my entire career to build reliable software systems, it seems to me more than likely that this future will not work out as well as some people may imagine. My personal experience suggests we tend to overestimate our design abilities.

Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn't we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution?

We are aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the now-unchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold financial incentives and competitive pressures.

This is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself - as well as to vast numbers of others.

47

The Making of the Atomic Bombby Richard Rhodes HL-102-874

In November 1945, three months after the atomic bombings, Oppenheimer stood firmly behind the scientific attitude, saying, "It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge and are willing to take the consequences."

Two years later, in 1948, Oppenheimer seemed to have reached another stage in his thinking, saying, "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge they cannot lose."