IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 68
responsibility: a minimal involvement in the democratic processes from members who are willing to
get informed, deliberate, decide, and take responsibility for their participation.
■ Perceptible impact of pro-social contributions:
minimal traceability of the impact of (collective)
actions (e.g., opinion expression and voting) onto
the organization and functioning of democratic institutions; members must trust this causality relation
(even if fine-grain traceability is impossible).
In turn, these mechanisms rely decisively on individual knowledge, relative diversity of opinion, responsibility, judgement, and participation, which are precisely lacking
when ideological movements are ignited.
Pathologically Disruptive Technology
Disruptive technologies are currently much sought-after
innovations, expected to improve social and market
arrangements. We contend that technology can also fundamentally disrupt such arrangements: by introducing
new pathologies, and/or by magnifying existing ones.
Disruptive technologies are currently
much sought-after innovations,
expected to improve social and
market arrangements.
Technology-Induced Pathologies
The disruptive effects that technology has on society
with respect to transparency, engagement, and action
effectiveness include: technological features eclipsing
human values, minimizing diversity, and rendering
critical thinking obsolete; unregulated, informal and
illegitimate technological power; and increased complexity obfuscating general traceability.
Firstly, technology imposes an increasingly faster
pace, higher efficiency, and more accuracy, encouraging
reflex reactions over critical thinking, and removing
human values from the decision criteria since deemed
to introduce inefficiencies [6], [7]. This can result in the
literal application and acceptance of rule-based computing systems, which allow none of the flexibility or "interpretative skills" that humans typically employ to comply
with the spirit, if not the letter, of rules. In turn, this
causes diminished individual involvement, questioning,
and responsibility taking.
68
A particularly reductive outcome of technological
capabilities is the introduction of quantitative measures
and digital models as a replacement for qualitative evaluations and richer human representations. One sees,
for example in academia, a shift of focus onto citation
counts rather than scientific content, and in social networks, the pursuit of "likes," "followers," or "friends" in
volume rather than substance. Engaging extensively via
computing platforms, individuals may start to perceive
who they are via digital (multiple-choice) selves, neglecting human dimensions not fitting this medium [16].
Secondly, ownership and access to critical technologies and massive computational and networking
resources leads to the emergence of a new type of
power [8], [9], [23]. On one hand, this severely disrupts
the socio-economic order - e.g., loss of jobs to automation and a "sharing" economy where those who
share become increasingly poor [8]. On the other hand,
this can also circumvent and tamper with existing democratic institutions - e.g., interfering with knowledge
production and dissemination, which is critical to democratic processes [12], and preventing new regulations
that would confine their interference.
A notable example is the exploitation of doubt in the
systematic use of the scientific method against itself,
especially in conjunction with ownership of the (technological) means that determine how knowledge is published, disseminated and searched for [24]. The
outcome is to frame individuals' critical thinking abilities so that particular conclusions are never drawn, and
consequently popular support for, for example, new regulations, is never forthcoming. Subsequently, confirmation bias ensures that conflicting evidence is rejected
and leads to a polarization of opinion [25], impeding
any progress on a collective action issue.
Finally, since technology introduces more complexity, it can diminish traceability, resulting in less comprehensible transparency, and over time, in less trust in
the causality between actions and societal transformation (e.g., "The essence of all technology is to increase
the distance between cause and effect both in space
and in time"4,5). The implication is that it becomes
increasingly difficult to establish, with any useful precision, who was responsible for the effects that a technology had on some observable aspect (i.e., was it the
technology designers, the users, or the decision makers),
or to identify which use of which technology was responsible for which events. Further lessening of transparency
can be added by the privatization of invention and nondisclosure policies of privately-owned technology,
4
Ursula Franklin in a CBC interview in 1977.
This is not to say that there should be absolute predictability of the effects
of individual events. Yet zero traceability, even a-posteriori, would make
any (collective) action appear as superfluous.
5
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE
∕
SEPTEMBER 2017
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