The Philosophy of Technology
Are technologies neutral tools, or do they carry values and reshape the people who use them?
This site’s essays ask what each technology assumes and what it changes. This path follows the thinkers who asked those questions about technology in general.
It begins with history, Mumford’s account of how machines reshaped civilisation, and moves to the most influential philosophical critiques: Heidegger on how technology changes the way we see the world, McLuhan on media, Illich on tools that enlarge or shrink human freedom. Winner then shows how political choices hide inside technical ones. The last three books bring the argument to work, automation and artificial intelligence.
The What Our Tools Do to Us path is a lighter companion, and the idea of the pharmakon, the remedy that is also a poison, runs through both.
Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach is a companion to the last two steps: it asks how meaning and a self could arise in any system, which is the question underneath every argument about thinking machines.
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Mumford’s 1934 history argued that the clock, not the steam engine, was the key machine of the industrial age, because it reorganised time and work. It sets the scale for everything that follows.
- Read it for
- The phases of technological history and the idea that machines embody and spread ways of life.
- Carry forward
- What does our product teach its users to treat as normal?
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The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays
Heidegger’s difficult but influential essay argues that modern technology reveals the world as a stock of resources on call, and that this way of seeing is the real danger.
- Read it for
- The title essay, read slowly, and the idea of enframing.
- Carry forward
- What in our business have we come to see only as a resource to be optimised?
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McLuhan’s claim that the medium is the message, that each medium changes the scale and pattern of human affairs regardless of content, still frames debates about every new platform.
- Read it for
- The opening chapters and the idea of media as extensions of ourselves.
- Carry forward
- What does the form of our product do to people, apart from anything it says?
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Illich distinguished tools that enlarge people’s autonomy from those that make them dependent on experts and institutions, and argued that tools pass a threshold beyond which they harm.
- Read it for
- The idea of convivial tools and of the two watersheds in a technology’s development.
- Carry forward
- Does our product make its users more capable, or more dependent on us?
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Winner’s essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” shows that technical arrangements can settle questions of power. The book is the bridge from philosophy to policy.
- Read it for
- The essay on artefacts and politics, and the critique of technological somnambulism.
- Carry forward
- What decision about power is hidden inside one of our design choices?
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Arendt distinguished labour, work and action, and asked what happens to people when automation removes the labour that has organised their lives.
- Read it for
- The prologue on automation and the account of the vita activa.
- Carry forward
- If machines did the labour in our field, what would remain that only people can do?
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Carr brings the argument to the present: automation can erode the skills and attention of the people it assists, from pilots to doctors.
- Read it for
- Automation complacency, automation bias and the case for designs that keep people engaged.
- Carry forward
- Which skill are our people losing because a system now does it for them?
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Ends with the newest version of the old question. Russell argues that machines pursuing fixed objectives are dangerous and proposes machines that remain uncertain about what humans want.
- Read it for
- The standard model of AI and its flaws, and the principles for beneficial machines.
- Carry forward
- What objective have we handed to a system that is not quite what we actually want?
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