Autonomous Technology – Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought

"Autonomous Technology by Langdon Winner, published in 1978 – obviously before the internet became a sensation. Winner brought the sensitivity of a political theorist concerned with questions of democratic control over technologies, and the control of those who are in power over technologies, to the debate. The book was a survey of how various thinkers (from Marx to Mumford but also people like Herbert Marcuse) have all thought about technology as a social force. It’s important to recognise that many of the early thinkers who were not primarily technologists, like Marx, did think that technology was not just a combination of gadgets and widgets, but that there was also something to it that was special, and required special attention from intellectuals and from societies. Some people definitely thought it was a good thing, because it could speed up economic growth or undermine capitalism. But many people thought that technology by itself simply obscures many of the political decisions that citizens and governments need to make. A lot of issues that are clearly political, and require democratic scrutiny and participation suddenly become labelled as ‘technology’, and as technology is seen to be something neutral, many of those decisions pass on autopilot – like nuclear energy and pollution and other social problems. For many years people were not asking the right questions, because the bureaucrats and politicians presented these issues as simply an apolitical question of efficiency: seeking the most optimal solution to a problem, while disregarding the fact that some technology privileges certain groups over others and discriminates against other groups. In this book, Winner ended up endorsing the view that technology can be seen as an autonomous force, but he also took a very negative view of it, thinking that many bureaucratic decisions are not transparent enough, and that often technology demands even more technology to rein itself in or to correct some of its errors. You can actually trace that in the current debate about climate change and geo-engineering, where instead of cutting down on how much we drive or how much we pollute we are thinking of ways in which to turn the earth about its axis. I think it was very smart of Winner to point out that we do have to start taking technology seriously as a political phenomenon, and that thinking about it only as a combination of gadgets or as something completely supernatural or magical is not going to help, because human interest will always be either promoted or suppressed by technology. I think one has to draw a very clear line between technology and human agents. If you read the testimony of Albert Speer at the Nuremberg Trials, he claims that most of the crimes of the Nazi regime were committed because technology cut out the middle man, and people who could have been questioning many of the decisions made by their superiors were replaced by databases and machines, so such questioning was no longer possible. It does look like a very valid explanation, but then blaming technology also spares the likes of Speer from the moral responsibility they carry. For sure, technology did facilitate the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, particularly if you look at the role of radio and how Goering was exploring it, but then I don’t want to lessen the blame that should be put on the humans using that technology. Yeah, and I think one of the points that people like Winner have been making in their work is that it’s often too late to be asking those questions once the technology is out of the bag. Often there are already well-developed markets, people already like it, so we cannot just legislate retroactively. We have to start thinking about ways in which we can make all of this ethical calculus maybe before the prototypes are even designed, and then you have to figure out a way to balance it with the need to innovate. The precautionary principle creates tension with technologists – they think it’s just a burden. People in Silicon Valley really want the innovation, as much of it and as fast as possible, and if something breaks down they’ll fix it later, and think that unless something really bad happens we should not legislate. It’s a really interesting discussion and I think Winner’s books started that."