I recently attended a presentation by Dr. Ruha Benjamin about technology and the future. She discussed how almost all of our depictions of technology over the past decades present it as either a thing that will destroy us or a thing that will save us. She calls these visions “techno-dystopia” and “techno-utopia”.
Both are wrong. Both suggest that technology is something that develops independently of human choice, that it’s a thing that happens to us and out of our control.
That’s definitely wrong! People build technology. People’s choices guide technology. However it turns out, it will be because it serves the desires of the people who built it.
This discussion really helped me clarify what bothers me most about how we depict and try to understand technology in our world:
Both visions deny human agency.
Both visions are built on the same belief: That technology is needed because human beings lack the necessary capabilities to do for ourselves. A belief that we can’t build a better world, or solve our problems, or save ourselves. A belief that we need tech to do it for us.
This is belief is both wrong and deeply contemptuous. Both visions underestimate, undervalue, and undermine human capability in equal measure. I refuse to accept that. I don’t believe it.
We don’t need technology to rule us or uplift us. It’s a tool. That’s all. We are fully capable of building the world and the future we want for ourselves.
The bigger question is this: The people building our technology are building it to serve their own ends. These people are desperate for the rest of us to believe that we need technology to solve our problems and save the world.
Why do you think that is?
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I want to talk more meaningfully about the statement, “Technology is a tool.” This elides the role of design in how a tool is made. Tools are designed to make certain ways of using them easy and rewarding; they make other ways of using them more difficult and costly. These design decisions influence how the tool gets used. That matters.
Take social media as an example: Studies have shown that social media can have either a postive or negative influence on your quality of life. If you use social media to facilitate in-person connections and experiences, it’s a wonderful tool! If you use it to replace in-person connections and experiences, it signficantly damages health, well-being, and quality of life. But here’s the thing:
Social media is designed to make it easy and rewarding to use it to replace in-person connection. It’s not designed to encourage in-person connection. Indeed, it’s explicitly designed to make it difficult and costly to use it that way: in-person connection takes you off the platform, which costs them money. You can use social media in a healthy way but it’s not designed to make it easy, which means most people won’t.
Same with AI: It’s designed on purpose to increase our dependency on it, to insert into spaces where it replaces human connections and judgement. It’s designed in ways that disempower and deskill us. You can use it as a healthy and helpful tool, but that’s not how it’s designed and not how it’s being deployed. That matters.
