Contemplate for a moment the extent to which technology shapes the world we live in. Direct interaction with technology is necessary even just to read this post. Technology is so present in our lives that many people closely monitor just how much time they spend consuming online media. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, all of these apps have been designed to capture one’s attention, and they are provenly effective at doing so.
But technology extends far beyond social media. Indeed, any reasonable definition of technology should encompass digital products such as digital music and films, video games, ebooks, blog posts, software, firmware, etc. The internet is the combination of hardware and protocol with which we transfer digital products between people, and should certainly be included in any definition of technology. But this is still too narrow; surely technology has existed long before the emergence of digital products and the internet. Our goal in the following is to establish a broad definition of technology that will ultimately allow us to examine its interaction with humans, and nature.
Technology is commonly defined along the lines of an application of conceptual knowledge to achieve a goal or to control the environment. Some authors specify that the knowledge be scientific knowledge, or that the application should be reproducible. While such a definition is broad enough to characterize much of what we think of intuitively as technology, it depicts technology as a passive result of Man actively controlling nature. It is much more than this. Technology is an active participant in the evolution of Man and nature. I have a few other criticisms of the common conceptualization of technology, which I outline as follows.
The first is that the definition implies that Man has control over technology. While I would agree that technology is created and reproduced with a goal in mind, it is misleading to suggest that technology is controlled by its user or creator. For example, there is a growing consensus that the rate of development of AI should be slowed, but no clear solutions on how to control the rate of evolution of AI have been proposed, and so we stand by anticipating the consequences of this rapid growth. In this sense, we do not control AI as a collective species, and certainly not as individuals.
My second issue with the standard definition of technology is that the direction of influence is implicitly one directional. Sure, technology is developed often with a particular goal in mind, but the influence of technology on the user, and the goal drift of the user is not apparent in the definition. Addiction to social networking platforms is an example.
Additionally, technology is depicted as a collection of products that serve the goals of humans. Not only does achievement have a misleadingly positive connotation, it is not clear who’s goal is being achieved, or that the goal of the technology should be aligned with the goal of its creator. The atomic bomb is a good example of a misalignment of goals. While the goal of the atomic bomb is to create destruction, the creators of the atomic bomb had the goal of preventing their own destruction by gaining leverage over their enemies.
Finally, we are led by the definition to think of technology as successfully satisfying our needs, which can be seen as an instance of survivor’s bias. For a very brief period in history, the Titanic was considered to be a marvellous new technology.
These observations motivate an alternative definition of technology. In the following, and in my future articles, I will operate under the following definition when referring to technology.
Technology is the collection of non-human systems that are intentionally created by one or more humans1.
By conceptualizing technology as a system that interacts with humans and nature, we gain a more objective perspective, opening the door to the study of technology using tools from systems theory. The above definition does not suffer from biased language such as “achieve” or “control”, which I believe plays a large role in the debate over the ethics of technology. For instance, climate change is often thought of a negative side effect of technological advancement which, by definition, is beneficial for humans. This cognitive separation of technology from its negative characteristics is harmful. For instance, imagine if society conceptualized alcohol as a path to temporary euphoria and increased sociability, and labelled the disbenefits of alcohol as unwanted side effects. Thankfully, we tend to have a wholistic vision of what alcohol is, and not only of what we hope to obtain from it.
Systems theory
Our definition of technology relies on the concept of a system. For a short introduction to Systems theory, see this article. I will use the definition of a system from Donella H. Meadows’s book, Thinking in Systems.
A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.
As Meadows points out, the definition implies that systems can be studied in terms of three things:
The system elements,
The organization of the system elements,
And the goal that the system achieves.
An example
To concretize the idea that we can model different technologies as systems, let us consider the simple example of a fishing rod. It is composed of a hook, a line, a rod with guides, and a spool, just to name some of the main components. These system elements are organized in an intelligent manner such that the fishing rod may carry out its goal of efficient energy transfer from the angler to the hook, enabling both casting and reeling. Other goals of the fishing rod are, for example, to seem appealing to aquatic life, which is reflected in the size of the hook and the transparency of the line. We see here that the systems goals are intricately related to the system elements and their organization.
Consider, for example, an angler whose goal it is to feed her family a fresh salmon. While there may be several ways to achieve this goal, such as purchasing the salmon at the market, our angler decides to fish for the salmon herself. She has narrowed down her goal of feeding her family a fresh salmon to the sub-goal of obtaining the salmon from the river. To do so she needs to transfer her energy into the river in an intelligent way, and uses a fishing rod to do so since the goal of the fishing rod aligns well with her sub-goal. The angler waits with her hook in the water, and suddenly feels a tug on her line. Excitedly, she reels in her catch. Just after the hook leaves the water, the angler sees that the fish attached to it is not a salmon, but a trout.
In this example, the fishing rod exists and operates independently of the overarching goal of the angler, and so it should not be defined in terms of the anglers’ goals. This example also shows that the goals of a technology are intended to align with the goals of the user. The angler’s goals align to some extent with those of the fishing rod, but not entirely. There is nothing salmon-specific about the goals of the fishing rod, hence the trout that was caught at the end of the story.
The ontology of technology
Let us, for a moment, veer off from the pragmatic paradigm of systems theory and consider a more ontological paradigm. The very existence of a system implicates that its design (i.e., the system elements and their organization) is consistent with its own existence, and therefore existence can be seen as one of the system’s goals. This is well understood in evolutionary biology, where all living organisms are said to share the common goals of survival and reproduction. In general, the sustainability of a system can be seen as the ability to which the system can achieve its goal of existing, or in other words, being well-adapted to its dynamic environment. Technologies that have withstood the test of time are well-adapted to the environment in which they exist. To be well adapted in an environment means to align ones own goals with the goals of the environment. So naturally, technology evolves its design to align its goals with the goals of the environment through a selection process analogous to natural selection.
Let us break down the environment in which a technology may find itself. The environment of a system is the collection of systems that it interacts with.
To a large extent, the technology interacts with its user, and so its user makes up a large portion of its environment. This explains why the goals of technologies tend to be aligned with the goals of their users.
All systems interact with nature, whose goal can be seen as maximizing the production of entropy.
Sometimes, the goal of a technology is in stark contrast with that of a particular element of the environment, in which case the goal of the technology is usually to eradicate that element. With the example of pesticide, the environment of the pest is rendered inhospitable due to the misalignment of goals, which in turn eliminates the existence of the pest. Meanwhile, the pest works to evolve an intolerance to the pesticide, rendering the pesticide obsolete.
As technology advances, the environment of any particular technology becomes more technological. This means that new technologies must align their goals with the existing technological landscape, or revolutionize the technological landscape. In either case, the more powerful technology becomes, the more influence it has in deciding the goals of new technologies.
Conclusion
I ask again, to what extent does technology shape our environment? Put simply, a lot. The rate at which technology develops is faster than ever, and so is the rate of human adaptation to a new technological environment. The groundwork that we have laid in this article will allow us to explore, using a systems theoretic paradigm, how technology and society coexist and interact.
You are a system. You have goals that are based on millions of years of evolution in a natural, slowly evolving environment. Your environment today contains a plethora of technological systems, some of which have goals that align with yours, and others less-so. It is vital for the well-being of each individual that technology supports our goals to the fullest. So, in the power that we have to influence the direction of technological process, it is imperative that we understand and live by our goals. The sustainable development goals outlined by the United Nations are an excellent start. To what extent do the technologies that you thought of at the beginning of this article reflect these goals?
Examples of human systems include governments, markets, families, organizations, and companies. These are excluded from my above definition of technology.