Comment on I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better
hsdkfr734r@feddit.nl 4 days agofactory example
Thanks. I think I get it now. Besides physical constraints (availability of resources, natural laws and the knowledge of them), society’s inherent values and rules (like work safety, minimum wage, worth attributed to a group of people/ the environment / animals) affect the way things are done.
If work force is cheap and abundantly available and the workers’ health or wellbeing isn’t considered as too relevant the resulting solution to achieve something is very different from one with different preconditions.
computers … because they’re so general purpose, more cultural values get embedded. Like in the example above, there are decisions that aren’t determined by the goals of what you’re trying to accomplish, but because computers are so much more open ended than physical robots, there are more decisions like that, and you have even more leeway in how they’re decided.
The moral/ social/ economic decisions which are made are affected by the opportunities which a technology has to offer? OK, yes.
The versatility of computer technology makes it a tech which can be used in many harmful ways. The potential for harm is bigger than let’s say with the invention of the wheel or the plow but not as big as with nuclear fission.
Responsibility for the usage of a technology and finding common rules for its usage and enforcing them… hmm.
Technology and what we do with it can’t be viewed as independent aspects?
theluddite@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
I’d say that’s mostly right, but it’s less about opportunities, and more about design. To return to the example of the factory: Let’s say that there was a communist revolution and the workers now own the factory. The machines still have them facing away from each other. If they want to face each other, they’ll have to rebuild the machine. The values of the old system are literally physically present in the machine.
So it’s not that you can do different things with a technology based on your values, but that different values produce technology differently. This actually limits future possibilities. Those workers physically cannot face each other on that machine, even if they want to use it that way. The past’s values are frozen in that machine.
hsdkfr734r@feddit.nl 3 days ago
OK. That makes sense. It is more expensive (time, money) to reinvent a present technology, so it takes less effort to base further development on the currently available design.