Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Politics And Technodevelopmental Predetermination

Michael Anissimov Comments:

There are certain technological advancements that seem developmentally predetermined: the wheel, fire, ironworking, agriculture, radio, computers, nuclear technology, etc. To hold back any one of these milestone technologies would require a fascist world government preventing it.

I really do disagree with both of these propositions. I disagree that any of these developments was or remains logically predetermined in their concrete specificity, and (I guess as a matter of course from the first) I definitely disagree that only fascism can restrain their eventual arrival on the scene.

I would say that nanoscale manufacturing (as envisioned by Drexler or not) and AI (as envisioned by Kurzweil or not) are similarly developmentally predetermined. Their arrival is not so much a question of if, but when.

Man, I really disagree with this! I think it remains to be seen whether or not these rather Superlative outcomes are even practically possible, let alone inevitable.

When I say this, I'm not "denigrating the political process".

To be sure I'm clear about this, I don't think that just affirming these propositions I disagree with means you are bound to denigrate democratic politics or anything so morally charged like that. I do think that this sort of technological determinism does arise from and/or conduce to a profound underestimation of the political in the broadest sense, the sense that renders historical formations radically contingent, reminds us about unintended consequences, leads us to understand the social construction of our institutions and practices, recalls the role of unpredictable vicissitudes of climate, culture, social instability, and such that meddle in our best-laid plans, foregrounds the ineradicable dimension of plurality and contestation in all public affairs, and so on.

I have no particular investment in any narrow vision of nano or AI, however, there are certain parameters that MNT and AI must fall into if they are possible at all. For instance, the throughput of an MNT system is guaranteed to either be significantly faster or significantly slower than conventional manufacturing -- it would be a remarkably unlikely coincidence for nanoscale processes to be of similar speed to macroscale processes.

Well, okay, I'll take your word for it. I think it is rather early to say with confidence what the "minimal parameters" would be, and hence it does seem to me likely that jumping the gun will lend itself to pointless idealizations of (and often defensive identifications with) technodevelopmental outcomes that circumscribe open futurity in the service of too-specific futures. But you see the point of the critique by now -- we can agree to disagree about where the lines get drawn.

Saying that the Internet was "the furthest imaginable thing from inevitable" sounds like hyperbole to me.

It was.

You don't think that most intelligent civilizations develop a worldwide communications network like this? Do most intelligent civilizations develop housing, or the wheel, or plastics? Is there nothing that is developmentally predetermined in the course of a civilization's trajectory?

It seems to me that the overabundant majority of intelligent civilizations we know about did NOT develop world wide communications networks or plastics (and the jury's still out on how intelligent the civilization that developed the latter actually turns out to have been).

As for developmental predetermination -- well, all I will say is that it seems to me very easy to confuse self-congratulatory narratives of progress culminating in cultures with which one personally identifies with narratives of the logical steps that development must inevitably go through.

One finds this absurdity as much in Marx as in racist rationales for colonialism. One finds it idiotically playing out in Freud's claims about anal fixation and so on, but very well supported in Piaget's childhood developmental psychology.

I'm suspicious of the frame but not so much, let us say, that I inevitably rule it out of hand.

I do think you seem much too sure of the predetermination of certain technodevelopmental outcomes in the propositions you are affirming, certainly. But, who's to say, I'm open to the possibility of some technodevelopmental determination. I await a case that seems compelling.

You want for everything to be dependent on activists,

It would be a relief if less was so dependent, as it happens.

because that boosts the significance of social struggles, stakeholder politics, etc.

I certainly wouldn't want to discount the possibility that this prejudice is playing out in my formulations, but you would be wrong to assume that I am not enormously vigilant about this very possibility. It seems to me that I am more aware of, or take a bit more seriously perhaps, the role of contingent ongoing collective effort in the maintenance of and progress toward the solution of shared problems than some technological determinists seem to me to be.

But sometimes, individual agents have a disproportionate impact -- for instance, if the first atomic bomb ignited the atmosphere, we would not have "voted" for it with tax dollars per se, but enabled it, and a few uncautious scientists would have caused our doom as the result of their poor decisions.

I agree with the thrust of what you say. I am interested a bit in whether what you are calling "enabling" here is for you a political or non-political phenomenon. But the larger point that the instruments of violence introduce asymmetries into conventional political dynamics is enormously important -- and so far rather undertheorized. My own sense of these issues is more beholden to my readings of theorists of Revolution and theorists of non-violent social struggle than deterministic analyses of technological development -- which remain, after all, tools rather than agents of politics even when they derange the customary dynamics of politics as you say. I agree with you that this is a very interesting subject.

Individual scientists and the choices they make matter. It is perfectly possible to acknowledge this without coming from a Randian background.

Who said otherwise?

Because it's easier for me to influence a few people than to influence everyone,

Those aren't the only two options, you know.

I think it's worthwhile to focus on influencing the inventors, the policymakers, the businessmen, rather than everyone, because the latter is extremely difficult.

Be aware that influence goes both ways. Follow the money, look where the guns are aimed, find the stakeholders to a dispute who aren't being taken seriously or heard at all, and I suspect that your sense of the most worthwhile focus will not remain where it is for you for now for long. Of course, I could be wrong.

Most of the American public doesn't even know what the word "nanotechnology" means.

This doesn't seem particularly tragic to me, I must say. I think people are likely to know quite well what nanotechnology means when "it" impacts their daily lives at all; that is to say, when and if they need to. You think they need to know it now, no doubt, but I think you are probably quite wrong to think that. I also think you may well be wrong to think you know now what "nanotechnology" will mean then, when and if it does matter to them to know it. That remains to be seen.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This last paragraph could be understood (or misunderstood) as a claim against the importance of public education on emerging technologies and their potential or likely impacts. I'd like to know what you think about that. Is it that "the people" or "the American public" needs to be considered as much a source of education as a target for it? What were you thinking here?

Dale Carrico said...

Michael Anissimov wrote:

Most of the American public doesn't even know what the word "nanotechnology" means.

I responded:

This doesn't seem particularly tragic to me, I must say. I think people are likely to know quite well what nanotechnology means when "it" impacts their daily lives at all; that is to say, when and if they need to. You think they need to know it now, no doubt, but I think you are probably quite wrong to think that. I also think you may well be wrong to think you know now what "nanotechnology" will mean then, when and if it does matter to them to know it. That remains to be seen.

Jonathan Pfeiffer worries:

This last paragraph could be understood (or misunderstood) as a claim against the importance of public education on emerging technologies and their potential or likely impacts.

I think that misunderstanding is unlikely given the context of the post in which that comment appears: I argued in the post that idealized nonproximate Superlative outcomes are mistaken by Michael in the argument to which I was responding as "predetermined" in advance when the truth is that technodevelopmental determination is an ongoing, collective, and unpredictable process, a matter of politics.

If nanoscale technique inscribes one among many different technodevelopmental paths in two decades' time it could end up meaning something much more like what people think of now when they think of "biotechnology" rather than what people think of now (those few that do) when they think of, say, "Drextech." It may well be that people won't and will never have needed to know what the word "nanotechnology" connoted for a small coterie of tech-enthusiasts.

People in general might end up using a word like "medicine," or "sensors," or even "fabbing," maybe -- if another futurological paradigm pans out -- and what they will mean by these things will have come over the years of that development to contain the sense of nanoscale technique.

Notice even the difference between conjuring up "nanoscale technique" -- intervention, manipulation at the nanoscale, open to any number of implementations, paradigms of manufacturing, and levels of eventual control -- as against the conjuring up in the first place of a "nanotechnology" whose characteristics we are prone to delineate in advance, as though scribbling them directly from the book of physics or logic, indifferent to the shaping of developmental outcomes and ongoing distribution by factors that are radically underdetermined by logic or physics and instead always retrospectively narrated in history.

This isn't a claim against the importance of public education: again, some context would obviously rule out such a misunderstanding in a flash -- inasmuch as I regularly champion public education here on the blog, and have, more to the point, literally devoted my life to public education as a teacher!

Rather than a claim against such education it is better to read it as an insistence that educating a properly open, critical, and literate technodevelopmental education will involve much more than logic and physics.

And certainly it should involve sensitivity training to the pseudo-science, self-delusion, reductionism, and hyperbole with which some techno-enthusiasts will try to peddle their own pet Superlative outcomes and impose their pet or elite-incumbent agendas in the name of "foresight."

Is it that "the people" or "the American public" needs to be considered as much a source of education as a target for it? What were you thinking here?

Don't scarequote the people or the American public. We really do exist. It's true that we are a plurality rather than a monolithic unanimity invested with some kind of sovereign will -- but that is, after all, just a facile straw man constructed by incumbent and elite interests to denigrate the actually ongoing contestation, deliberation, participation of that popular plurality in the articulation of history which incumbents and elitists would rather control to their particular advantage.

Obviously the people are as much a source as a target for education! The Street finds its own uses for things. Aborning peer production practices are palpably shattering industrial-broadcast prejudices everywhere. The "Unitary Executive" is shitting in his pants and firing off wild shots in a last ditch panic.

Be careful, by the way, what groove your rhetoric is apt to nudge you into if you aren't vigilant: the people "considering" the people are themselves among the people, and so your example isn't in any measure properly a matter of elite technocrats assuming a vantage from which to consult, say, now the Book of the Universe's Law with their logical asocial independent brains, and now, with the same asocial indifference, the news arriving from ground level from the clamoring multitude, and on the basis of such consultations make the calculation that will enable them to implement some Superlative eidos into a technodevelopmental outcome.

Technodevelopmental determination is itself actively and interminably ongoing and collective, not logical nor teleological, nor implemented unilaterally from above. That is the key thing to be understood here. Education, expertise, foresight, organizing are part of mosaic, but none of that trumps the collectivity of ongoing technodevelopmental determination and open futurity.