A basic thought that is taking shape: Technology can expand our agency, but at the cost of giving up autonomy.
Recognizing impact of our own actions is important for the construction of identity, both as an individual and a group. It’s a confirmation of our agency. Therefore the offering of Technology to increase our reach is attractive, it is a promise to solve both material problems (a newsletter side hustle, missing limbs, global warming) and immaterial ones („I want to be prolific“, „I want to be a part of society“, „We want to be a species that is able to manage existential risk“).
But this expansion of our impact does not come for free. Every time we use Technology to solve a problem we could not have solved otherwise, we get used to this boost of our agency and soon, we become dependent on this device/service/AI-thing being available all the time. It now becomes part of our everyday infrastructure and it‘s benefits become a part of our individual and collective self image. We are getting things done, so it must be true that we are distinct and enabled individuals and a distinct and enabled species as well. It becomes hard to imagine a life without this new device/service/AI-thing, not just because it is convenient, but because we made it a part of ourselves and forgot how we managed to exist before the thing existed^[An illustrative example: It seems that Inuit hunters are loosing their ancestral knowledge about navigation on the ice, because younger generations grow up with GPS navigation and don’t need this kind of analog deep understanding of their hunting grounds anymore].
Now this might sound like old news, but I think many basic but important thoughts can sound very basic. The trade-off between agency and dependence is obviously running since the beginning of mankind and it has produced all kinds of weird and often unhealthy dependencies on technological solutions. In a vast simplification, I think one might estimate many technological innovations introduced since the domestication of fire and until maybe the start of burning coal and oil on industrial levels to be largely a benefit to mankind, but even these positive examples created lots of dependency. Think of: book printing (trading literacy and science vs. the dependency on a book making industry instead of oral history traditions), electrical light (trading expanded daytime and safety vs. the need to always be close to a working power plant) and antibiotics (trading the eradication of lethal diseases vs a pharma industry that has to keep playing catch-up against multi-resistent bacteria). We trade away autonomy to gain agency all the time and often this is to our benefit.
Two areas recently made me wonder about the interplay between agency and dependency introduced by new technologies:
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Climate Change politics currently seem to shift slowly towards discussion of Geo Engineering measures as a valid option. While differentiation is necessary here (Carbon Capture seems to be a No-Brainer, large-scale artificial cooling might be a doomsday device), a core fear of many experts is, that instead of just fixing existing problems, we would utilize Geo Engineering to play this trade-off again: recieve an opportunity to keep going as we did and just burn stuff, but at the cost of being forever dependent on Geo Engineering cycles to work and providing companies to be in service
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As everybody, I recently started to utilize AI (mainly ChatGPT and Midjourney) for creative output. It is weird, it is fascinating, it (at least currently) somehow feels inherently unhealthy but it produces interesting results I could not have received in the same time. Leveraging the whole of our cultural production (digested by the LLM) for every stupid little image you create is a magical thing. But what if this huge leverage at some point would become necessary to have any creative output at all? And what if the Altmanns etc. running these things start to show there true face and their services, now part of our intellectual infrastructure, turn to become a toxic wasteland, just as Twitter recently did?
The Twitter-wasteland could be a key to a new perspective on this seemingly endless sale of autonomy for new technologies and their promised leverage. Since the change of ownership, the platform has become quite unstable. It increasingly seems „broken“ from a technological, political and ethical perspective. Maybe this is a good thing. The failure of a part of our infrastructure is also the failure of a part of our self image and that could be a healthy irritation. Hans-Jörg Pochmann has described this moment of self-understanding triggered by broken technology beautifully:
A fall from grace is fatal for digital devices; their magic quickly dissipates. This underwhelming and frustrating encounter evokes the existential rift that the fully functioning interface is constantly bridging. Left to my own devices, I may realize that all is not lost, that no computer system failure can take away my being here, and my constant struggle to make sense-yet. I am all tangled up but independent; I am independent not because I am superior, but because I am impotent.^[Hans-Jörg Pochmann in „The Thing Between You and Me“, p. 71]
More about the interesting book this quote is from later.
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Last updated: 2023-08-06
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