Relation to the world· Work and technology
Techno-optimism
Axis: Relation to technology — Does technological progress improve the human condition?
Technology is the great lever of human progress: it frees us from need, pushes back suffering, and extends our power over nature. The problems it creates call for more ingenuity, not a step backward.
Movements 3
Transhumanismexplicit
Technology is neither a neutral tool nor an alienating force, but the chief engine of emancipation from the human condition: what pulled us out of scarcity and disease can free us from our very biological limits. The it raises do not warrant renunciation, but a prudent, steered acceleration. A desirable future is built by pushing back the frontiers of the technically possible, not by distrusting them.
Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near · Bostrom, Superintelligence
The Enlightenmentexplicit
The Encyclopédie performs an unprecedented gesture: bringing the mechanical arts, the trades and the machines into knowledge, on an equal footing with the sciences. Technology is here no mere convenience but a vehicle of emancipation, which lifts man out of misery and need and extends his dominion over nature. Heirs to 's programme, the Enlightenment ties the progress of the arts to the progress of enlightenment: mastering nature and instructing men go together.
Diderot and d'Alembert, Encyclopédie, art. "Art" · Bacon, Novum Organum
Show inferred positions (1)
Marxisminferable
Marx holds the development of the productive forces to be the motor of historical progress: machinery and large-scale industry create the material conditions for a society of abundance freed from want. Yet under capital, that same machinery intensifies exploitation and alienation: the optimism bears on technology freed from capitalist relations, not on technology as such.
Marx, Capital, vol. I, chapter on machinery and modern industry · Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
Philosophers 7
Baconexplicit
Knowledge is worth not for contemplation but for its fruits: to know causes is to be able to produce effects, and the measure of a truth is the work it makes possible. Bacon judges this by the mechanical arts, which have grown without cease while the philosophy of the schools stood still: printing, gunpowder, and the compass have changed the world more than all the systems. Technology is thus no suspect by-product of knowledge but its legitimate end and the lever of human progress, against the resignation that holds the present condition to be beyond improvement.
Novum Organum, I, §3, §81 and §129
Simondonexplicit
The introduction to starts from a diagnosis: culture has set itself up as a system of defence against technics, which it either reduces to mere utensils or mythologizes as menacing robots. For , the strongest cause of is not the machine itself but the misunderstanding of its nature and essence. He therefore rejects instrumentalism as much as technophobia: the technical object has its own technicity and its own genesis, , through which its elements become interdependent. He sees in technical development a major possibility for transforming the human condition, on one condition: that culture take in the knowledge of machines, and that the human become their organizer and interpreter, neither master nor slave. Favourable but conditional, this stance sits slightly on the techno-optimist side: the confidence bears on what technics makes possible, not on the power it confers.
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958), introduction and part I · "Culture and Technics" (1965), reprinted in Sur la technique (2014)
Show inferred positions (5)
Descartesinferable
For Descartes, the new science has a practical end: to yield techniques, mechanical arts, and a medicine that would prolong life and relieve the human condition. This optimism in the transformative power of applied knowledge anticipates techno-optimism, though it never forms an explicit thesis about technology as such.
Discourse on Method, VI
Lockeinferable
Our knowledge of nature does not reach real essences, but it is enough for what matters to us: the conduct of life and the conveniences we can draw from things. Locke sees in the useful arts, grounded in experience and natural history, the true benefit of natural philosophy. To show what labour and improvement add to the land, he contrasts the king of a large territory in America with an English day-labourer, who is better fed, housed and clothed.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, 12, §10-12 · Second Treatise of Government, ch. V, §41
Hegelinferable
In the "Teleology", the tool displays the cunning of reason, which uses the properties of things to accomplish its ends: through its permanence, "the plough is more honourable than are immediately the enjoyments procured by it". In civil society, however, the division of labour makes activity ever more abstract and mechanical, until the machine can take the human being's place. Poverty belongs to the contradictory dynamics of that society and the distribution of its wealth, not to the machine as such: Hegel prizes the rational power of means while analysing their social conditions.
Science of Logic, Subjective Logic, "Teleology" · Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §198 and §243-245
Marxinferable
The development of the productive forces, machinery included, is the motor of history and the material condition of emancipation: large-scale industry creates the means of a society of abundance. Yet under capitalism the machine enslaves the worker and intensifies his exploitation. Marx is thus neither technophobic nor naively optimistic: technology liberates according to the social relations that command it, hence a nuanced optimism.
Capital, vol. I, ch. 15 (machinery and large-scale industry) · Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 1 (the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie and of industry)
Kantinferable
In Kant's account of history, "unsocial sociability" drives the development of human talents and skills: without this antagonism, human beings would have remained as good-natured as the sheep they tend. Kant sees this as genuine but morally incomplete progress: "We are cultivated to a high degree by art and science. We are civilised to the point of excess in all kinds of social courtesies and proprieties. But we are still a long way from the point where we could consider ourselves morally mature." Skill supplies means for all kinds of ends; it says nothing of their worth.
Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), fourth and seventh propositions (tr. H. B. Nisbet, Kant: Political Writings) · Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, II (imperatives of skill)
Argument
- Before our tools, human life was short, exposed, weighed down by toil. The plough, the printing press, the vaccine, the engine: each technology widened what a human being can know, do, and hope for. This is the meaning of 's project, which charged knowledge with making us as masters and possessors of nature.
- The feed you were scrolling tonight belongs to this lineage: never has so vast a share of knowledge, of works, of distant voices been within arm's reach. What we call distraction is the flip side of an unheard-of abundance.
- And every novelty, in its day, caused fear: already dreaded that writing would ruin memory. Yet we would not trade writing for forgetfulness. The present anxiety is surely, too, the discomfort of a threshold.
Therefore So to bet on technology is not naivety: it is to recognize the lever that, alone, has kept its promises of emancipation.
See the pageObjection
- Grant the optimist his starting point: our means of acting, producing, communicating have grown as never before. But he at once concludes that our condition has improved, and it is that step which must be examined.
- For a means is worth only the end it serves: having more tools makes life better only if those tools serve what makes life good. To multiply means without questioning ends is to gain in power, not necessarily in happiness or freedom.
- And the very power that removes old ills gives rise to new ones: it creates needs we never had, dependencies, unprecedented forms of fatigue and solitude. The reckoning is thus not the simple addition the optimist assumes, and nothing guarantees it tips the right way for life itself.
Therefore So from the growth of our means one cannot conclude the progress of our condition: it is a leap from power to the good life that nothing secures.
See the pageObjection
- The optimist treats technology's ills as passing defects: to every problem, more ingenuity, a better setting, a smarter app. This is solutionism, the faith that every technical problem has a technical solution.
- But the feed that held you tonight is not a clumsy tool to be perfected: it does exactly what it was designed to do. Holding you is not its flaw, it is its trade, for it is on your attention that those who build it make their living.
- To hope, then, that the industry thriving on this mechanism will correct it of its own accord is to set the fox to guard the henhouse. Improvement may come, but not from refining the tool alone.
Therefore So the optimist is mistaken in filing under malfunctions what is, in truth, the machine's very purpose.
See the pageThe instrument auditExerciseInspired by the Enlightenment tradition
In the wake of and the , this exercise asks not that you use less but better: to subject your own use to the very method you expect of technology. You name the end a tool ought to serve, observe whether it truly serves it, and correct the use through more ingenuity rather than retreat. It is optimism carried to its end: not trusting blindly, but demanding of each use that it deliver what it promises.
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Discover the Premium accountThe use charterExerciseInspired by Aristotle
holds if the use is genuinely chosen. But a tool built to hold you tilts the use quietly: goodwill alone is no match for it. This exercise arms the choice with clear rules and a little friction, so that the use you decide is the use you get. knew it: one does not become temperate by decree, but by arranging one's repeated acts, for we are what we habitually do.
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Discover the Premium account- Descriptive QuestionIs the tool neutral?
A tool, we are told, is neither good nor bad in itself, everything depending on its use; but does a weapon, or a news feed engineered to capture the eye, really carry no slope of its own?
the tool - PrescriptiveVitalThe mastery of nature
Since Bacon and Descartes, technology has promised to make us "as it were masters and possessors of nature"; it has pushed back hunger and disease, but it also unleashes forces no one governs: is this half-kept mastery on its way, or contradictory in its very principle?
nature - DescriptivePower and wisdom
Technical means accumulate: each generation inherits the machines and knowledge of all those before it; the wisdom to use them, however, cannot be stockpiled and must be won anew by each of us. Is this gap between power and discernment a lag that education could close, or does it widen by its very nature?
technological civilization - PrescriptiveExistentialThe remedy and the poison
Plato already feared that writing would weaken the very memory it claimed to serve; every tool that extends us relieves us of a capacity, down to the assistant that now thinks in our place: where does service end, where does dispossession begin?
our faculties - PrescriptivePolitical & legalChoosing our technologies
No one voted for the smartphone or for artificial intelligence, yet they reorganize our lives: can the adoption of a technology be a common decision, or is it a force that imposes itself and gets debated only after the fact?
the adoption of technologies - PrescriptiveMoralRepairing or enhancing the human
When technology no longer transforms the world but its author, healing shades into enhancing: that threshold is a question in its own right.
the human body