Technology and Power

While often understood as a tool, today's technology looks more like a power structure.

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Is a hammer a good thing or bad thing? Depends on who is holding the hammer. In the right hands, it is a tool that can be used to build and provide shelter. Of course it can also be used to inflict harm.

The same analogy has sometimes been applied to technology, in particular AI. The question is not so much, is AI good or bad, but rather how it is being used. Hence, the ongoing conversation about AI ethics. Take it a step further and we get inquiries about how AI might be used for good. Ethical questions tend more toward regulation to mitigate bad outcomes. When we ask about what good AI might achieve, we then are venturing into the realm of what noble end can be accomplished with technology that otherwise would not be possible without it.

Whether it is mitigation of the negative or envisioning the fulfillment of our ideals, these approaches tend to view AI and tech as a tool, something that needs to be in the right hands and used properly.

Last century, this analogy would likely be fitting for technology. Is a computer a good thing or a bad thing. Depends. Plenty of nefarious uses for it, but then there are ways that it can be used for good ends. Tap away at the keyboard and create something that will benefit your fellow human beings. For the most part, this made sense to us.

With the rapid advancement in recent years, technology has become less about something we can put our hands on, and more about a force that is shaping our lives today and will increasingly do so in the future. These characteristics are evidence not of a powerful tool as much as a power structure.

And we definitely have opinions about power structures. Our history is replete with accounts of how certain power structures were used to inflict immeasurable harm on humans. In the modern world, we have largely said “No thank you” to these power structures. Not a lot of discussion about how monarchies are not so much good or bad, but just a matter of who is sitting on the throne. Ethics for monarchs just never caught on. No, the pronouncement has been clear. This kind of power ought not reside with an individual or just a few.

This is what makes the technological terrain so daunting, the concentration of power. On a global scale, what can be achieved rivals (or more likely surpasses) the power wielded by the most dominant empires in history. Without need to march across borders or sail the seas, entire regions can be shifted with a series of technical inputs.

Unlike the demonstrable manifestations of power in ages past, the technological terrain advances in ways we often do not notice. Your mobile device, which is likely in your hand, or very near by, has become essentially indispensable. Not so much that particular device, but the one with your profile, your imprint. When did these devices achieve the status of being indispensable? Hard to pick an exact date.

This is how the technological terrain advances its power, subtly. Its existence today, however, is not so subtle. In fact, it is announcing itself clearly with grand plans. How it got to this point though has largely been independent of our awareness. And therein lies the key. Awareness. The importance of awareness is nothing new. Ages before the first silicon circuit was built, wisdom would point toward awareness. We can notice how our surroundings function and at the same time become aware of ourselves.

The good news is that this practice of awareness is very much available to us today. The world that is presented to us looks very different than what people saw just a century ago, but the practice of directing our attention remains the same. As we notice our mobile devices, we can also take notice of our surroundings and our presence in them. Take it a step further and we can become aware of ourselves and our inner movements towards certain directions and away from others.

These subtle moves of directing attention may seem rather unspectacular in the face of such impressive and imposing ways of the technological terrain. But in the practice of directing our awareness, we begin to notice just how much the technological terrain is dependent upon us. It likes to appear as if it is the other way around, but without our attention (and our energy that follows) the world of technology would simply lose its influence.