Technology is often discussed and conceived in extreme terms: triumphant progress, mastering nature; or self-inflicted catastrophic destruction. But rarely is the question asked—and even more rarely answered well—what is technology? How are we affected in ourselves by our technologies?
The 2024 Difficulties of Technology seminar, conducted within the multiyear Humanitas Technica project, asked these and related questions across eight weeks of intense reading and conversation. Now, we have distilled these inquiries into their essential insights and are making them available to the public.
Our point of departure: technology is a difficulty intrinsic to human existence. Contrary to the common view, it does not consist in a series of problems and solutions. It belongs to our nature to produce technological interventions. Failing to grasp the fundamental nature of technology, as itself an extension of our own natural being, results in a self-perpetuating cycle of technological problematizing.
This cycle reaches a crisis point with the advent of LLM/GPT (“artificial intelligence”) technologies. Already living in an environment which has become structured by an inhuman pattern of technologized thinking, these new advances pose a great threat to genuine human flourishing. But we cannot fully understand the threat of “AI” without a grasp of technology as such.
Insights into Technology
Thus, building towards this final goal, we will be publishing a series of nine white papers:
- The Conception of Technology
- Technology and the Psyche
- Natural and Artificial Environment
- Technology of Biology and Biological Environments
- Culture as a System
- Governments and Technology
- Communication, Media, Institutions, Education
- Technology and the Whole Person
- Consensus on Artificial Intelligence
Together, these papers present a radical re-conceptualization of technology, poised to help us navigate not only the present problems of a technologized society but to wrestle with the ever-present difficulty of being animals possessed of technical capacity.
Today, we have made available the first three papers, in addition to an overview of the seminar as a whole. An additional two papers will be made available each week. A similar distillation will be provided for the 2025 Opportunities of Technology seminar later this year.
The Conception of Technology
Technology is not merely a neutral tool but a specifying extension of human rationality that reshapes the conditions under which judgment and action occur. Its dangers arise not from misuse alone, but from its intrinsic tendency to reorder human faculties and environments.
Technology and the Psyche
Investigating how technological systems act upon the psyche prior to conscious choice, conditioning attention, memory, and habit in ways that fragment the psyche. The central harm is not distractedness but deformation of the capacities required for truly thinking.
Natural and Artificial Environments
Artificial environments do not simply set the locus for human activity, but specify our norms of scale, and thus possible action and the frameworks of intelligibility. When we sever the artificial from the natural, we elevate efficiency over dwelling as the aim of our habitation.
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