Everyone knows that technology troubles our lives in the twenty-first century. It distracts us, surveils us, accelerates us, isolates us, weakens our habits of attention, alters the demands and means of education, and increasingly mediates in our relations to both one another and to reality itself. The natural response is to ask: how do we solve this?
But that question already distorts the situation. Not everything troubling in human life is a problem to be solved. Some things are difficulties to be lived with well.
I. The False Comfort of “Solving” Technology
Framing our technological difficulty as a series of problems has an appeal. A problem may not yet have a solution; but the possibility of a solution is implied. Once the solution is in place, we no longer need to worry about it. Thus, a problem might be solved with more regulation, or a better design, the implementation of an ethics policy, a better-adapted tool, a better source material, a clarification of a system’s procedures, and so on.
All of those things might help us, indeed, with solving certain technological problems we encounter. But if we misunderstand technology in its essential nature, this nevertheless leaves us simply waiting for the next problem, which wants yet some further solution—all the while, contributing to the difficulty’s obscurity. In other words, treating technology as a problem encourages technical solutions to technical harms. This tends to deepen our dependence upon the same mode of thinking that produced the problems in the first place.
II. Two Inadequate Views
To help us understand this false comfort, we outline here the two most common views of technology which are taken today: first, what we will call “instrumental optimism”, and second, “technological pessimism”. These are general categorizations not meant to enumerate exhaustively the range of positions commonly taken, but to give a broad orientation.
1. Instrumental optimism
From within this perspective, technology is seen as neutral: a tool whose goodness or badness depends only on the uses to which it is put. This argument has often been used, for instance, in debating gun control, nuclear technology, or automotive regulation. One may cause great harm with all three, but that is not an intrinsic and inescapable necessity. The automobile has made possible a much greater material abundance, flexibility, and connectivity. Firearms may kill, but they also prevent would-be criminals from committing atrocities. The nuclear bomb is not only a weapon of mass destruction, but a deterrent—and the underlying technology can be used to provide enormous quantities of electric power. Similarly, the smartphone might distract us, but it also enables us to reach others quickly in an emergency; the calendar might flatten out our sense of time, but it helps us stay organized in busy lives.
If we can only use the technology rightly, from this view, we will be able to build a better society.
But there is a problem with this view: namely, that our tools not only shape the world to which they are put, they also shape us, the users. Technologies, in other words, do not merely help us act with greater power, efficiency, range, or regularity. Rather, they often fundamentally change our relationships with the world and with one another—and even reorient the habits by which we think and feel about all of what is.
2. Technological pessimism
Contrariwise, the technological pessimist views technology as an autonomous system that takes over human life. The car remains instructive, here: once it becomes widespread, we see sprawl which undermines community, changes the price of homes, allows one to suffer a long daily commute, and so on. All our labor-saving innovations of the past centuries have seemingly only ushered us towards working more and more, producing less, finding less satisfaction in what we do. We become victims or our own advancements.
Here too there is a problem: namely, that such a view surrenders agency and responsibility by buying into a reductionistic theory of causality. We become caught in a web of apparent inevitability because we cannot understand how we ourselves are the most fundamental causes of technology.
In this, perhaps ironically, the pessimist and the optimist share alike: that is, both fail to understand technology’s essence as intrinsically and necessarily related to human faculties.
III. Technology as a Human Difficulty
Let us restate an earlier point: problems can be solved. Difficulties, on the other hand—while they might involve or produce problems—follow from something that cannot be solved. To navigate a difficulty, one needs prudence; one or another solution will not work at all times and in all places that such a difficulty is encountered. For instance, lifelong relationships always have unique difficulties; what solved the problems in one will not solve the problems in another.
Technology, too, is a difficulty. It does not arise from this or that particular piece of technological instrumentation, but rather from the very nature of human cognition. We are able, through our abstractive reasoning capacities, disentangle intelligible ideas from the things in which they are found (e.g., shapes like circles or forces like momentum), revise those ideas, and then—in some cases—re-instantiate them differently in the world. Principally, we form such productive concepts which extend our own natural beings. We make tools to enlarge our sphere of influence on the world outside ourselves. But the world will resist some of these efforts. That does not mean we strive either, on the one hand, to flatten the world before our might; nor, on the other, that we ought to give up and become Luddites.
Language produces misunderstanding, but ceasing to speak is not the answer. Politics produces conflict, but abandoning common life is not the answer. Education can become indoctrination or vanity, but refusing to teach is not the answer. Likewise, all technologies may produce real distortions—especially if they are pursued carelessly—but technological elimination is not a serious human answer.
IV. Fixing Technology with Technology
Using naught but technology to try fixing technology’s flaws is a fool’s errand. Of course, this has not stopped many from responding to technological harms by developing more technology. For instance, we become distracted by screens, so we install screen-time apps; overwhelmed by information, so we curate algorithmic filtering; we become isolated by social media platforms, so we join more platforms; we become anxious from technological acceleration, so we automate more tasks.
These may provide a certain short-term relief. But, like scratching a bug bite, they seldom eliminate the cause of the problem. Often, they make it worse.
That is: misuse—directing something towards the wrong ends for the wrong purposes or in the wrong manner—is not the primary reason we end up with so many technological problems. Rather, it is a lack of rightly-conceived proportion in the development, design, and deployment of our technologies before they are ever commonly used. Each technological innovation allows us to amplify certain powers; but always at the cost of weakening others. Technology extends means, but it does not provide the measure by which those means should be judged.
V. Human Measure and Resilience
When we confront the expanding mass of technological problems in the twenty-first century, it can be easy to panic and seek the insurance of human safety. And of course, safety is an important consideration. We can hardly flourish as human beings if our technology kills us all. But so, too, we cannot flourish if our instinctual reaction to every new technological innovation is one of rebellion. We must understand what the technology is, and what it can do. But in order that this knowledge be completed, that understanding must be folded into a larger conception of human faculties and flourishing.
Only from within a rightly-ordered conception of what it means to flourish as a human being, in other words, can we say whether a technology is good or bad, and in what uses that goodness or badness consists.
This requires the human being to form certain habits of cognitive and emotional resilience which are resistant to technological reduction. We think here of the arts that enable contemplation, patience, well-ordered memories, embodied cognition and skills, that foster social relationality, and that allow us to judge the truth of what we behold.
Such habits cannot, by nature, be formed efficiently. But the human being is not measured by efficiency—to accept such a measure is already to subjugate oneself to the reign of technology.
VI. Conclusion: Not Rejection, Not Surrender
If technology were only a tool, better design would save us. If technology were an autonomous force, we ought to destroy every last innovation… or resign ourselves to an inhuman fate. But if technology is an intrinsic human difficulty, then the task is neither naïve embrace nor nostalgic rejection. Rather, our need is one of developing prudence: recovering the human measure of our own making.
Continue the Inquiry
This question is developed more fully in the Humanitas Technica white paper, “The Conception of Technology”, which frames technology not as a problem to be solved, but as a difficulty intrinsic to human life and therefore requiring philosophical, cultural, and practical response.
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