Algemeen Jacques Ellul Günther Anders Lewis Mumford Herbert Marcuse Andrew Feenberg Wiebe Bijker Algemeen Luddieten Wapentuig als voorbeeld Transport Radio en televisie Internet Artificiële intelligentie Algemeen Hypermedia en hypertext Informatieovervloed Privacy Spionage, inlichtingendiensten Cyberoorlog Hackers Algemeen Het schrift Boeken en tijdschriftenDit boek maakt deel uit van de beroemde reeks Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Je zou kunnen zeggen dat de techniekfilosofie daarmee een zekere status heeft bereikt. Zover ik heb kunnen zien is dit het meest recente boek met een internationaal en interdisciplinair overzicht van de techniekfilosofie. De lijst van mensen die hebben bijgedragen (p.xi-xv] alleen al, leest als een 'wie-is-wie' op het terrein van de techniekfilosofie.
Dit is een overzichtswerk en het probeert precies dat: een overzicht bieden van 'het hele terrein'. Maar dat terrein wordt hier wel heel breed opgevat. Meer focus zou het boek beter gemaakt hebben, bij de huidige insteek had het ook twee keer zo dik kunnen zijn. Het is jammer dat de artikelen van de auteurs door die te brede insteek niet meer dan een pagina of zes / zeven konden omvatten. De artikelen presenteren daardoor in veel gevallen te veel en hebben daardoor weinig diepgang. Voor een verdere verdieping kun je gebruik maken van de literatuur die na vrijwel elk artikel wordt gegeven, maar dat is toch niet wat je in eerste instantie wilt.
Jan Kyrre Berg OLSEN / Stig Andur PEDERSEN / Vincent F. HENDRICKSDe redactie leidt het werk in, legt de opzet in delen van het boek uit, en zegt over techniekfilosofie:
"The philosophy of technology is a newcomer in philosophy. As a constituted subject it has existed for about half a century. It is one of the fastest-growing philosophical disciplines. It is also an intercontinental philosophical discipline, drawing inspiration and building lasting bridges across the unfortunate divide between Continental and analytic strands of thought in philosophy."(1)
"Definitions are always related to the values of a tradition, of a specific group of thinkers, to a school of thought, and of course to whoever provides the definition. The problem is that 'technology' is not one 'thing' but a complex of practices, methods, hopes, intentions, goals, needs and desires, besides all the actual technologies in hand. The lack of unity is in turn due to the interdisciplinary nature of technology and technology studies. A single definition simply cannot fathom the complexity of technology in its entirety. In sum, a thorough definition of 'technology' needs a 'companion' – A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology."(3)
Geschiedenis van de technologie en filosofie van de technologie bestonden lang als gescheidenen domeinen met heel verschillende benaderingen en ideeën. De laatste tien jaar is daar sterk verandering in gekomen en zijn de gezamenlijke interesses toegenomen. Dat wordt op drie terreinen bekeken.
Definities van technologie. Historici zijn niet gek op essentialistische definities van techniek of technologie, omdat ze op de hoogte zijn van de vele vormen waarin techniek voorkomt. Dat is zeker het geval vanuit het gebruikersperspectief. Bovendien blijkt dat 'technologie' als term sterk gekoppeld is geraakt aan de mannenwereld, zoals Oldenziel heeft laten zien. Tegenwoordig wordt steeds meer over 'technowetenschap' gesproken.
"Normative evaluations of technology, then, cannot assume that the meanings or consequences of technology can be easily comprehended; nor, as was once the case in the early days of the technology-assessment movement, can these characteristics be predicted from the technology’s 'hardware' characteristics. Indeed, all assessments of technology need to grapple with these epistemological and methodological problems."(9)
Cultuur en technologie. Voor definities van cultuur geldt nog meer dat je niet uit kunt gaan van een eenheid. Culturen veranderen voortdurend, worden steeds weer herschapen door het opnemen van vreemde elementen of het aanpassen van eigen tradities. Dat wordt met voorbeelden als Japan, China en de Islam uitgewerkt.
Technologisch determinisme of niet? Historici en filosofen keken lang heel verschillend aan tegen deze fundamentee kwestie.
"Discussion of the common concerns of philosophers of technology and historians of technology must include mention of 'technological determinism'. As noted above, philosophers and historians have not seen eye to eye when examining the problem of whether, if and how technology brings about social and cultural changes. In their more or less essentialistic framing of the problem a generation ago, philosophers of technology were among the most enthusiastic proponents of the notion of technology as a strong and compelling force for change in history, while historians of technology took great pains to attack any and all forms of technological-determinist arguments (Smith and Marx 1994)."(13)
Er zijn eindeloos veel perspectieven op wat technologie is en daarmee eindeloos veel definities. Vele voorbeelden daarvan.
[In feite is 'techniek' of 'technologie' allesomvattend, omdat mensen voortdurend middelen bedenken om dingen te bewerkstelligen en daardoor voortdurend meer kennis en inzicht opdoen om die middelen te verbteren of te vervangen. Het is daarom niet zo heel erg zinvol om definities te geven. Maar goed. Een van de mooiste:]
"Technology represents the combination of human understanding of natural laws and phenomena accumulated since ancient times to make things that fulfill our needs and desires or that perform certain functions (Karatsu 1990)."(19)
Technologie en kennis gaan samen, maar - naar Polanyi - die kennis is niet altijd expliciet.
"Technical knowledge consists of these two components, 'explicit' and 'tacit'; however, the greater the extent to which a technology exists in the form of the softer, less physical resources, the greater the proportion of tacit knowledge it contains."(20)
"However, bearing in mind that knowledge is a key to controlling technology as a whole, technology transfer does not take place without knowledge transfer."(21)
Met andere woorden: Omdat kennis ook bestaat uit alle ervaringen die je in context opdoet, is internationale technologieoverdracht niet iets simpels: in feite zou je ook alle onderliggende kennis moeten overdragen en dat is vrijwel uitgesloten.
[Het is ook niet echt mogelijk om te zeggen wat 'westerse technologie' is, omdat er historisch veel invloed uitging van allerlei culturen op westerse uitvindingen en omdat zich mondiaal verspreidde wat in het Westen werd bedacht.]
"By Western technology is here understood a large set of particular technologies and technological practices which mainly have their roots in inventions and developments in Europe and North America. In particular, since the Second World War, most of these technological practices have spread, so that 'Western' technology can now be found on all continents."(23)
Er zijn enorm veel overeenkomsten tussen de inzet en ontwikkeling van techniek in andere culturen en die in het Westen. Er zijn ook verschillen.
[Die verschillen zaten sterk in het gebrek aan respect voor de natuur, in het achterliggende kapitalisme en het gebruik van wetenschappelijke methoden in het Westen. Dat lijkt me vandaag de dag ook niet meer het geval.]
"A specifically 'Western' result of the wide-spread use of technology is also the capacity to disturb Earth's climate and eco-systems on a global scale, and the power to eradicate most – if not all – of mankind through the use of nuclear or biological weapons."(24)
Desondanks: Historisch gezien zijn er wel een aantal typisch westerse zaken geweest die afweken van wat er in andere culturen van invloed was. Genoemd worden stadsvorming, het systeem van handel, de arbeidsdeling, de boekdrukkunst (die er al wel eerder was in China en Korea, maar daar niet dezelfde gevolgen had: het verspreiden van kennis), de globalisering door ontdekkingstochten per schip, de inzet van andere energiebronnen (stoom, kolen, etc.) dan de spierkracht van mens en dier, het vermogen om steeds verfijnder instrumenten en machines te maken, de standaardisatie daarvoor, het produceren in massa van onderdelen, de systematische inzet van wetenschappelijke kennis voor de productie (laboratoria!) en het opleiden van mensen daarvoor, en hetzelfde voor oorlogsvoering.
"The success of science-like research to develop and perfect new technologies for military purposes set the stage for the massive technological research and development in the US after the Second World War, leading to such – military and civilian – devices as solid state electronics, CNC (computerized numerical control) machines, the digital computer, the Internet and nuclear energy. Technological development projects funded by various American defense budgets have had a tremendous influence on the way Western technology has developed during the past fifty years."(27)
Veel invloed werd door Bacon, Marx e.a. toegeschreven aan de uitvinding van buskruit, kompas en boekdrukkunst.
"In his encylopedic research on science and technology in pre-modern China, Joseph Needham documented the Chinese origins of all these technologies but was then faced with the challenge of explaining why they failed to transform Chinese society as they had revolutionized the West."(28)
"Given that China surpassed Europe in many technical domains until well into the medieval period, why did imperial Chinese civilization not generate its own scientific or industrial revolution? Why did it achieve so much in early times, then lose its virile drive to innovate and sink into vulnerable stagnation? Throughout the colonial period and through to the present day, perceptions of technological superiority have played a key role in constructing ideologies of Western dominance, and in shaping national self-images (Adas 1989)."(28)
Dat beeld en de gevolgen van westerse technologishe superioriteit hebben lang het zelfvertrouwen van de Chinezen aangetast. Maar uiteindelijk veranderde dat fundamenteel toen teruggegrepen werd op wat Needham ook liet zien: dat enorm veel technische uitvindingen hun oorsprong vonden in China.
"Needham’s long list of key Chinese technical inventions (e.g. the crossbow trigger and the blast furnace) which predated their appearance in the West effectively challenged the view that China had historically lacked 'real' technological skills or understanding. Needham’s findings began to appear in print in the early 1950s. The communist government of the People’s Republic of China, established in 1949, warmly welcomed Needham’s documentation of what they identified as the skills and ingenuity of the working masses of ancient China (also manifest in the stunning artifacts excavated by archeologists during the 1960s and 1970s)."(29)
Die omwenteling heeft doorgezet.
"Although Westerners still prefer to think of the Chinese as copying rather than innovating, China is rapidly emerging as a global leader in several branches of technoscience, including biotechnology and nanotechnology."(30)
"An intriguing parallel to this resurgence of national technological confidence can be observed in the domain of technology studies. Until recently, the Chinese historical experience was usually considered interesting as a case of failure – in the terms of Bertrand Gille, a 'blocked system'. (...)
More recently, however, critical historians have turned the tables (Sivin 1982). Instead of trying to explain a supposed failure (to follow the trajectory of the West), they ask what China was at any particular historical moment in its own terms. They then are led to ask in a more anthropological vein which technological domains were of particular significance in that historical context, and what kinds of work, social or symbolic as well as material and economic, they performed.
This is proving an exciting and revealing exercise. Examples include: the relation between the design of bells, kingship and cosmology (Falkenhausen 1994); technical changes that supported the emergence of new cultural elites (Kuhn 1987); how technologies were deployed to mark and maintain gender difference in times of social change (Bray 1997); evolving traditions of mass-production – from the ritual bronzes of the ancient Shang to the export-porcelains of the eighteenth century – and their shifting impact upon aesthetics and governance (Ledderose 2000); and philosophies of human material action (Schäfer 2005).
Just as the feminist critique has transformed technology studies and undermined its master narratives, so, too, critical studies of technology in non-Western societies, of which China offers a particularly rich span, promise stimulating new perspectives on the nature and meaning of technology."(30-31)
Met de verspreiding van de Islam werd de cultuur verrijkt met de uitvindingen uit China, India en de klassieke wereld (de laatste vooral ook door de vertaling van Griekse en Romeinse geschriften). Als voorbeelden het produceren van papier, de irrigatiewerken voor de landbouw, astronomische tabellen en buskruit en wapens.
[Hieronder in één alinea wat steeds het geval blijkt te zijn - zie China, Islam hiervoor. Culturen, landen, steden, buurten nemen van elkaar over wat ze voor zichzelf goed kunnen gebruiken. Dat delen van kennis en vaardigheden is zo'n open deur dat je meteen ziet dat kapitalistisch protectionisme en allerlei superioriteitsgevoelens op lange termijn in ieder geval niets opleveren.]
"Much of Japan’s technological history can be described as a dialogue. From the earliest times this dialogue took place between Japan and its East Asian neighbors, in particular China and Korea. Later it was an exchange between Japan and Western visitors. In the mid-nineteenth century and beyond, the government and the private sector fostered increased translation of foreign technical knowledge into Japan. Regardless of the era, there was also an internal discourse in which absorbed and indigenous technologies were transformed to suit local resources, needs and sensibilities."(37)
"During the Meiji era (1868–1912), Japan underwent industrial modernization along Western lines. The first two decades can be considered a period of technological and scientific tutelage in which Japanese technologists, entrepreneurs and engineers experimented their way through the early stages of modernization. The period following 1886 is often considered Japan’s industrial revolution, in which techniques – technologies and organization – internalized during the first decades of the Meiji era came to fruition."(41)
Staatvorming gaat over het algemeen samen met de vorming van een militaire organisatie. Die is voor de staat zo belangrijk dat het voeren van allerlei oorlogen voortdurend de ontwikkeling van technieken stimuleert waarmee een voordeel behaald kan worden op de tegenstander.
Er is een discussie gaande over de relatie tussen wetenschap en techniek, waarbij het traditionele beeld is dat wetenschap van alles verzint en techniek het toepast. Maar de omslag kwam rond 1980. De conclusie wordt in feite al gegeven in de eerste alinea van dit hoofdstuk:
"The term technoscience has come into vogue in the last two decades. It suggests a sort of hybrid combining of technology and science, and has been used by many of the best-known Science and Technology Studies writers ranging from Bruno Latour to Donna Haraway and others. Such a hybridization stands in contrast to an older usage which suggested not only distinct differences between science and technology, but also a clear relation of dependence of technology upon science, as in the once popular usage of 'applied science' referring to most engineering in its modern sense. This usage prevailed well into the twentieth century and still exists as a title for some programs, but has increasingly been called into question."(51)
[Dat primaat van de wetenschap is natuurlijk onzin. De ontwikkeling van technieken was er altijd al en ging altijd samen met kennisverwerving waardoor weer betere of andere technieken ontwikkeld konden worden. Moderne wetenschap is niet meer dan een wat methodischer manier om kennis te verwerven. Het is gewoon een hermeneutische spiraal van kennis en techniek zonder enig primaat: de techniek speelt een rol in de kennisverwerving, de kennisverwerving leidt tot betere / andere technieken. En zo verder.]
Het primaat van de wetenschap werd in feit verdedigd door wetenschapsfilosofen met een duidelijke voorkeur voor wiskunde en fysica:
"The giants of early-twentieth-century philosophy of science were Pierre Duhem, Jules Henri Poincaré and Ernst Mach, all themselves mathematician-philosophers and all decreeing the mathematical 'essence' of physics. Thus, the image of science which emerged from this set of interpreters was a science which was ahistorical, acultural, 'mathematical' or theoretical and context-free. By the time of positivism and logical empiricism, most of that image of science was retained as was the centrality of theory-bias, although one could add a weighting to logical and propositional focii to the earlier mathematization emphasis, along with concerns with observation for verification purposes. Programs such as the unification of science and the proliferation of positivist philosophy of science in the universities are well-recognized parts of this part of the history of the philosophy of science to the mid-twentieth century. Rudolph Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Herbert Feigl, Carl Hempel, Moritz Schlick et al. were some of these familiar names.
By mid-century, objections began to counter the positivist programs, and what today is usually called the 'positivist-anti-positivist wars' began. Karl Popper, Imre Lakotos, Paul Feyerabend and pre-eminently Thomas Kuhn were the anti-positivist critics. And, although concrete histories, instruments and, to some degree, experiments begin to play a role in science interpretation, it was not until later in the twentieth century that a shift to a praxis, laboratory and new experimental focus began to overwhelm the earlier trajectory of theory-centered interpretation. Before leaving philosophers of science as key interpreters of science, the appearance in the 1980s, precisely after Forman’s watershed year, of experiment- and instrument-oriented philosophy of science began to make inroads. Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening (1983), with its marked shift to intervention and manipulation via experiment and instruments, was one landmark. Robert Ackermann followed with Data, Instruments and Theory (1985), and Peter Galison with How Experiments End (1987)."(54)
Maar ook binnen de sociologie van de wetenschap kwam er steeds meer kritiek op dat idee.
"This was especially marked by the new and largely 'post-Mertonian' sociologies of science from both the United Kingdom and Europe. 'Social Constructionism', 'The Strong Programme' and 'Actor Network Theory' by the mid-1980s were in strong contention with interpretations of science which looked at the social and sometimes material cultures of science. Here the names of Trevor Pinch, Harry Collins, Steve Woolgar, Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, Karin Knorr-Cetina began to appear. Philosophers of science had new interpretive competition, and the 'wars' which occurred were an indirect recognition of the contention. "(55)
Ook in de filosofie van de techniek - met name ook in de die van Nederlandse bodem - werd en wordt die schijntegenstelling bekritiseerd: er is geen primaat van de wetenschap en er is geen primaat van de technologie. Vandaar dat tegenwoordig gesproken wordt van technowetenschap.
"The point being made is that technologies, instrumentation, mediate and make possible different and refined observations."(59)
[Precies.]
Opheldering over het begrip 'positivisme' is nodig. Habermas merkt op dat positivisten typisch niet nadenken over hun eigen uitgangspunten en vooronderstellingen.
"In addition to this, positivism often includes a stronger normative view, saying that a scientific or a technological approach is the best, or even the only legitimate, approach to tackle any economic, socio-cultural or personal problem. Put differently, positivism equates knowledge with science and accordingly claims that only science and science-based technology can bring us material and social progress. In the case of science, this approach is called scientism; in the case of technology, one speaks of technocracy. Such views are still quite current (though not unchallenged) among scientists, technologists, policy-makers, politicians and the general public."(61)
"Positivism unjustly takes the factual successes of the scientific approach to be enough epistemic justification and social legitimation. (...) Science is a legitimate human endeavor, but it is also one-sided, and hence its unconstrained expansion should be counteracted from the sphere of communicative action. "(62)
Eenzelfde benadering heeft Habermas ten aanzien van technologie.
"Technology has its proper place as an instrumental means for supporting the survival of individual human beings and of human kind more generally. All too often, however, technology intrudes on, and intends to replace, communicative discourse and action concerning societal goals (see Habermas 1971). Positivism provides an ideological underpinning of this improper 'colonization of the life-world', since it claims that the actual practices of science and technology need not, and should not, be normatively constrained from an independent domain of communicative action."(62)
"Yet one may argue that Habermas' approach still includes a positivist residue: because of his claim that the validity of scientific facts and the effectiveness of technological artifacts are independent of particular societal interests and specific norms and values, his account of the conditions of the possibility of science and technology is inadequate."(62)
Het sociaal-constructivisme laat zien dat wetenschappelijke kennis nooit neutraal en universeel valide is en dat technische artefacten ontstaan via allerlei sociale onderhandelingen (naturalisme, anti-positivisme). Van de andere kant ontbreekt daar weer de normatieve kritiek op de rol van wetenschap en kritiek in de samenleving die Habermas voorstaat.
" In contrast, many naturalistic studies of science and technology claim to provide no more than an impartial description or explanation of scientific and technological practices, and quite a few argue strongly against taking a normative stance on the scientific and technological issues they study."(63)
Feenberg is een van de auteurs die zo'n normatieve aanpak uitwerkt.
Wijkt 'engineering science' af van de normale wetenschap? Bijvoorbeeld omdat deze meer gericht is op toepassingen? Er zijn wat kleine verschillen, maar voor de rest is er een grote overeenkomst met die normale wetenschap. Er is eerder een kloof met de ingenieurspraktijk.
Welke soorten kennis spelen er bij de verschillende betrokkenen in het ontwerpen, maken en gebruiken van technische artefacten? Dat is zeer gevarieerd. Het gaat in ieder geval zowel om empirische kennis als normatieve kennis.
Het heeft lang geduurd voordat men los kwam van het idee dat technologische kennis niet meer is dan toegepaste wetenschappelijke kennis. De eerste stappen in die richting werden gezet door techniekhistorici (bv. Koyré, Vincenti, Faulkner). Techniekfilosofen trokken de lijn daarna door in meer algemene richting: techniek blijkt niet alleen maar 'toegepaste natuurwetenschap', er spelen andere elementen in door zoals de collectiviteit / sociale achtergronden, contextgebondenheid van technische oplossingen, normativiteit, en het niet-propositionele karakter van veel technische kennis. Over collectiviteit:(
"Technical norms and standards are part and parcel of technological knowledge. They differ from natural phenomena in that they require a community of professionals for their existence; obviously, these norms and standards are often the result of collective decision-making, they are social constructs. This is reflected in the epistemic standards that apply to them. In contrast to natural science knowledge, justification criteria are purely social, because in the latter case it is entirely up to the group members to decide about the truth (or effectiveness) of the beliefs; in principle there is no need to check against the external (natural) world. It can even be the case that certain members of the group are authorized to make decisions about what beliefs to accept. "(72)
Kern van de zaak weer in de eerste alinea:
"Until the 1970s the debate on the science–technology relationship was dominated by theoretical issues from the philosophy of science. The history of technology had limited theoretical import, and sociology of technology was almost nonexistent. The development of both of these disciplines led to criticism of the subsumption schema (the domination of science over technology), and to the rise of the so-called interaction schema as an alternative schema. Although the interplay model belongs to the interaction schema, the interaction between scientific and technical practices is considered to be more than just a simple exchange of results between practices. Both kinds of practices are changed in some manner, yet each also maintains its uniqueness and integrity. "(75)
Belangrijke namen hier: Derek de Solla Price, S. Barry Barnes, Arie Rip.
"The focus taken here is how scientific research contributes to the development of instruments and apparatus for technological use."(78)
"New Experimentalists share the view that a number of problems, such as the underdetermination of theory by empirical knowledge, the theory-ladenness of observation, and extreme skeptical positions – such as social constructivist – that result from it, stem from the theory-dominated perspective on science of positivistic philosophers of science. They defend that focusing on aspects of experiments and instruments in scientific practice holds the key to avoiding these problems. Some of the key figures of this movement in the 1980s and early 1990s are Ian Hacking, Nancy Cartwright, Allan Franklin, Peter Galison, Ronald Giere, Robert Ackermann, and more recently Deborah Mayo. These authors do not accept the restriction to the logic of science that positivistic philosophers had set for themselves. (...) The traditional distinction between the 'context of discovery' and the 'context of justification', which motivated why philosophers should restrict their task to the logic of justification of scientific theories, is abandoned. New Experimentalists, instead, aim at an account of the rationality of scientists in scientific practices that includes how scientists reason about experiments, instruments, data and theoretical knowledge."(79-80)
Karl Mannheim heeft met zijn sociologie van de kennis al vergaand uitgewerkt dat er maatschappelijke invloeden zijn die de wetenschappelijke kennisverwerving beïnvloeden en bepalen wat we überhaupt 'kennis' noemen. Maakt dat wetenschappelijke waarheid nu volledig relatief?
"To test the truth of a scientific claim is almost impossible for all but a very small elite. It is one of the strangest facts about science that the belief that anyone can test a scientific claim remains robust in the face of the fact that hardly anyone can or has. (...) It becomes clear that, first, there is ample logical space for a sociology of scientific knowledge and, second, that those who practice it are likely to be thought to be questioning the truths of science and find themselves the subject of attacks such as are more typically directed at religious heretics than at scholars. There was even a period, in the 1990s, which became known as the 'science wars' because of the tenor of the attacks on sociologists of scientific knowledge by certain natural scientists."(85)
"Whether or not the theory is true, the crucial point is to look at the social forces involved in bringing people to believe it was true; the analysis should be no different in the case of relativity than in the case of, say, astrology. No philosophical commitment to the truth or otherwise of science is required to adopt this methodological stance – it is known as methodological relativism."(86)
Collins komt nog uitvoeriger terug op de stelling dat iedereen de waarheid van wetenschappelijke kennis zelf kan controleren door het onderzoek te herhalen.
[Ik vind die controleerbaarheid van kennis bijzonder belangrijk, dus ik citeer even heel uitvoerig:]
" 'Believers' in scientific method often cite replication as one of the crucial differences between science and other kinds of belief – anyone, from anywhere, who checks the results of a scientific experiment will get the same result, so experimentally determined facts stand outside society. It has already been mentioned that experiments are expensive to carry out, so the 'anyone' in 'anyone can check' is often a very small number of people. For most of us, including scientists, belief that the checks have been carried out and have confirmed the initial claims depends on assessing the credibility of the small number of replicators and the reliability of the media through which the results are conveyed to a wider audience. Obviously, these assessments depend upon wider assumptions about how society works – most of us would make different assumptions if the claims concerned witchcraft, magic, or even experimental results concerning, say, paranormal phenomena.
That is what happens 'at best'. Often, however, even the members of the elite group who have the means to test an experimental claim find themselves in dispute. Under these circumstances the social components intrinsic to the very process of replication become clear. Thus, it is not enough to have the logistic resources required to repeat an experiment; one must also have the necessary skills to do it. To some extent, skills turn on 'tacit knowledge' that cannot be expressed. Therefore, if someone fails to confirm an experimental result, it may not be that the result was wrong – they may not have possessed the necessary skills. The only clear way to find out if the necessary skills are in play is to see if the experiment 'works', but what it is to 'work' is usually the subject of the dispute – e.g. should a working gravitational wave detector of a certain sensitivity see gravitational waves or should it not see them? The experimenters find themselves caught in the 'experimenter’s regress': to know if an experiment has been soundly performed, one has to show it has the right outcome, but to know what the right outcome should be one must first conduct a series of sound experiments. Disputes of this kind are settled by agreements to agree on what count as the sound experiments; and this, again, turns on judgments of credibility and so forth – these are sociologically analysable processes."(86-87)
[Het is uiteindelijk het vertrouwen in onderzoekers dat maakt dat het systeem werkt. Of anders gezegd: het simpele uitgangspunt dat mensen er niet op uit zijn elkaar te bedriegen, maakt dat het systeem werkt. Dat er af en toe iemand opduikt die dat wél doet, bevestigt dat in feite. Maar dan blijkt het systeem sterk genoeg om dat uiteindelijk boven tafel te krijgen. Ik maak me wat dat betreft minder zorgen over individuele onderzoekers dan over de achterliggende organisaties die de richting van het onderzoek beïnvloeden en censuur toepassen op gevonden resultaten.]
Als definitie hanteert Bijker:
"The term 'social construction of technology' can be used to denote two different things. First, it is a research approach to study technical change in society, both in historical and in contemporaneous studies. And, second, it is a theory about the development of technology and its relation to society."(88)
De term 'social construction' komt uit de sociologie van de kennis (Mannheim, Berger / Luckmann, Schutz).
"Berger and Luckmann focus on the social construction of ordinary knowledge of the sort that we use to make our way about society. Other scholarship developed around such themes as the social construction of mental illness, deviance, gender, law and class. Similarly, in the 1970s the social construction of scientific facts developed, followed in the 1980s by the social construction of artifacts.
Constructivist studies of science and technology come in a wide variety of mild and radical (Sismondo 1993). The mild versions merely stress the importance of including the social context when describing the development of science and technology. The radical versions argue that the content of science and technology is socially constructed. In other words, the truth of scientific statements and the technical working of machines cannot be explained as being derived from nature but as constituted in social processes."(88)
Nog wat meer achtergrond:
"The social construction of technology (SCOT) grew out of the combination of three distinct bodies of work: the science–technology–society (STS) movement, the sociology of scientific knowledge and the history of technology. The first started in the 1970s, mainly in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Its goal was to enrich the curricula of both universities and secondary schools by studying issues such as scientists' social responsibilities, the risks of nuclear energy, the proliferation of nuclear arms, and environmental pollution. The movement was quite successful, especially in science and engineering faculties, and some of the STS courses became part of the degree requirements. The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) emerged in the late 1970s in the United Kingdom on the basis of work in the sociology of knowledge, the philosophy of science and the sociology of science. The central methodological tenets of the strong programme (especially its symmetry principle) seemed equally applicable to technology. In the history of technology, especially in the US, an increasing number of scholars began to raise more theoretical and sociologically inspired questions (influential were Constant [1980], Hughes [1983] and Cowan [1983] ). Path-breaking advocacy for this body of work in the history of technology provided the reader edited by MacKenzie and Wajcman (1985). Researchers from these three traditions convened in an international workshop in 1984 in the Netherlands. The subsequent volume from that workshop, edited by an STS-er, a historian of technology and a sociologist of scientific knowledge (Bijker et al. 1987), has been heralded as the starting-point of the social construction of technology."(89)
Kritiek op het technologische determinisme van de jaren ervoor stimuleerde de ontwikkeling van SCOT. Aan de hand van technische artefacten werd de rol van de sociale context aangetoond. Later werd ook de wederzijdse invloed tussen techniek en samenleving in het onderzoek betrokken (een verbreding). Theorievorming ontstond weer later.
Over de invloed die onderzoeksinstrumenten hebben op de veranderingen in wetenschappelijek theorieën. Zo kunnen nieuwe instrumenten nieuwe waarnemingen mogelijk maken die een bestaande theorie aantasten. Voorbeeld: Galileo's toepassing van de telescoop leidde tot resultaten die het geocentrische wereldbeeld van Aristoteles tegenspraken. Ander voorbeelden: de microscoop, e fotocamera, de computer.
Over de transformatie van levende organismen tot biotische artefacten door middel van techniek (biotechnologie, gentechnologie).
"The above confirms that the greater and the deeper our understanding and knowledge of how living organisms function and reproduce, the greater, the more precise is our ability to control and manipulate living organisms, in our attempts ontologically to transform them from being naturally occurring entities to become biotic artifacts. As artifacts, they differ from abiotic/exbiotic ones in that, while the latter are inert, they are alive. However, the fact that they are alive, that they breathe, eat, excrete, grow, develop and reproduce, does not necessarily undermine the claim that they are artifacts, as those autopoietic biological mechanisms have been captured and diverted by Homo faber to serve, no longer their own tele, but the goals and intentions of humankind – "(102)
Fysica en fysici werden pas echt belangrijk met de atoombom van WOII, de Koude Oorlog die er op volgde, en de opkomst van atoomenergie. Fysica werd daarbij sterk geïntegreerd in het miltiair-industriele complex, waarbij geheimhouding ook een grote rol speelde.
"The notions that nuclear technologies are fearful products of insufficiently accountable technocratic elites lead one to two vital questions. The first is essentially anthropological. Why would decent people work on such technologies? Hugh Gusterson has shown that decent, often liberal progressive people work for the US Sandia National Laboratory on nuclear weapons systems and given a range of insights as to why (Gusterson 1998). The second question concerns the substance of the moral issues inherent in nuclear weapons. For these aspects the work of Douglas P. Lackey is particularly insightful, albeit stoical, separating, as he attempts to do, nuclear weapons from nuclear war (Lackey 1984). "(106)
Maar ethische kwesties hebben niet alleen te maken met atoomwapens, maar ook met atoomenergie: kerncentrales, nucleair afval, kwetsbaarheid, de verhouding met andere manieren om energie te produceren gezien de opwarming van de aarde.
Het verschil tussen technische productie ('engineering') en wetenschap is dat er bij het eerste ontwerp ('design') te pas komt naar een lijst van specificaties gebaseerd op de functies die een artefact moet hebben om tegemoet te komen aan de behoeften en wensen van de gebruikers ervan. Omdat ingenieurs heel veel verschillende producten maken, is het aantal designprocessen ook erg gevarieerd.
"With so much variety, the question arises whether it is possible to define domain-independent general principles and procedures for engineering design. Simon (1996 [1969]) maintains that such a general science of design is possible."(112)
"According to the ABET description, engineering design is a decision-making process. Designing involves decision-making on different levels, at different stages and about different kinds of issues. Simon (1996 [1969] ) considers this decision-making process to be all about the problem of making rational choices between available alternatives. Bucciarelli (1996) characterizes it more as a social process in which negotiations between different stakeholders also play a role, thus stressing that more is involved in engineering design than mere instrumental rationality. "(114)
Pickering schildert eerst kort de geschiedenis van de cybernetica-beweging:
"It begins with Norbert Wiener’s work at MIT during the Second World War that sought (unsuccessfully) to build an anti-aircraft predictor – a machine which could extrapolate a plane’s traject- ory into the future and hence improve the chances of shooting it down (Galison 1994; Mindell 2002). Philosophically, the key feature of this device was that it could be thought of as both a purposeful machine in itself and as a model for understanding purposeful behavior in living creatures, thus eliding the distinction between machines, animals and humans – an idea set out in a classic essay by Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow (1943) and developed at greater length in the 1948 book that first gained the field worldwide attention, Wiener’s Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Alongside Wiener himself, historical attention has focused on a series of conferences supported by the Macy Foundation between 1946 and 1953 as the principal locus for the elaboration of cybernetic ideas in the US (Pias 2003, 2004). Both Heims (1991) and Dupuy (2000) have written book-length studies based on the Macy Proceedings, the former focusing on cybernetics as social science, the latter as cognitive science. The chairman of the Macy meetings was neuropsychiatrist and philosopher Warren McCulloch, the most important figure in the immediate postwar history of US cybernetics (Kay 2001); the secretary for the later meetings and editor of the Proceedings was the Austrian émigré physicist Heinz von Foerster. Institutional centers of cybernetics were the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, where McCulloch's group was based, and the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois estab- lished by Foerster (1958–75: Müller and Müller, forthcoming). Beyond the canonical history, cybernetics had a rich and varied life outside the US. It flourished in France and Germany, and became almost the official science of the Soviet Union (Gerovitch 2002). In Britain, the publication of Cybernetics catalysed the formation of the Ratio Club, an informal dining club of proto-cyberneticians that met between 1949 and 1958 (Pickering forthcoming)."(118)
De benadering wordt verderop beschreven:
"Though this has been obscured by Wiener’s background in mathematics, cybernetics began as a science of the brain, and its distinctive character derived from its conception of the brain as an organ of performance rather than of cognition – the brain as a key organ in our bodily functioning and, especially, in our adaptation to situations we have never encountered before. And, materially, one hallmark of early cybernetics was the construction of electromechanical models that could illuminate 'the go' of the performative and adaptive brain (Cordeschi 2002)."(119)
Cybernetica is weer actueel aan het worden:
"There is presently a growing resurgence of interest in cybernetics across the humanities and social sciences, with Donna Haraway’s 'Manifesto for Cyborgs' (1985) and N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman (1999) amongst the key works – an interest that reflects the conviction that cybernetics is a 'new kind of science' (Wolfram 2002) importantly different from more familiar sciences such as physics or mainstream sociology. One way to get at that difference is ontologically (Pickering 2002; forthcoming)."(119)
Wetenschap heeft heel lang nauwelijks een rol gespeeld in de ontwikkeling van de chemische industrie:
"By and large, until the mid-nineteenth century, chemical industry and technology was more important to scientific chemistry than the other way around. Nevertheless, it is with some justification that chemical industry is said to be the first industry that profited significantly from advances in pure science."(124)
Techniekfilosofie is pas een jaar of 30 een bloeiende discipline binnen de filosofie, hoewel techniek in feite altijd iets essentieels is geweest voor mensen. De met het praktische handelen verbonden kennis werd echter lager gewaardeerd dan theoretische kennis. Pas met Francis Bacon veranderde dat en in de 19e eeuw schreven mensen als Auguste Comte, Henri de Saint-Simon en Karl Marx over technologie.
"Nevertheless, scores of major philosophers in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had very little or nothing to say about technology. Even with the growth of early modern science and technology followed by the industrial revolution, the Continental European rationalists and British empiricists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (with the exception of Bacon), despite two centuries of intense concern with theory of knowledge and the nature of knowledge in pure science, had surprisingly little to say specifically about technology. Why was this? "(132)
Een van de redenen was dat techniek gezien werd als toegepaste wetenschap en onproblematisch in zichzelf. Over techniek werd alleen maar positief gedacht door filosofen. De kritiek die er in die eeuwen op technologie etc. bestond, kwam van dichters, romanschrijvers, maatschappelijke actiegroepen (Romantiek, Luddieten) en niet van filosofen.
" ... it would seem that only after the Second World War, especially because of nuclear bombs and the nuclear arms race, were large numbers of people willing to entertain the idea that technology might be at least as harmful as helpful to humanity. Similarly, although there had been criticisms of the harmful effects of technology on the environment, particularly among the Romantics, mass popular concern about negative impacts of technology on the environment did not surface until the 1960s and 1970s. Thus nuclear weapons and widely reported ecological side-effects of technology made reflection on the ethical balance of the benefits and risks of technology a widespread phenomenon. With development of biotechnology, particularly the possibility of genetic modification of humans, and concomitant speculation about engineering human nature itself, intensified concern about this seemingly more intimate and 'essential' intrusion of technology into humanity grew."(132-133)
Een ander probleem dat de ontwikkeling van techniekfilosofie remde was de noodzaak van samenwerking tussen vele filosofische disciplines, terwijl er tot in de 80-er jaren nog sprake was van een behoorlijk sterke scheiding tussen kennisdisciplines (kennistheorie, wetenschapsfilosofie enz.) en ethische disciplines (ethiek, sociale filosofie enz.). Het sterke wantrouwen tussen 'Analytische Filosofie' en 'Continentale Filosofie' hielp daarbij niet.
"Anglo-American analytical and linguistic philosophers tended to dismiss much of German and French philosophy as obscurantist, pretentious and meaningless, while professionals in the mainstream of Continental philosophy often dismissed analytical philosophy as narrow, trivial and irrelevant to the great issues of the age."(133)
Daar kwam pas heel geleidelijk verandering in in de laatste decennia van de twintigste eeuw. Al die barrières lijken pas in dit laatste decennium van de 21ste eeuw geslecht, zodat vruchtbare samenwerking mogelijk is.
De fenomenologie in de lijn van de latere Husserl (analyses van de leefwereld) en Merleau-Ponty blijkt een heel stimulerende richting. Hetzelfde geldt voor de hermeneutiek, marxisme en kritische theorie. Nog een richting met invloed: het pragmatisme (vooral van Dewey). Ook het idee 'constructivisme' is door de decennia heen in kracht gegroeid.
"In 1923, György Lukács combined the constructive trend of German idealism with Marxism. Rather than the forms of mind or reason as such, it is the forms of economic production that structure knowledge and worldviews. In the 1960s the social constitution of knowledge was revived in a number of forms. In the 1970s this approach was applied to the sociology of scientific knowledge by the British social constructivists of science. Social construction of technology is in some ways less controversial than the social construction of scientific knowledge."(137)
Inmiddels is een integratie gaande in de filosofietechniek waarin een aantal thema's fundamenteel blijken te zijn. Bijvoorbeeld die van context, betekenis van taal, handelen, belichaming van kennis, normativiteit.
"One feature of the various schools of recent philosophy applied to the philosophy of technology is their sensitivity to the issue of context. Ordinary language philosophy, in contrast to earlier logical positivism and formal-logic-oriented analytical philosophy, emphasizes the context of utterances. Deweyan pragmatism likewise is a thorough-going contextualism. (...)
The emphasis on action rather than passive apprehension in knowledge has been central to both Marxism and pragmatism. Furthermore the understanding of meaning in pragmatism and in ordinary language philosophy is one that emphasizes use in practice rather than correspondence to abstract entities. (...)
Similarly an emphasis on the role of embodiment in human life and knowledge distinguishes a number of the mid-to-late-twentieth-century approaches to philosophy from earlier approaches emphasizing the dualism of mind and body. (...)
Another turn in the treatment of knowledge and action shared by a number of the philosophies made use of in discussing technology is the social nature of knowledge. (...)
Another area of integration of approaches is the way that the philosophy of technology forces use of both descriptive and normative or evaluative considerations to give adequate accounts of technological artifacts and projects."(139-140)
Over de rol die semiotiek (Von Uexküll, Peirce, De Saussure, Cassirer) kan spelen in de conceptuele analyse van techniek.
Het gaat hier dus om een techniekfilosofie - gebaseerd op de kritische theorie van de Frankfurter Schule - die zegt dat techniek niet maatschappelijk neutraal (instrumentalisme) is en zich ook niet autonoom (substantivisme) ontwikkelt zonder dat mensen er invloed op kunnen hebben.
"My own critical theory of technology is a particular application of this general perspective. It derives from Marcuse’s version of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Marcuse argued that the existing modern technology forms a quasi-dystopian system that might be changed through political action. Marcuse’s writings are very abstract, but I have concretized his position through a constructivist approach to the analysis of specific technologies, such as computer-mediated communication and experimentation on human subjects. Critical theory of technology thus represents a unique synthesis of ideas drawn from the Frankfurt School and contemporary science and technology studies."(147)
"Critical theory of technology is a political theory of modernity with a normative dimension. It belongs to a tradition extending from Marx to Foucault and Habermas according to which advances in the formal claims of human rights take center stage while in the background centralization of ever more powerful public institutions and private organizations imposes an authoritarian social order. "(147)
"A hermeneutics of technology must make explicit the meanings implicit in the devices we use and the rituals they script. Social histories of technologies such as the bicycle, artificial lighting or firearms have made important contributions to this type of analysis. Critical theory of technology attempts to build a methodological approach on the lessons of these histories. "(148)
"Yet, because the foundations of our political philosophies and arrangements were elaborated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there is still a tendency to distinguish sharply between politics and technology, the one supposedly based on rights and values, the other on scientific knowledge. In reality, the political consensus is largely shaped by the available technological form of life rather than rational argumentation, and all the scientific knowledge in the world will not get an engineer from the general idea of a function to a concrete device. The many technically underdetermined aspects of design must be decided by reference to social principles and demands. This situation must be more widely understood to bring technology into the public sphere where it increasingly belongs. (...) Technological rationality would no longer be defined as purely instrumental but would become conscious of its value-laden character and as such open a space within its compass for moral and political rationality."(149)
Feenberg onderscheidt tussen primaire en secundaire instrumentatie.
"The primary instrumentalization has been studied primarily by philosophers in the existentialist tradition. Their reflections on what Peter-Paul Verbeek has called the 'transcendental' preconditions of technology form the basis of a critique of modernity. This excessively negative approach overlooks the way in which the secondary instrumentalization adapts and complements the initial decontextualization and reduction to which objects are submitted as they enter the technical field. The secondary instrumentalization is studied by social scientists and historians, who focus precisely on what philosophers overlook: the concrete social forces and meanings at work in the design process. But, without a theory of the intrinsic structure of the technical, they lack a normative perspective on the consequences and limits of technology. Critical theory of technology attempts to combine insights from both sides of this deadlocked argument."(151)
Verwijst naar een begin van het soort denken in de cybernetica. Maar verwijst vooral naar Conna Haraway's werk. Daarin worden drie belangrijke inzichten verwoord. De eerste is dat de grens tussen mens en dier is doorbroken, de tweede is dat het onderscheid tussen mens en machine problematisch is geworden, de derde is dat de grens tussen fysisch en niet-fysisch niet meer zo scherp getrokken kan worden. Het lijkt er op dat je voor of tegen Haraway bent.
Aanhangers van het posthumanisme zijn voorstanders. Voorbeeld: Andy Clark.
"On the critical side, theorists such as Francis Fukuyama, Leon Kass and Bill McKibben have featured prominently. One of McKibben's most interesting arguments against a posthuman future stems from his sense of how human identity and self-understanding relate to certain forms of embodied action."(156)
Korte bespreking van de moderne gevolgen van simulaties, beeldvorming, manipulaties van de werkelijkheid door de media, met op de achtergrond Baudrillard.
Het technologie-als-toegepaste-wetenschap-model / technologie-als-slechts-een-middel is sterk aanwezig in het Westerse denken.
"In the Anglo-American empiricist, French/German Enlightenment, and European positivist traditions, technology typically continues to be conceived in straightforwardly Cartesian fashion. Science tells us what there is; technology simply employs this knowledge in whatever way we decide. "From science comes foresight, from foresight, action," declared the father of positivism (Comte 1988: 38). The primary philosophical issues therefore lie either before or after technology. Before we can receive the benefits, we must have reliable knowledge – hence the need for an epistemology of science. Once we have it, we must decide among the technologically possible goals that science empowers us to achieve – hence the need for an ethics (in the broad sense, including socio-political inquiry). With philosophy focused on how we can know and what we may do, technology falls uninterestingly between them."(161)
"By the 1970s, however, this pinched conception of technology was under attack from several directions (Dusek 2006). One line of criticism accompanied growing dissatisfaction with the dominant positivistic tendency to define science in terms of a narrowly formalist, ahistorical model of theory confirmation. As philosophical models of scientific reasoning became more contextualized and pluralized (Kuhn 1996, Longino 2002) and integrated into a new perspective that tended to view science as a human practice instead of just a kind of reasoning (Fuller 2002, Stengers 2000, Rouse 1996), the old idea of technology as merely making use of science also became untenable. Philosophers began to acknowledge what historians and sociologists of technology had always known, namely that modern science and technology are mutually interdependent (Latour and Woolgar 1986). Even early modern science relied upon the prior existence of technical devices (e.g. telescopes, microscopes, measuring instruments) invented by persons who had no recognizably 'scientific' concerns (White 1962)."(161)
Wat zijn technische artefacten?
"Technological artifacts are in general characterized narrowly as material objects made by (human) agents as means to achieve practical ends."(165)
[Is het nu zo belangrijk om technische artefacten te kunnen onderscheiden van natuurlijke of van kunstobjecten? Natúúrlijk zijn de intenties van de makers en maatschappelijke inkadering hiervoor bepalend. Is dit nu weer zo'n typische trend van filosofen: je terugtrekken op abstracte analyses in ivoren torens in plaats van na te denken over de gevolgen van techniek voor mens en samenleving? Het artikel soms verder alleen maar auteurs op.]
Actoren zijn in sociale wetenschap vaak individueel beschreven. Technische beroepsuitoefenaren handelen echter niet individueel, maar zijn opgenomen in sociale kaders die ook normatief van aard zijn. Binnen die kaders wordt bepaald wie een competente broepsuitoefenaar is en wie niet.
Over het Amerikaanse pragmatisme van Charles S. Peirce, William James en met name John Dewey. Dewey is een echte voorloper (qua denken en in tijd): hij heeft geen expliciete boeken over technologie, maar het onderwerp doordesemd heel zijn werk. Hij heeft inzichten die anders zijn dan die van Heidegger of Ellul of Horkheimer / Adorno of Habermas. Die inzichten blijken verrassend modern te zijn.
"Technological success or failure is in Dewey's view the responsibility of human actors as they engage social networks as well as networks of non-human objects and events. Although past successes may provide platforms from which future technology can be mounted, there is no general recipe for technological success. Technology requires sensitivity to context."(176)
"Dewey's naturalistic thesis has important consequences for environmental philosophy. Rejecting transcendentalist arguments, Dewey's pragmatic technology utilizes one part of nature to transform or reconstruct another part of nature. Some situations call for what is relatively external to the organism to be altered or adapted to the needs of the organism. Other situations require the organism to accommodate itself to what are relatively external conditions. In most cases, however, what is required is what Dewey terms 'adjustment' – a judicious balance between adaptation and accommodation. Dewey's pragmatic technology is thus neither essentialist nor reductionist."(177)
"Dewey's critique of technology also differs in important ways from that of 'second generation' critical theorist Jürgen Habermas. Dewey would have certainly rejected Habermas's claim that the human sciences proceed in a manner that is totally different from the technosciences because the former are primarily concerned with meaning and value whereas the latter are primarily concerned with data-gathering. His pragmatic technology provides the basis for relating and integrating within a general theory of inquiry the several interests – the empirical sciences, the historical hermeneutical sciences, and the critical sciences – that Habermas tends to maintain as distinct (Habermas 1971)."(177)
Hermeneutiek wordt traditioneel gezien als de interpretatie van teksten. Later werd het idee uitgebreid naar een methode van de sociale wetenschap (Dilthey, Schleiermacher) en nog verder naar de filosofische methode om het bestaan te interpreteren (Heidegger).
Hier wordt de oorspronkelijke betekenis eerst genomen. Teksten zijn namelijk ook technische artefacten. Omgekeerd hebben technische artefacten / technieken doelen en een betekenis in een context die geïnterpreteerd moet en kan worden.
"That is, technologies, precisely because they can be taken and used in a multiplicity of contexts, uses and trajectories, display a range of indeterminancy of meaning which is precisely the phenomenon which any hermeneutic theory of meaning must engage. "(182)
'Analytische filosofie' slaat in feite op een methode om filosofie te bedrijven met heel duidelijke voorkeuren:
"What characterizes analytic philosophy is an abhorrence of system-building and speculation, a preference for a detailed treatment of clearly delineated problems, an emphasis on clear definitions of the concepts used to put a problem and to answer it, an emphasis on language, conceptualization and formalization, a general acknowledgment of the relevance of empirical facts, and a great respect for the findings of science – to such an extent, even, that science and philosophy are considered to merge into each other or to form in some sense a continuum. (...) The following overview of some core issues in analytic philosophy of technology – the character of technological knowledge, the study of design and action, and the status of technical artifacts – will show that they are close to the heart of analytic philosophy."(184)
Technische kennis kent bijvoorbeeld een overgang van beschrijvend naar normatief die wetenschappelijke kennis niet heeft.
"This presentation of some of the core issues addressed by analytic philosophers of technology might suggest that they are not interested in ethical and social problems in connection with technology, just as the ethical and social dimensions of science are almost completely ignored in analytic philosophy of science. This is not so, however, but their interest is triggered more by the engagement of analytic philosophers of technology in engineering practice than by the interests of philosophical ethics. Analytic ethics is primarily a form of meta-ethics, that is, it discusses the character of ethical judgments and ethical statements and the way these are related, through rules of inference, for instance, with other types of statements. It is not apparent that technology presents special challenges to meta-ethics – none, at least, that do not already occur within the philosophy of action and the theory of rationality."(187)
Uitleg van Weber's onderscheid tussen doelrationaliteit ('Zweckrationalität') en normatieve rationaliteit ('Wertrationalität'). Weber constateert dat de eerste in de moderne samenleving een steeds grotere plaats inneemt. De kritische theorie houdt zich daar dan vervolgens ook mee bezig. Met name Habermas met zijn ideeën over communicatieve rationaliteit maakt verder duidelijk wat technische rationaliteit is.
"Technological rationality is a pure rationality of function, focused exclusively on the relation of means to ends. Technology’s animating rationality restricts the scope of its deliberation to means–end thinking, to a species of calculation dedicated to maximizing economy and efficiency, with respect to time and effort, in the realization of ends. So 'technological rationality' refers to that view of reason which focuses its attention exclusively upon the adequacy of means for the realization of ends, where those ends are not themselves subject to non-strategic rational adjudication, and to the notion of progress that is consistent with this view."(190-191)
[Dit voelt eigenlijk als een beperking tot wat Habermas bedoelde met instrumentele en strategische rationaliteit. Waar is de maatschappelijke discussie gebleven?]
Beschrijving van wat fenomenologie kan betekenen:
"Phenomenology’s fundamental concern is thus to uncover, understand and, when necessary, contest and seek to transcend the underlying principles of vision and division which – like lenses we see through but do not see – tacitly inform and frequently distort our basic sense of ourselves and our worlds."(196)
"Ironically, however, Husserlian phenomenologists have tended to avoid the difficult question of the essence of technological phenomena. Owing to this omission, Husserlian phenomenology tends to join forces with the other contemporary 'anti-essentialist' approaches to technology found in the sociology of science and in social constructivism (Latour, Pinch and Bijker, and the like)."(198)
Casussen waaruit duidelijk wordt dat er allerlei problemen verbonden kunnen zijn met 'experts' en 'expertise' (zoals 'bias', vooroordeel, onkunde en onethisch gedrag).
Over technieken om te visualiseren / afbeeldingen te maken. Relatie met technieken voor het hele golvenspectrum, voor het opbouwen van beelden, met digitalisering, met simulatie en modellering.
Over preventie / voorzorgsmaatregelen ten aanzien van catastrofes. Dupuy's kritiek is onder andere dat mensen zich niet kunnen voorstellen dat er een enorme catastrofe zal plaatsvinden en dat dat met name het probleem is.
[Vaag geklets verder. Waarschijnlijk een metafysicus, die Dupuy.]
[Wist ik toch ... De vooronderstellingen van wetenschap en techniek worden hier aangeduid met 'metafysica' en het nadenken erover als een 'metafysisch onderzoeksprogramma'. Waarom? Ik zou het liever over 'grondslagenonderzoek' hebben om los te komen van een traditie - en van de theoriën en concepten van die traditie - die vaak niet meer is dan de seculiere versie van religie.]
LTS-onderzoek heeft zo zijn eigen kenmerken: aandacht voor grootschalige systemen ('deep structures'; netwerken) waarvan de onderdelen sterk op elkaar afgestemd zijn, en waarin ook een sterke samenhang bestaat met cultuur en samenleving.
"These concerns inspired historical narratives of the development of specific systems and the history of large technical systems as a category sui generis; the development of strategies for building and managing systems; and the intertwinements of LTS development and the shaping of cities, nations and regions."(219)
[Waar zit het verschil met LTS eigenlijk?]
Technische artefacten hebben soms het karakter van infrastructuren voor grote groepen mensen (denk aan elektricititeitsnetwerk, netwerk voor openbaar vervoer en zo verder). Dat worden sociotechische systemen genoemd. Het ontwerpen, onderhouden en gebruik ervan heeft een heel eigen karakter. Het gaat om institutioneel gereguleerde systemen met een heel eigen en grote complexiteit.
"A rule is a normative concept: it is not true or false but applies or does not apply, and whether or not it is actually followed does not affect whether or not it applies. Following a rule follows upon a judgment that the rule applies. "(225)
Ontwerp en beheer is veel lastiger dan bij het ontwerpoen en beheren van een technisch artefact gebruikt door een individuele gebruiker.
"In contrast to traditional artifacts, where all elements are material objects related by causal laws, it is unclear how the various elements or components involved in sociotechnical systems – hardware, people in various roles, and laws, rules and regulations – must be seen as making up the system, and in particular by what relations these elements are linked. Since the behavior of people is described with intentional rather than causal concepts, and since rules are abstract rather than concrete things, these relations must cover a much wider spectrum than just the causal laws of natural science. "(226)
Dit gaat dus over IT (of ICT): technische artefacten die informatie vastleggen, communiceren, en bewerken. Dat begint met het schrift, numerieke systemen, en technische middelen daarvoor. De boekdrukkunst, de telegraaf, de radio, de televisie radicaliseerden dat: technieken om op te slaan werden aangevuld met technieken om informatie te communiceren. Met de komst van de computer kwam er weer een nieuwe dimensie bij: informatie verwerken / bewerken.
Het gaat niet zo zeer om alle technische middelen die ingezet worden: informatie is hierin het centrale concept. Vandaar dat we tegenwoordig spreken van een 'informatiesamenleving'. Informatie is er van grote waarde. Het gaat daarbij niet alleen om het berekenen van numerieke informatie, maar ook om de controle van informatieprocessen (automatisering), om modellering en simulatie van reële situaties (virtualisering). Er ontstaat een globale infosfeer, waarin mensen afhankelijk zijn van IT, en waarin politieke, sociale en ethische kwesties een steeds groter rol spelen..
Technische ontwikkelingen (voorbeelden: de komst van fabrieken, het gebruik van fossiele brandstoffen) zijn regelmatig aanleiding om ze ter discussie te stellen vanwege hun negatieve gevolgen voor de omgeving (het landschap, het milieu, de mensen). Je krijgt al gauw een tegenoverstelling van Mens en Natuur.
"Technology is seen as the material expression of Man's ambition to dominate Nature, with the subjugated natural environment the victim of its detrimental impacts."(235)
[Het valt me op dat er door auteurs weinig gezegd wordt de invloed van techniek op mensen. Alsof er niet allerlei technische middelen ontwikkeld worden om mensen te sturen. Ook die techniek kan negatieve effecten hebben en in dit geval dus op mensen. Verder is een negatief effect op de natuur ook een negatief effect op mensen.]
In die discussies worden mens en natuur, mens en milieu vaak tegenover elkaar gezet alsof ze niets met elkaar te maken hebben. Maar er is een grote samenhang.
"On this basis I shall propose that there is a need to extend the conception of an ecosystem and of ecology to industrial, technological and social ecosystems and ecologies. "(236)
Hoewel mijnbouw en militaire technologie sterk de omgeving veranderen en dus het idee van die tegenoverstelling lijken te suggereren, worden daarmee toch zaken over het hoofd gezien.
"It has been through the development of agriculture and technologies to support it that humans traditionally have most altered and created the environments in which they live. "(238)
De invloed die daarvan uitgaat is veel groter dan we willen aannemen (stadsvorming, kunstmest, genetische modificatie, watermanagement om maar een paar voorbeelden te noemen). En de complexiteit van alle samenhangende technische en wetenschappelijke zaken is enorm. Vandaar dat we ook hier in termen van ecologie moeten denken, maar dan inclusief alle grebruikte technieken.
"In other words, we need to borrow techniques and concepts from ecology to think in terms of industrial or technological ecology that can focus on the webs of interdependence between different technologies and the ways in which they form environments for each other as well as for human and other living organisms."(241)
Het voorzorg-principe betreft de 'better safe than sorry'-aanpak in industriële en technische ontwikkeling die vaak al wettelijk is vastgelegd. Dit principe gaat veel verder dan het traditionele risicomanagement van bedrijven. Omdat het een normatief principe is, zijn er flinke discussies tussen voorstanders (bv. milieubewuste mensen) en tegenstanders (kapitalistische industriëlen en zo). En omdat het raakt aan overheidsbeleid en de vorming van wetten zie je weer de verschillen tussen Europa en de VS. Het artikel geeft een uitgebreid overzicht van de literatuur over dit onderwerp in de noten.
"First, it hinges on the presence of two quite particular qualities: a potential for irreversible harm and a lack of scientific certainty. Second, the normative presumption is also quite particular: favoring the interests of the environment (and human health) rather than economic, sectoral or strategic institutional interests. Third, it refers to the precautionary principle the reasons for action, not to the substance of the possible actions themselves. Fourth, it applies in principle symmetrically to all technological or policy alternatives in any given context. At root, the precautionary principle involves a particular normative distillation of more than a century of experience with the unexpected consequences of new knowledges and technologies. "(248-249)
De sociale context maakt het moeilijk om milieuproblemen op te lossen en niet alleen de complexiteit (dat laatste: diverse problemen hangen met elkaar samen - de aanpak van het ene probleem kan niet losgezien worden van een aanpak van een ander probleem).
De problemen overstijgen landsgrenzen enz. en dus is internationale samenwerking nodig. Er is echter ook een verschuiving in 'governance': beleid wordt steeds vaker bepaald door tussengroepen, beslissingen worden op allerlei niveaus genomen. Globalisering of één mondiale regering is dus niet zo maar de oplossing.
"Instead of the advent of Singer’s single-world community we actually witness an ongoing multiplication of communities. Increasingly, policy-makers are dealing with a wide array of groups which do not necessarily speak each other's language or share similar conceptions of the world."(264)
"To prevent the environmental crisis from ending in catastrophe, we should turn away from anthropocentrism and convert to some sort of biocentrism or ecocentrism: we should no longer treat nature in terms of her instrumental significance for our survival and self-preservation but instead acknowledge and respect her intrinsic value."(264)
Wat echter niet betekent: een uniform wereldbeeld nastreven. Totalitaire visies hebben laten zien dat dat ten koste van mensen kan gaan. Vandaar dat het postmodernisme dit soort 'grote verhalen' wantrouwt en pleit voor pluralisme. Dat geldt ook voor wetenschap: het idee van een uniforme objectieve wetenschap is ook niet houdbaar gebleken.
"So we had better stop the quest for grand narratives and try to accept and live with the multitude and variety of ethical visions and moral vocabularies. But, then, again, the question arises: how is cooperation possible at all under these pluralist conditions?"(265)
De oplossing is 'boundary work'.
"Three pragmatic methods of boundary work will be discussed in some detail: the overcoming of dualisms by gradualization, the transformation of problematic situations by reframing, and the creation of space for shared problem-solving by the formation of so-called boundary objects."(266)
[Een goede samenvatting van de kwestie. Maar ik vraag me toch af of dit soort artikelen in een boek over filosofie van de technologie thuishoren. Uiteraard zitten er altijd ethische aspecten aan technieken. Moet je nu dan elk controversieel onderwerp in zo'n boek als dit opnemen? Dan ga je alles 'filosofie van de techniek' noemen en dat is toch niet handig.]
"Those in the developed countries have already benefited over many generations from abundant fossil fuel energy. As is recognized by the FCCC, the realization that the adverse impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately on poorer nations creates a strong moral imperative for urgent action by industrialized countries. "(273)
[Dit artikel was helemaal overbodig.]
[Ook niet erg nuttig in deze context.]
"What this tells us is that the research agenda of contemporary environmental science is significantly driven by impacts of technological development that have become matters of public concern rather than by theoretically generated research problems."(281)
[Techniekfilosofisch iets interessanter, maar ook niet onmisbaar in dit boek.]
"Agriculture is a uniquely human activity and is perhaps the first activity for which humans developed technology. Technology, understood as the use of farming tools and techniques, is an indispensable component in agriculture. In the most general sense, technology permits humans to increase the capture and efficient utilization of solar radiation that drives primary plant production that is the basis of the human food and fiber chain. "(285)
"The current production of food affects the main global biogeochemical cycles and is heavily reliant on inputs of fossil fuel energy and technology. Farmers use such products of fossil fuels as nitrogen fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides and machinery to increase the proportion of solar energy that is captured by crops to drive dry matter production and thereby harvested yield. "(286)
"Recent attempts to alter genetically the make-up of plants used for food production have met resistance, mainly in Europe, whereas many emerging economies have embraced biotechnology with enthusiasm. One important issue raised by the advent of biotechnology has been the question of ownership and intellectual property protection. The private and exclusive ownership of technological products and processes in agriculture has been extended to include plant and animal varieties. These have traditionally either been part of a social and cultural heritage, and thus freely available, or have been under legal protection designed to foster their utilization by non-owning others. Such developments in ownership, fostered by the application of gene technology to agriculture, will have profound consequences for a human activity that forms the basis of human society. "(287-288)
Dit betreft steden en huizen, die staan voor tweevijfde van het mondiale energieverbruik. Ook de bouw ervan vraagt enorm veel van het milieu, vergeleken met andere industrietakken.
"The story of the built environment is part of man’s domination of nature. A city as any building is a place that had to be wrested out of nature: forests must be rooted out, land cleared, and much that was hitherto part of a vital ecological system becomes covered by asphalt, concrete and brick."(291)
Om politiek verantwoordelijk te kunnen handelen moet je als burger op de hoogte zijn van allerlei kwesties rondom techniek.
" Since information is presented and received in contextually specific ways, injustice occurs when the following events transpire: public education fails to prioritize the relevant issues; media bias diverts attention from matters of genuine concern and clouds real issues through spin; governments make bad-faith appeals to secrecy and security; and inequitable access to data marginalizes individuals and groups. In short, without a deep understanding of how ideas about and decisions concerning technology impact political processes, and without a sophisticated grasp of how political processes impact the development, distribution and use of technology, neither global nor local affairs can be comprehensively grasped or intelligently evaluated."(297)
"Put in more specific terms, this section contains analyses of technology and politics that address topics most people have strong opinions about. It traverses issues concerning how technology relates to progress, power, culture, globalization, capitalism, energy, management, strategy, comparative governance, and gender. "(297)
Op een aantal van die begrippen wordt ingegaan om een overzicht te geven van de artikelen van deze afdeling. Bijvoorbeeld 'vooruitgang', vervreemding door techniek, techniek en macht, globalisering, de verschillen in houding tegenover techniek in de VS - Europa - Azië, genderkwesties.
Gaat over het idee 'vooruitgang' en alle discussies daaromheen die te maken hebben met de (eind)doelen die gesteld worden en waarvan dan gezegd wordt dat het bereiken er van vooruitgang zou betekenen. Uiteraard zijn dat sterk normatieve discussies. En ook wetenschap heeft hier niet de objectiviteit gebracht die men er lang van verwaxchtte.
"The coherence of this idea of progress, however, can no longer be sustained – owing not so much to the insights of philosophers and historians about the contingent nature of science and truth as to the very success of science itself in continually generating new insight into the intricacies and complexities of the world. (...)
The most fundamental truths generated by science, sometimes called 'laws of nature', actually describe phenomena that can be observed only in the controlled environment of laboratories, experiments and engineered artifacts. Such laws do not have reliably predictive power in the complex and uncontrolled world of human affairs, and are likely as not to mislead if applied as 'truth' to guide human action. When science is applied to the understanding and guidance of human affairs, its results – while often useful – are contextual, contingent and ephemeral."(304)
Ook technologie valt niet zonder meer te koppelen aan vooruitgang, zeker niet als het om meer gaat dan om technische artefacten die door een individu gebruikt worden. Bijvoorbeeld: wanneer 'technische vooruitgang' gelijk gesteld wordt met 'economische groei'. Groei voor sommigen blijkt immers vaak stilstand of achteruitgang voor anderen. Bovendien hebben de geproduceerde technische producten vaak onbedoelde gevolgen die het welzijn en daarmee de ervaring van vooruitgang aantasten.
"Just as science in its production of knowledge creates new realms of the unknown, so does technology in its exercise of local control open new terrains of unreliability and unpredictability. (...) Predictability, or its absence, is central to the idea of progress because statements about progress are necessarily informed not just by comparison with the past (itself a contentious enough task) but with expectations for the future as well."(305)
Er is een duidelijke relatie tussen machtsuitoefening over mensen, dieren en dingen en het gebruik van techniek. Zoals er ook een intense relatie is met economie.
"Politically and militarily dominant societies have almost always been those that have chosen to take seriously the pursuit of technological advantage. Indeed, history can be told as a story of evolving technology applied to the exercise of power. (...) Power and technology grow together; they co-evolve. The competitive nature of humans and societies, and the incremental essence of technological innovation feed technology and power back on each other and are mutually enhancing."(308-309)
[Mensen en samenlevingen zijn van nature competitief? Hier wordt even een impliciete waarde neergezet!]
"Conventional wisdom no longer places man within nature, but face-to-face with it, the author of his own essence and able to reshape it at will, replacing it, for better or worse, with a wholly artificial world. "(311)
"What such a comparison [van menselijke technieken met die van dieren / de natuur] demonstrates is not that artificial production is fundamentally distinct from natural production, or that the procedures employed by men are always or even often original. In reality, they rarely or never are, for we have good reason to suppose that there is always less in a machine, however complex it may be, than in an organism – much less, for example, in a computer than in the brain of its inventor."(313)
Over MOT: Management of Technology.
[Ik begrijp werkelijk niet wat dit soort artikelen doet in een boek over techniekfilosofie. Het is zelfs onduidelijk wat het met politiek en technologie te maken heeft.]
[Idem]
Globalisering is opvallend gaan versnellen sinds 1970. De omschrijving ervan is kortweg:
"Globalization typically refers to the process by which a capitalist world system spreads across the globe and consolidates the economic, cultural and political order of nations into a world society. Globalization involves the expansion of global linkages, the liberalization of trade and currencies, the dominance of Western cultural life, increased international travel and immigration, and proliferation of information technologies leading to the interdependence of nations and, eventually, a single global community."(325)
Technologische innovaties - vooral op het terrein van ICT - spelen een grote rol in dat proces. Maar het kapitalisme net zo goed.
"Technology is a necessary but not sufficient condition for globalization. A variety of national and international laws, policies, practices must also be in place. The most important conditions include the dominance of capitalist markets, increasing influence of international financial markets over national policies, a decreasing influence of the State over international finance and commerce, privatization of services, deregulation of economic activities, and an increasing role of private actors and business corporations in social and economic life."(327)
Overdracht van technische kennis - bijvoorbeeld in het kader van ontwikkelingssamenwerking - is niet zonder problemen en leidt tot fundamentele discussies.
"In order to understand the central motifs around which many of the debates revolve, it will be useful first to discuss how to understand technology transfer qua practice. Owing to anthropological diversity, the thesis of technological relativity holds the key to this endeavor. According to this thesis – expressed by pragmatists such as John Dewey and phenomenologists such as Don Ihde – technological activity is an embodied experience that has ineliminable cultural dimensions. Not only does the scope of technology include machines, artifacts and engineering principals; it also extends to background conditions, including skills, knowledge, techniques, social norms, and perceptions that are shaped by personal and collective histories. In short, without the regulating structure of practice, artifacts and machines would simply be useless junk – or, at best, material entities that could, some day, potentially become technologies."(329)
"Having briefly detailed the relativistic dimension of technology transfer, it will be useful to discuss some of the leading ethical and political issues. For the sake of continuity, Bangladesh and China will again be used as paradigm cases. With respect to the transfer of chemicals, nuclear power and biotechnology, one of the central problems that developing countries have faced is contextual insensitivity on the part of the developers."(331)
"Since comparable examples of dramatic and unforeseen results arising from technology transfer abound, the task of creating an empirically sensitive development ethics, one that deals appropriately with both techno-scientific uncertainty and multi-cultural sensitivity, remains an important priority."(331)
Technologie is belangrijk geweest in de opkomst en de ontwikkeling van het kapitalisme. De ontwikkeling van het kapitalisme wordt hier helder samengevat.
Gender is terug te vinden in de beeldvorming rondom technieken in relatie tot sekse (snelle auto's zijn mannelijk, keukenapparatuur en mobieltjes zijn vrouwelijk). Maar gender speelt ook een rol in het ontwerpen van techniek.
"The area of gender and technology studies has been flourishing in recent years, and scholars have developed sophisticated approaches to understand better the gender–technology relation (Gill and Grint 1995; Wajcman 1991, 2004). These approaches start from the assumption that gender and technology are co-produced and mutually shaping. This means that technology influences gender relations and gender relations influence technology. "(338)
" One dimension of the politics of gender and technology is therefore to uncover women inventors of technology who have been forgotten by history. That women inventors are often written out of history reflects gender relations, as women are not associated with technologies, and ground-breaking technologies are commonly associated with men. That computer programming has changed gender from being associated with women to becoming a male endeavor is important as it reflects that during that time the economic potential of computers rose and important things in society are commonly associated with men."(339)
[De ervaringen in Europa met poltiek, economie en technologie door de jaren heen. Het heeft weer weinig met techniekfilosofie te maken.]
[Idem voor China en India, die in dit artikel de hoofdrol spelen.]
[Idem voor de Verenigde Staten.]
[Over de behoefte aan energie en hoe dat invloed heeft op de internationale verhoudingen. Het is zo abstract dat het weinig zinvol is en heeft ook weer niets met techniekfilosofie te maken.]
Inleiding tot 23 hoofdstukken over ethische kwesties rondom technologie. Ethiek raakt aan de beroepscodes van professionals op technisch terrein die zich om allerlei redenen ontwikkelen. Daarnaast breidt ethiek uit van de typische mens-mens-benadering naar een mens-techniek-wereld-benadering. Voorzichtigheid met morele oordelen is echter geboden: beschrijven moet vooraf gaan aan voorschrijven.
[Ik begrijp niet zo goed waarom zo nadrukkelijk gezegd wordt dat al te snelle morele oordelen vermeden moeten worden. Dat lijkt me logisch. Ik hoop alleen dat dat niet betekent dat filosofen weer op de tour gaan van abstractie en pseudo-waardenvrijheid en het vermijden van maatschappelijke betrokkenheid, omdat ze zo bang zijn voor normativiteit.]
"Technological progress appears to bring not only the goods of increased wealth, reduced physical labor and extended lifespan but also the more problematic, unintended and not easily controlled consequences of alienation, bureaucratization and intensified decision-making – not to mention environmental pollution and transformation. For Simmel, Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, Romano Guardini, Günter Anders and others, the combination was creating a new type of cultural life that appears incommensurable with all that has been known up to this point in human history and within which people thus struggled for moral orientation."(368)
Andere auteurs - William Fielding Ogburn, John Dewey - schreven over de culturele kloof die soms optreedt door technische innovatie. Zoals bijvoorbeeld wanneer de politiek of het onderwijssysteem achterloopt bij het inschatten van de maatschappelijke invloed dan wel mogelijkheden van nieuwe technieken.
"Numerous other cases in which science and technology have outstripped the social, political or intellectual capacities of a culture have been documented by anthropological studies such as those collected by Edward H. Spicer (1952) and H. Russell Bernard and Pertti J. Pelto (1987)."(369)
Een voorbeeld vormen atoomwapens die zo'n desastreuze gevolgen kunnen hebben dat allerlei culturele systemen nieuwe posities moesten gaan innemen (Hans Jonas), wat dan ook gebeurde. En dat gebeurt op allerlei terreinen. Van de andere kant hoeft de cultuur niet noodzakelijkerwijs achter te lopen op technische ontwikkelingen: ideeën en idealen over 'het goede leven' dan wel 'de rechtvaardige samenleving' kunnen het ontwikkelen van nieuwe technieken ook op gang brengen.
De debatten kenmerken zich door flinke tegenstellingen over
--in hoeverre mensen de ontwikkeling van technische processen en producten aansturen: determinisme (techniek ontwikkelt zich autonoom) staat tegenover voluntarisme (menselijke keuzes maken de technische ontwikkelingen);
--in hoeverre technische producten en processen het menselijke handelen beïnvloeden: substantivisme (technologie heeft een enorme invloed) staat tegenover instrumentalisme (technische middelen zijn neutraal mensen kunnen technologie op allerlei manieren gebruiken al naar gelang het zo uitkomt).
Maar het is wel duidelijk dat de extreme standpunten niet volgehouden kunnen worden: er worden inmiddels genuanceerder tussenposities ingenomen . Bv. door Langdon Winner met zijn opvattingen over het politieke karakter van artefacten. En door Bruno Latour met zijn actor-network-theory (ANT). Over ANT wordt uitgebreider geschreven. Conclusie:
"Summarizing again: In an actant network, the social role of technological artifacts is equivalent to that of humans. Relations between technologies and humans are comparable to relations between humans. Additionally, both humans and non-humans are agencies, but neither are autonomous agents. Actant agents act as they do as a result of associations with other agents, human and non-human. Human agents are not unique sources of action, but neither are non-human agents."(377)
Andere auteurs met een eigen insteek die genoemde tegenstellingen overstijgt zijn Don Ihde en Peter-Paul Verbeek.
Tot dusver kwamen vooral auteurs aan de orde die beschrijven. Andere proberen wel de normatieve dimensie binnen te brengen zoals Albert Borgmann.
[Waar is de benadering vanuit de kritische theorie? Waar is Feenberg bijvoorbeeld? Ik mis de sociaaleconomische dimensie in het verhaal.]
"Agriculture ethics is a branch of applied ethics that deals with a wide range of issues related to the farming of food, ranching and processing livestock, and the cultivation of crops for fiber, fuel and other products. The history of agriculture is inseparably linked to human history and the history of technology. (...) In the twentieth century, the methods and machinery of industrialization were applied to agriculture culminating in the 'Green Revolution', a mid-to-late-century period of great increases in productivity in both the industrialized and the developing worlds. The Green Revolution brought great social and environmental changes and raised new moral questions in agriculture ethics related to appropriate use of the land, environmental harms, hunger and trade policy, agricultural biotechnology, and the ethical treatment of animals."(384)
"Thus the study of architecture ethics, the ethics of architecture or, more generally, the ethics of the built environment, the ethics of the human-constructed realm, or the ethics of design, is still in its infancy "(387)
Dat komt weer sterk doordat ethiek zich zo geconcentreerd heeft op mens-mens-relaties. Terwijl de later ontwikkelde milieu-ethiek zich richtte op de natuur maar niet op de bebouwde wereld. Een architectuur ethiek zou zich bijvoorbeeld bezig kunnen houden met de beroepsethiek van architecten, met de fysische en psychologische gevolgen van dat mensen moeten werken dan wel wonen in bepaalde gebouwen of wijken, 'cultural fit', 'design fit', en effecten op de omgeving / het milieu.
"Next to such issues inherent to their own practice, biomedical engineers have a responsibility to anticipate the consequences of their designs for medical practice and to ensure that technologies and techniques are designed in a manner consistent with and supportive of ethical principles for medical practice. Such principles include beneficence (benefiting patients), non-maleficence (doing no harm), patient autonomy (the right to choose or refuse treatment), justice (the equitable allocation of scarce health resources), dignity (dignified treatment of patients), confidentiality (of medical information) and informed consent (consent to treatment based on a proper understanding of the facts). Particular ethical questions arise in relation to human enhancement."(393)
Verder een opsomming van kwesties en vragen, die laten zien hoeveel ethische problemen er met dit gebied samengaan.
" Bioethicists have conducted vigorous philosophical debates on the ethical acceptability of procedures such as in vitro fertilization, cloning and stem cell research, as well as on drugs (such as misoprostol and mifepristone) that can be used to terminate pregnancy or drug protocols for euthanasia. "(398)
"Philosophers such as Mary Midgely (1991), Leon Kass (2001) and Francis Fukuyama (2002) have assembled a battery of arguments intended to suggest that such extensive genetic change in any portion of the human population is intrinsically wrong, whether brought about intentionally or through the cumulative result of otherwise unobjectionable practices. This line of argument is opposed by bioethicists, who view these arguments as similar to protests about the unnatural character of racial mixing, women in the workforce and various forms of sexuality, or as a new form of the genetic determinism that arose in the era of eugenics. In its place, philosophers such as Allan Buchanan, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler (2001) have interposed philosophy that draws upon utilitarian and rights-based arguments which claim that, while there must be social policies to guard against abuse, denying access to those desirous or needful of genetic technologies is consistent neither with social utility nor with basic liberty."(399)
Het gaat hier met name over genetische modificatie van planten en dieren (GMO's), en niet om biotechnologie in zijn breedste betekenis.
"Transgenic animals are used in medical research, and there are only a few examples of transgenic animals in agriculture (for example transgenic salmon), while there is a worldwide ban on transgenic humans. Only within the last few decades, developing transgenic organisms has become routine and has raised a lot of ethical concerns. (...) Basic ethical questions are about intrinsic value, environmental and health risks, and the problem of human hunger and benefit-sharing."(402)
"Without the intrinsic value of nature, environmental ethics becomes a particular application of human-to-human ethics. In this traditional kind of ethics the term 'intrinsic value' is used to refer to certain conscious experiences of humans, and is thus anthropocentric. In this view there is a central difference between humans and non-humans: only humans have moral relevance, and everything else has instrumental value."(403)
"Computer ethics is a new field of applied ethics that addresses ethical issues in the use, design and management of information technology and in the formulation of ethical policies for its regulation in society. For contemporary overviews of the field, see Tavani (2007), Weckert (2007), Spinello and Tavani (2004), and Himma and Tavani (2007). Computer ethics, which has also been called cyberethics, emerged in the 1980s, together with the rise of the personal computer. Early work in the field, however, had already started in the 1940s, soon after the invention of the computer. The birth of computer ethics as a field is often fixed at 1985, the year that saw the appearance of seminal publications by Jim Moor (1985) and Deborah Johnson (1985). The field is sometimes also defined to be a part of a more general field of information ethics, which includes computer ethics, media ethics, library ethics and bio-information ethics."(406)
Het betreft beroepsethiek van IT-professionals. Maar niet alleen dat: er is ook een filosofische ethiek:
"The philosophical approach focuses on larger social issues like information privacy and security, computer crime, issues of access and equity, and the regulation of commerce and speech on the Internet. It asks what ethical principles should guide our thinking about these issues, and what specific policies (laws, social and corporate policies, social norms) should regulate conduct with respect to them."(407-408)
[Dit is wat mij betreft een boeiend terrein, omdat het te maken heeft met de samenhang tussemn wetenschap / technologie en economie. Vandaar een lang citaat met alle namen:]
"Consumerism is a way of life combining material affluence with symbolic–emotional attachments to shopping, possessions and 'waste'. Scholarly commentary tends to depict global consumerism as culturally corrosive (Satterthwaite 2001) and environmentally unsustainable (Crocker and Lindman 1998, Rosenblatt 1999). Even those skeptical of such claims must acknowledge that consumerism is linked inextricably with science and technology.
Studies bearing on consumerism began with Thorstein Veblen (1899) a century ago, took firm root in the mid-twentieth century (Riesman 1950, Potter 1954, Frazier 1957, Galbraith 1958), built gradually thereafter thanks especially to Baudrillard (1968, 1970), and then burgeoned after the fall of the Soviet Union left affluent democracies as the primary occupants of the political–economic stage. Contemporary scholarship ranges from updates on conspicuous consumption (Varul 2006), to the ethos of consumers (Ci 2006), to debates about whether a zero-growth economy would be technically feasible and morally superior (Daly 1977). The literature includes general meditations on the role of technology in the good life (Higgs et al. 2000) as well as specific critiques implicating consumerism in 'identity morphing, aesthetization of life, and a denial of life’s tragic dimensions' (Brinkman 2006: 92) and as an 'ideology enabling and supporting U.S. capitalism' (Wolff 2005: 223). Issues connected with consumerism include McDonaldization, the rationalization of everything (Ritzer 2004), and Disneyization, the prepackaging of leisure and entertainment (Bryman 2004). Although the variegated scholarship has not yet coalesced into a coherent subfield, there are at least five questions political philosophers can help humanity pose so as to clarify and possibly reform the dynamics of consumerism."(412)
Volgt een enorme hoeveelheid vragen rondom die vijf thema's: de verantwoordelijkheid van de producenten van al die producten (voor het afval enz.); de globale ongelijkheid in de verdeling van mogelijkheden om te consumeren; het bedrog van consumenten door bedrijven en de noodzakelijke regulatie; de verhouding werknemer - consument; de versnelling en de haast in de samenleving.
Over allerlei dilemma's en ethische kwesties rondom ontwikkelingssamenwerking. De laatste decennia is daarin een soort van wederzijdse afhankelijkheid gegroeid door de globalisering:
"Development aid policy does also become more and more significant in the context of 'Global Governance'. In particular, it is of increasing importance for coping with a series of challenges that rich as well as poor nations face equally, such as ecological crisis, climate change, atomic radiation, AIDS, risks of unstable financial markets, and terrorism. These challenges depict factual constraints which relativize the significance of national borders, reduce the latitude of national politics, and restrict the sovereignty of states (Messner et al. 2005). "(418)
"The attitude of Amartya Sen (1999) to development aid policy is directed more strongly toward the needs of the involved people than Rawls's. Sen has criticized Rawls for restricting transnational obligations toward development aid policy to the aim of (re-)establishing a system of human rights. Persons, Sen demands, must have at their disposal the abilities and the material prerequisites that are necessary for exercising their fundamental rights."(420)
"Energy is a key factor in economic development and human well-being, and energy provision therefore has many ethical dimensions. Furthermore, energy consumption has many indirect impacts on the environment. "(422)
Beschrijving van de ontwikkeling van de discipline, in eerste instantie voor het maken van een ethische beroepscode, die soms wel en soms niet wettelijk verplicht is. De vraag is of een 'engineering ethics' ook in bredere zin een eigen bestaansrecht heeft.
"Engineering must be understood as a hybrid (social and technical) form of action developing in a complex context (and not merely complicated) where political, social and economic stakes are intermingled. (...) The product of engineering is not knowledge, but an object which transforms the world: "when science takes the world into its laboratory, engineering takes the world for a laboratory" (Mitcham 1997: 138). Engineering generates all kinds of risks: social, sanitary, political, environmental, economic. It is characterized by potential power and its uncertain impacts on its natural and human environment, today as well as in the future.
Finally, engineering is not a simple resolution of problems: it is an art which requires imagination and creativity (Davis 1998). The activity of industrial design is considered by most researchers as the central and most specific engineering act. The activity of design is the process by which ideas, objectives or functions take shape in the plans for implementing an object, a system or a service, aiming at attaining the objective or performing this function. "(428)
"The axiological literature contains a great variety of positions, but these fall under three general headings: anthropocentrism, sentientism and ecologism."(434)
"In order to have a fully developed environmental ethics, it is necessary to combine one's preferred axiology with a normative theory that tells us how to act."(435)
"Food ethics is a branch of applied ethics that deals with a wide range of issues related to the production, distribution and consumption of food. In addition to providing nourishment, food has relevance for the moral character of our lives, for our obligations to others, to animals and to natural environments. As food-manufacturing becomes increasingly industrialized, food and food ethics also become increasingly bound up with food science and technology."(439)
Over lange-termijn-effecten van technologie en ingrepen tegen de gevolgen van technologie die daarom van groot belang kunnen zijn voor de levens van toekomstige generaties mensen, en zo verder.
"The genetic revolution has brought us technologies such as genetic screening, genetic pre-implantation and pre-natal diagnosis, gene therapy, cloning and genetic pharmacology. Such technologies raise all sorts of ethical issues. Some of the most profound issues pertain to the impact of genetic technologies on the identity of human beings. For instance, perhaps gene therapy and genetic pharmacology may be used to treat severe diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease and Huntington's chorea, and even to enhance human characteristics in the 'normal' range, including height, memory and intelligence. Such genetic interventions will affect the identity of their recipients in that they will give them certain properties (say, better health or memory) that they would not otherwise have had. But where exactly do we draw the line for such genetic interventions?"(445)
Dit gaat over de rol van ICT in de beroepsuitoefening van advocaten, rechters. etc., in de opleidingen tot, en in democratrische besluitvorming in het algemeen.
[Dit is een miskleun: in dit artikel wordt helemaal niets gezegd over ethische aspecten aan dat gebruik van ICT. Het hoort hier dus niet in thuis.]
"Media ethics is the study of (1) how media practitioners act when making decisions that affect other people, species or natural systems, and (2) how media practitioners should act in making these decisions. The first is descriptive ethics; the second is normative ethics."(452)
[Een volkomen nietszeggend artikel, dit.]
"Medical ethics is that branch of applied ethics that is concerned with the ethical problems of healthcare professionals and healthcare systems. It is a subset of bioethics, and can itself be further divided in medical ethics (narrowly defined), nursing ethics, public health ethics, research ethics, management ethics, etc. "(455)
"In the 1960s and 1970s two partly overlapping conservative streams were evident in medical ethics, one religious and one based on a secular skepticism toward medical technology and the 'medico-industrial complex', but these have become less and less prominent over time in academic medical ethics. Today liberal arguments are much more prevalent, especially in North America and Northern Europe. The liberal arguments often draw on elements from American pragmatism, classical political liberalism and modern preference consequentialism. "(457)
"There is a cluster of ethical issues surrounding nanotechnologies that are both important and interesting and that require examination. One of the most pressing current ones is concern about possible risks, both to health and to the environment, associated with nanoparticle toxicity."(459)
Over ethische aspecten aan de inzet dan wel het bezitten van nucleaire wapens.
"To restate, from the perspective of ethics alone: Both historically and culturally, moral practice is closely associated with religion. This is true in two senses: Many people find it difficult to imagine a morality that is not religiously based. Virtually no one can imagine religions that do not include substantive components of morality, even if their adherents may fail to live out the moral ideals to which they are committed. Indeed, virtually all religions seem to pose some degree of tension or conflict between alternative ways of life and to argue for one of these ways as higher or superior. In so far as technology itself can constitute a way of life, it is thus subject to religious or spiritual assessment. To some extent, then, the question of the relation between religion and technology can be considered as a special version of the relation between moral theory or ethics and technology. "(466)
"In so far as the religion–technology relation is linked to the ethics–technology relation, what might the religion–technology add? There are at least two possibilities. First, because religion adds to ethics both affective and institutional components, it provides supplementary resources for dealing with the moral challenges of technology. Religion has, for instance, made significant contributions to dealing with the moral issues and substantive threats raised by nuclear weapons and environmental pollution. Of course, at the same time, religion has often complicated secular approaches to other moral issues such as population control.
Second, and perhaps more important philosophically, critical religious reflection on technology can widen and deepen ethical perspectives. Most perspicaciously, critical religious thought can examine the extent to which technology itself might function as or attempt to replace religion. Such an approach might moderate some religious enthusiasms with regard to technology.
Finally, it is worth considering which religious traditions might offer the best complements to ethics from any number of perspectives. Such reflections (as in, e.g., Szerszynski 2005 and Waters 2006) might well function as a creative contribution to the multiple dimensional encounters between religions that are enfolded in the globalization that is itself promoted by technology."(471-472)
"The fact that the scientific work, especially the work that leads to new technology, may end up having a severe impact on many people’s lives raises the question concerning the extent to which scientists should be regarded as personally responsible for the consequences of their work. This is the question to be dealt with here. "(474)
"Value-sensitive design (VSD) is an approach to systems development and software engineering which was first introduced in the last decade of the twentieth century as an approach for incorporating human values into the design of (information) technology. VSD was developed by Batya Friedman and others, building on insights of the human– computer interaction community (HCI) to draw attention to the social and moral dimensions of design."(477)
"Many social and philosophical scholars of technology have attempted to expose the social and political biases embedded in technical systems and artifacts (see, for example, Berg 1998; Latour 1992, 1985; Mumford 1964; Winner 1980). They argue that technologies tend to promote certain ideologies, while obscuring others. Scholars in ethics of information technology have extended this research into questions of how information technologies specifically exemplify ethical and value biases (see, for example, Friedman 1997, 2005; Moor 1985; Nissenbaum 2001; Tavani 2004). Value-sensitive design recognizes that the design of technologies bears 'directly and systematically on the realization, or suppression, of particular configurations of social, ethical, and political values' (Flanagan, Howe and Nissenbaum 2005)."(478)
"Technology radically changes the human condition, and it does so in ways that we cannot foresee. Can we gain more control and foresight in this process? "(483)
Er zijn sinds de 70-er jaren twee bekende methoden om dat te doen: risico-analyse ('risk analysis') en techniekwaardering (?) ('technology assessment'). Beide komen voort vanuit de onzekerheid over effecten van techniek.
'Risico' betekent dat er in een situatie iets vervelends zou kunnen gebeuren, iets wat we niet willen (waarden op de achtergrond!), zonder dat we zeker weten dat dat ook werkelijk gaat gebeuren. Dat kan een bepaalde waarschijnlijkheid hebben. Of vergeleken worden met andere risico's.
"When there is a risk, there must be something that is unknown or has an unknown outcome. But, for this lack of knowledge to constitute a risk for us, something must be known about it. To have knowledge about a risk means to know something about what it is you do not know. This is therefore an unusually difficult type of knowledge to assess and to act upon. "(484)
Wanneer de waarschijnlijkheden rondom risico niet berekend kunnen worden, wordt gesproken van 'onzekerheid'. Onzekerheid hoeft op zich niet onwenselijk te zijn.
"In many discussions of risk, including some of the contributions to this volume, it is taken for granted that we live in a society with increasing risks. But is this really so? Have we not always lived with tremendous uncertainties? Is not the current attention to risk and uncertainty the result of a shift in focus rather than a real increase in risks? "(485)
De professionele berekening van risico (PRA) - erg populair op het moment - heeft een aantal nadelen.
"There is a strong tendency in decision-supporting disciplines, including risk ana- lysis, to proceed as if reasonably reliable probability estimates were available for all possible outcomes. This has been called the tuxedo fallacy. It consists in treating all decisions as if they took place under epistemic conditions analogous to gambling at the roulette table. The tuxedo fallacy is dangerous since it may lead to an illusion of con- trol and to neglect of uncertainties that should have a significant impact on decisions. (...) What future technologies offer us is much more similar to an adventure in the jungle than to a visit to the casino. (...) Person-related aspects such as agency, intentionality, consent, voluntariness, equity, etc., will have to be taken seriously in any reasonably accurate general format for the assessment of risk (Hansson 2003). The strong focus in PRA on probabilities and outcomes, to the exclusion of ethical factors that could legitimately influence decisions, may well be a major reason why risk analysis has had such great difficulties in communicating with the public."(487)
'Technology assessment' (TA) ontstond in de VS (de OTA = Office of Technology Assessment), ontwikkelde zich ook in Europa (in landen en in Europees verband; de STOA = Scientific Technological Options Assessment, de EPTA = European Parliamentary Technology Assessment Network, het ETAN = European Technology Assessment Network).
"Technology assessment (TA) started as an attempt to gain political control over the potential negative effects of technological development. It was expected to reveal future consequences of new technology that would not otherwise have been foreseen. However, the original optimism with respect to technological predictions was not substantiated. Technology assessors have been able to highlight important aspects of technological development and to bring them out for public discussion – which is important enough – but they have not been able to predict future technologies. In practice, TA has retreated from the ambition to predict. The focus has largely shifted to careful analysis of specific aspects of existing technologies. One variant of TA that does this is environmental impact analysis (EIA). "(488)
Er zijn allerlei redenen waarom de gevolgen van nieuwe technologie niet voorspeld kunnen worden en waarom PRA en TA dus tekortschieten. Er zijn dus andere manieren nodig om de ontwikkeling van nieuwe technologie te begeleiden en waarderen. De eerste die besproken wordt is 'safety engineering'.
"As we saw in section 2.2, in the assessment of new and emerging technologies, uncertainty is often more important than calculable risks. Therefore, it speaks much in favour of safety engineering that its major guiding principles are aimed at coping not only with risks but also with uncertainties."(491)
Daarnaast is er de scenario-methode waarin allerlei alternatieve ontwikkelingen (tegenover de verwachte) beschreven worden (plannen voor het toeval). Terwijl er ook steeds meer gewerkt wordt met pTA = participatory Technology Assessment in allerlei vormen waarin betrokkenen bij elkaar gezet worden om de gevolgen van technieken te doordenken.
Deze drie manieren om risico's en onzekerheid van technieken aan te pakken zijn niet reductionistisch.
" Risk analysis abstracts from individuals and their relationships and counts statistical lives of non-identified persons. In contrast, hypothetical retrospection adds concreteness so that our deliberations will be based on 'the full story' rather than on curtailed versions of it. More specifically, this procedure brings to our attention interpersonal relations that should be essential in a moral appraisal of risk and uncertainty, such as who exposes whom to a risk, who receives the benefits from whose exposure to risk, etc. It is only by staying off such concreteness that standard risk analysis can remain on the detached and depersonalized level of statistical lives and free-floating risks and benefits. "(493)
[Een tamelijk abstract hoofdstuk. Lijkt uit de marxistische hoek te komen. Is heel interessant, maar achtergronden ontbreken natuurlijk in zo'n kort artikel.]
"Risk definition, essentially, is a power game. This is especially true for world risk society where Western governments or powerful economic actors define risks for others. "(496)
"Neither science nor the politics in power, nor the mass media, nor business, nor the law or even the military are in a position to define or control risks rationally. The individual is forced to distrust the promises of rationality of these key institutions. As a consequence, people are thrown back on to themselves, they are alienated from expert systems but have nothing else instead."(498)
"So, for example, the dominant risk belief and risk tendencies of Europe and the US government are drifting very far apart; because the risk religions contradict one another, Europeans and Americans live in different worlds. For Europeans, risk belief issues like climate change, perhaps even the threats which global financial movements pose for individual countries, are much more important than the threat of terrorism. While, as far as the Americans are concerned, the Europeans are suffering from an environmental hysteria, many Europeans see the Americans as struck by a terrorism hysteria. The reversal of the terms 'secularism' and 'religiosity' is also striking. It seems that religious cultures are marked by a 'risk secularism'. Whoever believes in God is a risk atheist. "(498)
[Voegt nauwelijks iets toe aan het inleidende artikel van dit deel.]
"Granting that we cannot be certain about such matters, what technological factors might affect prosperity in the future? "(503)
[Dit artikel gaat over 100 dingen in het bestek van vijf bladzijden. Geen focus. Je ziet het ook aan de genoemde literatuur. Zinloos.]
"A cultural movement has arisen within science and technology aimed at the unification of theories, methods and goals across fields. This convergence has tremendous potential in the so-called 'NBIC' fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and new technologies based on cognitive science."(508)
[Een encyclopedist, die Bainbridge ...]
[Ook weer zo'n vaag verhaal. Maar het lijkt er op dat de auteur eigenlijk heel hard wil schreeuwen dat nanotechnologie het helemaal gaat worden, ondanks dat hij zelf vaststelt dat we nauwelijks iets weten over de effecten van nanotechnieken. De conclusie dan maar:]
"Questions of risk and of prosperity and risk can thus become richly contextual once we realize that nanotechnology’s storyline is not primarily that of human progress toward greater wealth, global abundance, ever expanded scientific understanding and technical control – but that its storyline is that of globalization: sailing under the flag of 'nanotechnology', we are presently embarked upon the conquest of nanospace and thus upon a contentious project to reform the web of human relations and the world of lived experience."(514)
"An energy mix is emerging to meet anticipated twenty-first-century energy demand (Fanchi 2004, 2005). This article discusses methodologies that are designed to forecast the role different energy technologies may take in the twenty-first century. "(517)
[Opnieuw vraag ik me af wat een artikel als dit doet in een boek over techiekfilosofie ...]
[Weer zo'n allegaartje van feiten, meningen en mogelijke problemen en oplossingen. Ik zeg niet dat het een slecht artikel is, maar het wordt zo oppervlakkig wanneer zo veel in zo weinig bladzijden gepropt wordt.]
"Most agree that biotechnology itself is not inherently 'risky' or 'safe' but its products are. Decision-makers are faced with having to fit regulations to numerous types of products with unique risk and benefit profiles. This is especially challenging when products transcend disciplinary, sector and agency borders. These types of applications and products are categorized as 'convergent technologies'."(525)
"Ease of transportation is a hallmark of advanced societies. Yet transportation systems also consume scarce fossil fuels, produce greenhouse gases, fragment habitat, and act as vectors for disease and invasive species. Social and economic interaction facilitated by transportation can lead to erosion of cultural identity and to cultural homogenization. "(532)
" ... over 180 UN member states adopted the 2000 Millennium Declaration to free the world of extreme poverty. These nations pledged to meet certain goals, called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), by the year 2015. The goals are designed to address extreme poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion, while promoting education, gender equality, and environmental sustainability. (...)
Historical and economic evidence suggests that science and technology (S&T) can contribute to all of the goals, and there is increasing attention to the need to link MDGs with global agendas for S&T. However, there are significant challenges to this linkage. Technology does not chart its own course toward social good. It is often developed by the private sector, whose main goal is to increase profits. "(538)
[De wil is er wel bij veel mensen, maar zo lang overheden alles over laten aan het bedrijfsleven zal er weinig veranderen. Het is zo duidelijk: dat zielige kapitalisme moet eerst op de helling voor een meer sociale economische aanpak.]
Voorbeelden van gevaarlijke chemicaliën die verboden moesten worden vanwege hun schadelijke werking.
[Een typisch Bostrom-verhaal. Controleerde hij zelf de feiten maar eens. Maar ik heb niet de indruk dat hem dat interesseert, zolang hij zijn boodschap over de 'superintelligentie' kan brengen. Wat een naïef idee: alsof meer intelligentie betekent dat je het sociaal beter doet en zo verder. Dat is nog nooit gebleken.]
"The same technologies that pose these risks will also enable us to reduce some risks. Biotechnology can help us develop better diagnostics, vaccines and anti-viral drugs. Molecular nanotechnology could offer even stronger prophylactics (Freitas 1999). Superintelligent machines would be the last invention that human beings need to make, since a superintelligence would by definition be far more effective than human brains in all intellectual endeavors, including strategic thinking, scientific analysis and technological creativity (Bostrom 1998). In addition to creating and mitigating risks, these powerful technological capabilities would also affect the human condition in many other ways. "(554)
"If and when artificial intelligence advances to the point where it matches the human mind in general reasoning abilities, superintelligence is likely to follow swiftly from further improvements in software and hardware (Vinge 1993, Bostrom 1998). The creation of superintelligent machines would be the most momentous event in the history of our species. Humanity’s remoter future might be dominated by artificial minds, our 'mind children' (Moravec 1988)."(555)