Toward a Pragmatic Philosophy of Technology Pt. 1 Framing the Issue
The way we directly engage with technology needs to change
There is a Spotify playlist that I am making for this series, check it out here.
Why a Pragmatic Philosophy of Technology
I still remember hearing about Google forcing Timnit Gebru out of the company. Gebru was the co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team at the time. I was on Twitter quite a bit and her ouster forced a lot of people to think about the role that ethics play in technology. The think-pieces died off for a while, only to resurge with large language models (LLMs) entering the zeitgeist with the rise of ChatGPT, Bard, and other like models. There’s an interesting, but obvious, connection here; what resulted in Gebru’s ouster was a paper on the ethical concerns of LLMs (the linked paper details Gebru’s argument).
We now find ourselves in something being called an “AI boom”. This particular era of the AI boom has been spurred on by the companies that harbor the models I mentioned above. At the same time of this boom cycle, we are also seeing, as reported by the Washington Post, a massive increase in the layoffs of their ethicists/ethics teams. So, as companies see the economic benefit of pushing AI, they have also become aware of the economic impact that ethicists play on their bottom line when describing their tech’s downsides.
It is clear then that we can’t rely on tech companies to prioritize ethical considerations over profit maximization. Some of the best, most well-renown ethicists in the field cannot change a tech company from within (which is why, I imagine, Gebru founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR)). What we then have to do is one, trust the experts in their fields, but secondly, have a framework by which we can learn to think more critically about technology ourselves and within our own organizations.
Current Default: Cults of Personality
YouTube has driven a new era of, and a new kind of cult of personality. This is best put on display in the paper “Charismatic authority and the YouTuber: Unpacking the new cults of personality”. Of course, this is continued through other social media platforms like TikTok.
The consequences of this are that if a culted figure describes x as the “next big thing” then that automatically drives the behavior of those in the group which has influences beyond. We can see very directly the results of this if you look at something like NFTs. In this case, however, YouTubers (and other social media influencers) catalyzed the cult of personality of another individual, Sam Bankman-Fried, who is currently facing “13 criminal counts, including securities fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance violations”. This article on CoinDesk covers this phenomenon pretty decently.
When we leave the decision of what tech to adopt to cult figures we surrender our decision-making capacity to them. I would like to say the situation in the Department of Defense (DoD is different than in the civilian world, but I feel that it’s worse. We thrive, generally speaking, on a particular kind of hero worship. This doesn’t just include war heroes, but “innovation heroes” (for more, but tangentially related about this topic check out this article about why innovation heroes are a bad sign, check out this article from Steve Blank), and other kinds of hero roles which leave people in a place of reverence. This reverence then translates to the capitulation of the revered figure’s influence.
Final Thoughts
We’re at an interesting/critical point in our history where if we don’t gain a better understanding of how we can critically evaluate and integrate technologies into our lives, then our futures will risk being driven by high-influence tech firms that have historically ignored ethics and public interest.
Next week I’ll be getting into a framing of pragmatism and the philosophy of technology, the final part will discuss the particular practices that embody the idea of a pragmatic philosophy of technology.
Obligatory: Since I’m discussing the DoD, I have to say that none of these thoughts are that of the DoD. These are my opinions and only reflect my hubris.