That’s the sort of sentence to bring in the clicks. Of course you want me to caveat that, surely I can’t mean all technology?
On the face of it, obviously not. Does a pencil dehumanise us? It’s not clear how that would be a sensible thing to say, and your definition of technology has to be quite narrow to rule out the pencil. At the same time, it seems self-evident that some technology has a formative effect. Not all technologies are neutral. It cannot be the case that every tool we pick up is only good or bad based on the use put to it. Instead, many tools shape us into certain kinds of people: they have a formative effect. That can be positive or negative, or your judgement might depend on your point of view, but we cannot claim that they are neutral. Though, even this is too blunt a claim, I’ll nuance it below.
I am using the term technology in the broadest possible sense to include all human made tools. Pencils are a technology, so is your smartphone. Reading that should make it clear that its difficult to speak about ‘technology’ in the abstract. Is anything true of all technology?
I think there are two simple claims I can make for all technologies. First, that any tool we use shapes the way we view the world. Its simple existence redefines everything else we interact with. Once introduced to a hammer I could, in principle, consider everything else I encounter by how it would be changed by liberal application of the hammer to it, with force. Now, that would be pathological, but the hammer still changes how I see the world and what I can do with the things I see.
It’s easier to see this with a technology that clearly changed the world like the automobile, or the washing machine (and its huge impact on women’s liberation), or the contraceptive pill. Each of these technologies changed the way we view the world, changed what was possible, and redefined certain features of our common existence. My claim is that this is true for all technologies, even if the changes are quite small with many.
Second, following Albert Borgmann, we can define all technologies as either Instruments or Devices. I’ve written on this before, but to summarise: an instrument is something we use to engage differently with the world, it requires mastery; a device does something for us, and does not require mastery.
Instruments change us but require us to grow in skill to use them. Their formation of us may not always be positive but has much more to do with us. Devices change us without requiring skill from us. Their formation of us can still be positive but has much more to do with the device than with our use of it.
I’ve probably written enough to prove my title false, instead it should say technology can dehumanise us. Who would click on that, though? However, the instrument/device distinction is important. Instruments require virtue from us, while the tool changes the world, we still need the same Christian virtues to act well in the world whatever they may be. They only form us away from Christ, or ‘dehumanise’ us, when we use them in evil ways. My claim is this: devices change the world irrespective of our virtue. It is still true that virtue is important, we can still use them in more or less evil ways, but its possible to speak of a device as being good or bad in and of itself.
The Social Internet
Why do Christians care about this at all? There are genuinely insightful technological theorists I’m riffing off if you want to think about this stuff. The reason this ends up being such a live issue right now is the digital revolution of 2007. Suddenly we’re surrounded with devices: smartphones, the social internet, AI, and a thousand other things besides.
A while ago I wrote a little on Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), and made the claim that AI dehumanises us. My thinking on the subject has developed and I would write that post differently now, but that central claim I’d stand by. Longer ago I wrote on social media’s deformative effects in a similar vein. People often want to respond by saying something like ‘surely it depends on how they’re used?’
My claim is that while there will always be a sense in which that’s true, it’s good and right to talk about devices in and of themselves as good or bad. I do think that GenAI confuses what we think a human being is. The rise of chatbots as salves for loneliness is chilling, to take an obvious example. We know they aren’t real and yet people manage to become very attached to these characters in ways reminiscent of many science fiction stories.
Of course, GenAI is inescapable. The word processor I’m typing in is using it to offer completed sentences to me. The search engine I just used to check the spelling of someone’s name now has a block of AI summary above the links, which is often wrong and yet we read it first anyway. Its capabilities spring forward monthly and lots of the ‘well its not going to be able to do that as well as a human’ statements may not turn out to be true. Some things it might do better. This may lead to an existential crisis for us, or it might not, but we do need to take it seriously.
We live in a world that dehumanises us. And we live in a world that invites us to learn to be human.
Consider the City
Cities expose and display the worst of humanity. The Bible doesn’t shy away from this, the development of the city in the early part of Genesis is not a movement towards God. Yet, the good end of the world is in a heavenly city at the end of Revelation. While the city isn’t a technology in the definition I gave, we see this thing that clearly dehumanises and degrades us be redeemed.
That should reframe the way we consider these questions. Some devices are bad for us. Are they redeemable? Can they be used well? What does virtue look like with them? How can we avoid giving them to young children, and how (if at all) should older children be inducted into their fruitful use?
We shouldn’t assume that good use is possible, we should question things deeply before adopting them, and churches should talk about this all a lot more. However, for some devices good use will be possible, though it might look very different from the way those around us use them. We need to think deeply about these things, we need to not panic, and then we need to live according to the Lord. That probably is out of step with the culture around us. But we’re living for a city whose designer and builder is God.
Photo by Moritz Mentges on Unsplash
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