All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.
This is silly. The world isn't balanced like that. Many improvements have no disadvantage. More efficient photovoltaic cells, not needing hfcfs in pressurized spray cans, discovering that you can add a bit of carbon to iron, ...
You could argue that automation is one of those improvements with no disadvantage. But it can also result in people losing their jobs and those people might be opposed to it.
I would argue that the same is true with the gig economy. It benefits the people participating in it greatly but it also cost some people their jobs (e.g. taxi drivers).
That was pretty unconvincing. Some people think writing makes your memory lazy? Well even more think it can serve as a tool in learning and as a tool for memorisation. Now what?
> All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
This, to me, reads as one of those statements that sounds wise and correct but doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Going from digging with your hands to using a shovel doesn't have a negative trade off. Going from carrying things on your back to using a wheeled cart doesn't have a corresponding disadvantage.
You can find very myopic cases where they're not improvements (e.g. digging for fragile objects is better done with hands), but that doesn't disprove the general improvement, and it is far from a corresponding disadvantage equal to the new advantage.
> Doesn't it? What if those "things" are weapons that you are carrying to battle?
I'm not sure what your point is.
Are you suggesting that some things are better kept close at hand and not on a cart? The invention of the cart does not remove the ability to carry things.
Do you mean to make an appeal to the evils of war? If so, the morality of a use case doesn't have much to do with the efficacy of a technology, though I think you have a point of discussion there. War is hardly always evil, but maybe you could argue that adding efficiency to the ability to wage unjust war is a disadvantage. But, again, you have to get very abstract to make that argument.
You denied a claim that "every new technology benefits some and harms others" by doubting that invention of a cart could cause harm. I'm suggesting a way that it could.
> the morality of a use case doesn't have much to do with the efficacy of a technology
I agree, but I believe it was morality that was under discussion, not efficacy.
> doubting that invention of a cart could cause harm
I think this is where we missed each other. I was trying to address "there is always a corresponding disadvantage", and I think mentally I was interpreting this as "an approximately proportionate downside or externality".
I don't disagree at all that nearly any technological improvement can cause harm.
I'll admit it does sound like a very abstract statement.
When I think of technology it's not a singular device/product/creation. It's wider in scope, kinda like a whole field. This is probably because like you pointed out you can find one thing that is just good, like a shovel. But a shovel is a mechanical tool and in the broader scheme of things.
An example I can think of is ABS, anti-lock break system. It prevents car wheels from locking under breaking and skidding, giving the driver more control while breaking. How could this be bad? ABS is a fix to a problem that was created by another technology, the car. The car dictated a lot of society as we know it today. Roads had to be built, rules of travel put in place, you could now live far from work. These might sound good to us now, but in reality they are trade-offs.
We can distinguish between pure and applied innovation, though. Coming up with a new algorithm which can be applied to facial recognition is a pure innovation, deploying that algorithm to monitor political dissidents is applied innovation. I would not agree that the latter example "isn't anything in moral terms", even though the former is.
I would argue that you cannot parse out the "good" technology from the "bad" technology as that would require full knowledge of downstream consequences.
Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
As soon as we build tiny cameras and software that could interpret pixel values and classify it, there was going to be facial recognition used against people.
P.S. I don't think it should, but I don't see how you can stop that. My personal feeling is that access to knowledge and technology is what prevents power imbalance.
This feels like having it both ways. "Innovation is morally neutral" and "harmful uses are the inevitable consequences of innovation" can't both be true.
I would prefer to say that the act of creating a possibility is different from the act of exercising that possibility in a particular way. But you seem to be saying that merely creating the possibility makes the use inevitable, and so the person who invents the tiny cameras or the image-recognition software is inescapably responsible for the use of that technology to target political dissidents.
I agree that once the invention has been made, it becomes harder to stop someone from using the invention in bad ways. But the moral responsibility is clearly with the person who makes bad use of technology, not with the person who invented it (assuming that the technology was not invented specifically for that purpose).
> This feels like having it both ways. "Innovation is morally neutral" and "harmful uses are the inevitable consequences of innovation" can't both be true.
I agree with you and I think I confused myself. What I mean is that technology has no inherent morality. It's not good, bad or neutral. You could judge a certain application in those terms, but you are really judging the morality of the user. Say a knife, it can be used as a cooking tool or a killing too. That is not to say the knife is good or bad, but that the user and his intentions are.
> so the person who invents the tiny cameras or the image-recognition software is inescapably responsible for the use of that technology to target political dissidents
I wouldn't really say that either. Unless the person was actively trying to make spy things to target political dissidents.
> it becomes harder to stop someone from using the invention in bad ways
The bad ways are not always clear. I will quote Freud from Civilization and Its Discontents.
"One would like to ask: is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal
increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child
of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time
after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult
voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously
reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and,
indeed, in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man?"
"If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his
native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if travelling across the
ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-
voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of
reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest
restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear
no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we
have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage.... And, finally, what good
to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we
can only welcome death as a deliverer?"
> If that was true, society as a whole would never improve.
Not sure that's the conclusion to draw. The car made traveling large distances possible. Now things are built on car scale distances, making walking difficult and requiring a car.
> unimaginable improvement of human life in every dimension
I would argue mainly materialistically. And yet we have to spend most of our lives working to pay for these comforts.
You can push that all the way back to the Middle Ages. Serfdom was quite an improvement over Roman-era slavery, being tied to the land was far more stable and secure than being tied directly to a master. It wasn't quite a middle class, but better nonetheless.
Transportation and naval technology steadily improved, and more and more goods and services became broadly available during this time period.
The downside is that war got really bad from 1800-1950.
You could perhaps argue that antibiotics have allowed farming practises that might not be otherwise be economical that produce more suffering for the animals.
NB I don't know if this is true or not, but it certainly seems possible.
There is an argument that the black plague was one of the driving forced behind the rise of British democracy causing a labour shortage that added fuel to the rise of the middle class.
Now I've got no idea if that is a convincing argument, but it is plausible enough to say that a counterfactual world without antibiotics might have turned out better.
Not quite. It was during feudalism, and what it established was the power of the guilds and a large rise in wages. To use the Marxist term, there was no "reserve army of the unemployed" so workers found it much easier to negotiate wages.
British democracy generally came much later, as a divide and rule proposition. The divide was between the feudalism descended aristocrats on one hand, and the merchant capitalists on the other. The franchise was extended to property owners, then poorer property owners, then all men and property owning women, then all women, then they removed multiple votes in the 60s and limited the number of hereditary peers in the 90s. The start of the process was the 19th century, whereas the plague was the 14th and then 15th.
Innovation isn't anything in moral terms.
All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.