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Technology and Progress

Conceptually, technology can be broadly defined as a collection of information of techniques, methods and processes. This information is used in the production of goods and services with the goal of accomplishing certain objectives like scientific investigation. Technology includes designed material, contracts, organizations, and systems. Progress is the onward or forward movement of something with regard to time. If applied to the application of technology, progress can facilitate the making of people’s lives better. Traditionally, this is a valued change. From wood to oil to natural gas to photovoltaic cells, things are becoming better, faster, stronger, more precise, more efficient, and more comprehensive.

Asking critical questions about the relationship between science, technology, and progress has occupied Science and Technology Studies scholars since the early days of the field. There are, at least, three different conceptions of progress considered: Technocratic thinking, enlightenment thinking and counter-enlightenment thinking.

Technocratic Thinking

Specific to technology, progress constitutes a genuine innovative or inventive means or method. As a social science, methods for quantifying and qualifying progress include technocratic thinking, enlightenment thinking and counter-enlightenment thinking. Per the technocratic methodology, individuals view all progress and the answers to all of humanity's problems coming from technology’s invention and innovation. By this thought, technology is regarded as the sole driving force bringing about not just social change but also progress. Technocrats believe in an intrinsic positive value stemming from technological innovation.

By this thinking, new medical technologies could generate societal benefits by creating economic benefits stemming from innovation. An example could be the advancement of nanotechnology, it is capable of augmenting the average standard of living in spite of making few easily identifiable direct contributions to social welfare. Science and technology could therefore make a crucial contribution to economic growth and standard of living without necessarily making a new positive non-economic contribution to the quality of human life or the welfare of society. This would still be considered progress. According to Sarewitz, any generalized societal benefits created by economic growth may obscure the negative impacts of science and technology on quality of life. By singling out the practical positive consequences of particular scientific discoveries, basic-research advocates create the illusion that there is a connection between the serendipitous course of basic research and the specific problems that society most needs or wants to have solved. Through this, the belief that scientific and technological advance is directly linked to societal progress is spread. While hard to substantiate, it could be said that science and technology exert an intrinsically undemocratic influence. Stemming from a requirement of people to adapt to change over which they have no control, society effectively must follow where science and technology leads it. This relationship is not one of mutual consent, and there is no going back.

Some have argued that the "easiest way to chart the progress of a civilization is simply to catalogue the inventions and technologies that it has produced." The standard array of discoveries and innovations made over the past century could serve as technocratic measure of societal progress. Rising standards of living are therefore interpreted by economists, policy makers, and voters alike as a concrete indication of societal progress. Being optimistic, one may envision greater progress in the future measured by advancements in areas such as: artificial intelligence, biotechnology, high temperature superconductivity, molecular-scale manufacturing, advanced materials, and hydrogen power. From wood to oil to natural gas to photovoltaic cells, goods and services have been viewed as becoming faster, stronger, more precise, more efficient, and more comprehensive.

Enlightenment Thinking

Different from the technocratic, those identifying with the enlightenment regard technology merely as a tool. The enlightenment rejects the idea that technological progress will necessarily lead to social progress. "The development of improved machinery [...] in the late eighteenth century coincided with the formulation and diffusion of the modern Enlightenment idea of history as a record of progress." It assumes that history, or at least modern history, is driven by the steady, cumulative, and inevitable expansion of human knowledge of and power over nature. The new scientific knowledge and technological power was expected to make possible a comprehensive improvement in all the conditions of life - social, political, moral, and intellectual as well as material.

The modern idea of progress, as developed by its radical French, English, and American adherents, emerged in an era of political revolution. It was a revolutionary doctrine, bonded to the radical struggle for freedom from feudal forms of domination. The sciences and technologies were not regarded as ends in themselves, but as instruments for carrying out a comprehensive transformation of society. The new knowledge and power would provide the basis for alternatives. People were motivated to move away from the deeply entrenched authoritarian, hierarchical institutions of l'ancien régime. Consequentially, the idea of history as endless progress fostered wildly improbable dreams of perfecting man and humanity's mastery of nature. Effectively, the enlightenment translates to a guidance of technology that promote social improvements over time.

Industrial Revolution

To help understand this, it may helps to go back as far as the Industrial Revolution using Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Max Weber as focal points. The difference between the earlier Enlightenment conception of progress and later thinkers such as Max Weber can in part be attributed to the difference between the groups they represent. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, as examples, belonged to a specific social class during their lifetimes. For a short time, these same men also possessed authority and power in several different forms: economic, social, political, and intellectual. The industrial capitalists for whom Webster spoke were men of a differing kind. Their status came from a different avenue of wealth and power. As such, their conception of progress, like their economic and social aspirations, were correspondingly different. The new technology and the immense profits it generated belonged to them, and since they had every reason to assume that they would retain their property and power, they had a vested interest in technological innovation. As industrialization proceeded, these men became true believers in technological improvement as the primary basis for - as necessary to - universal progress.

Happiness

According to Enlightenment views, human progress is not defined by technological progress, but by benefits to contemporary society. Through this thought process, arbitrary levels of technological achievement should not be the only type of benefit used to judge progress. Instead, it claims that true progress should include how these technologies interact and influence the sources of value in people’s lives. Since World War II to present day, Japan has changed immensely. It went from dire poverty to preeminent affluence. This is not considered Enlightenment progress though. People are not decidedly happier than they were before. Material, scientific, technological, and economic advancement did not improve happiness much after the baseline level (bare necessities are provided). According to this ideology, this pursuance of scarce resources and higher income detracts from other meaningful progress, such as social relations and true progress. Yojimbo was a good example of cultural removal from technological enforcement. The samurai code of living had to be given up to the development of the pistol. It was either death or acceptance. Enlightenment believes “science and technology have continually destabilized social institutional relations as well as cultural norms.” In result, happiness is not going up. Rather, Enlightenment believes it is the responsibility of humans to take responsibility for our own ingenuity, by slowing down innovation, deciding what is important and determining what direction social progress is going towards.

Counter-Enlightenment

Let's turn our focus to late-eighteenth-century ideas. These became the basis for a critique of the advanced society. Usually described as the viewpoint of the counter-Enlightenment, ideas of this kind have formed the basis for an adversarial culture. These views originated from the intellectual backlash toward the field of natural sciences typically associated with discoveries by Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, and Newton. In some lights, this tendency can be seen as a reaction against the extravagant claims of the truth of the Mechanical Philosophy.

Mechanical Philosophy

see also: Mechanical Philosophy

A term derived from the ubiquity of the machine metaphor in the work of Newton and other natural scientists ("celestial mechanics") and many of their philosophic allies, notably Descartes, all of whom tended to conceive of nature itself as a type of great engine, and its subordinate parts (including the human body) as lesser machines.

18th Century

By the late eighteenth century, a powerful set of critical, antimechanistic ideas was being developed by Kant, Fichte, and other German idealists, and by great English poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth. The Industrial Revolution was gaining momentum, and as power machinery was more widely diffused in Great Britain, Western Europe, and North America, the machine acquired much greater resonance. Soon it came to represent both new technologies based on mechanized power and a mechanistic mindset of scientific rationalism. According to Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle announced in his essay, "Signs of the Times," that the right name for the dawning era was the "Age of Machinery." He made the claim that it would be dominated by mechanical (utilitarian) thinking as well as by actual machines. In his criticism of the new era, Carlyle viewed that this wasn't inherently dangerous. Instead, it represented potential progress as long as neither was allowed to become the exclusive or predominant mode of thought. In the United States a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals adopted this ideology. In the work of writers like Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville, we encounter critical responses to the onset of industrialism that cannot be written off as mere nostalgia or primitivism. These writers regarded the dominant view, represented by the appearance of the new machine in the American landscape, as dangerously shallow, materialistic, and one- sided. A fear of mechanism and its potential domination of the individual colored their thought. Henry Thoreau's detailed, carefully composed account of the intrusion of the railroad into the Concord woods is a good example; it bears out his dilineation of the new inventions as "improved means to unimproved ends."

20th Century

Only in the late twentieth century, with the growth of skepticism about scientific and technological progress, and with the emergence of a vigorous adversary culture in the 1960's, has the standpoint of that earlier eccentric minority recieved a certain intellectual respect. To be sure, it is still the viewpoint of a relatively small minority, but there have been times - such as during the Vietnam upheaval of the 1960's - when that minority won the temporary support of, or formed a tacit coalition with, a remarkably large number of other disaffected Americans. Much the same antitechnocratic viewpoint has made itself felt in various dissident movements and intellectual tendencies since the 1960's: the antinuclear movements (against both nuclear power and nuclear weapoonry); some branches of the environmental and feminist movements; the "small is beautiful" and "stable-state" economic theories, as well as the quest for "soft energy paths" and "alternative (or appropriate) technologies."

Reading Notes

1. Leo Marx, “Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?” in Technology Review (January 1987): 33-41
2. Gary Chapman, “Shaping Technology for the ‘Good Life’: The Technological Imperative versus the Social Imperative” in Technology and Society: Building our Sociotechnical Future edited by Deborah G. Johnson and Jameson M. Wetmore (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008): 445-458
3. Merritt R Smith, “Technological Determinism in American Culture” in Does Technology Drive History edited by Merritt R Smith and Leo Marx (MIT Press, Cambride, MA,1994): 1-36
4. Daniel Sarewitz “Pas deTrois: Science, Technology, and the Marketplace” in Technology and Society: Building our Sociotechnical Future edited by Deborah G. Johnson and Jameson M. Wetmore (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008): 275-295
5. Daniel Sarewitz “Science and Happiness” in Living with the Genie edited by Alan Lightman, Daniel Sarewitz and Christina Desser (Island Press, Washington D.C., 2004): 181-200