Can we ever keep up with technological developments?

One of the books I included in yesterday’s list of accessible books was Philosophers of Technology by SB Hansen (2020) which was disappointing for me since the author failed to cover the writers I’m familiar with such as Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman and Jerry Mander. What was so interesting about the writings of Asimov, Boorstin, Brzezinski and Ellul is that their interest was much wider on the social impact of technology which we have tended to ignore - until the latest developments on Artificial Intelligence hit us last year

Almost 3 years ago I was reading an important book about Artificial Intelligence 

- all the more important since it comes out  of the conversations held by 3 

individuals teaching a course on the subject - System Error – how big tech went 

wrong and how we can reboot (2021) by a philospher, a top-level computer 

scientist and a political adviser/”scientist”. Such a multi-disciplinary authorship 

gives me more confidence in the book and its emphasis on the importance of 

values is perhaps an indication of the philosopher’s influence. I had forgotten 

that I had posted about it three years ago. At 400 pages it could and should 

be much shorter and fails two of the tests I set some 3 years ago for non-fiction 

books

• its intro doesn’t summarise each chapter to allow the reader to get a sense 

of the book’s thrust (some chapter subheadings do give hints)

• it lacks the short guide to further reading which might help the reader 

understand any author bias. 

The chapters headings do give some hint about the book’s argument - 
1. The Optimisation Mindset – where tech engineers are set up as the bogeymen
2. the Unholy Marriage of Hackers and Venture Capitalists
3. The Race between Disruption and Democracy
4. Can Algorithmic decisions ever be fair?
5. What’s your Privacy worthwhile?
6. Can Humans flourish in a world of smart machines?
7. Will free speech survive the Internet?
8. Can Democracies rise to the challenge?

Here are some excerpts -

When we uncritically celebrate technology or unthinkingly criticize it, the end 

result is to leave technologists in charge of our future. This book was written to 

provide an understanding of how we as individuals, and especially together as 

citizens in a democracy, can exercise our agency, reinvigorate our democracy, and 

direct the digital revolution to serve our best interests
We must resist the temptation to think in extremes. Both techno-utopianism and 

-dystopianism are all too facile and simplistic outlooks for our complex age. 

Instead of taking the easy way out or throwing our hands up in the air, we must rise 

to the defining challenge of our era: harnessing technological progress to serve 

rather than subvert the interests of individuals and societies. We can’t leave our 

technological future to engineers, venture capitalists, and politicians. 

This book lays out the dangers of leaving the optimizers in charge and empowers all 

of us to make the difficult decisions that will determine how technology transforms 

our society. There are few more important tasks before us in the twenty-first 

century. When we act collectively, we not only take charge of our own destiny, we 

also make it far likelier that our technological future will be one in which individuals 

will flourish alongside, and because of, a reinvigorated democracy.
Concluding Chapter In the blink of an eye, our relationship with technology changed. 

We once connected with family and friends on social networks. Now they’re viewed 

as a place for disinformation and the manipulation of public health and elections. 

We enjoyed the convenience of online shopping and the unfettered communication 

that smartphones brought us. Now they’re seen as a means to collect data from us, 

put local stores out of business, and hijack our attention. We shifted from a wide-eyed 

optimism about technology’s liberating potential to a dystopian obsession with 

biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots. It’s no surprise, 

then , that trust in technology companies is declining. Yet too few of us see any 

alternative to accepting the onward march of technology. We have simply accepted 

a technological future designed for us by technologists.

It need not be so. There are many actions we can take as an initial line of defense 

against the disruptions of big tech in our personal, professional, and civic lives. 

Perhaps the most important first step is one you’ve already taken by getting to this 

point in the book, which is to inform yourself about the myriad ways technology 

impacts your life. To fight for your rights in high-stakes decisions, you need to 

understand whether an algorithm is involved. In contexts such as being denied a 

mortgage, losing access to social services, or encountering the criminal justice system, 

you may have a right to seek more transparency into the processes.

One of my criticisms of “System Error” is that it lacks a short guide on 

“further reading” for those who wanted to get guidance about key books 

in the field. This, of course, is not an easy task. It requires authors to put 

their prejudices aside and try to identify the most important texts – not 

just contemporary but in the field as a whole.These are my suggestions -

Background Reading on Technology – earliest first
The Technological Society Jacques Ellul 1964
The Revolution of Hope - toward a humanized technology by Eric Fromm 1968
The Technological System Jacques Ellul 1980
The Technological Bluff Jacques Ellul 1989
The Impact of Science james burke, isaac asimov (nasa 1985)
The Republic of Technology Daniel Boorstin 1978
Between two ages – america's role in the technetronic era Zbigniew Brzezinski 1980
The whale and the reactor –a search for limits in the age of high technology 

Langdon Winner 1986
Technopoly - the surrender of culture to technology' Neil Postman 1992
The Second Machine Age – work, progress and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies;

 Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014  

More recent texts
Impromptu – ampflifying our humanity through AI by AI and Reid Hoffman (2023) 
The Age of AI; and our human future H Kissinger, E Scmidt and D Huttenlocher (2021)
Ten Arguments for getting rid of your social media right now; Jaron Lanier (2018)
Utopia is Creepy; Nicholas Carr (2016)
The Internet is not the Answer; Andrew Keen (2015)
From Guttenberg to Zuckenberg – what you really need to know about the Internet; John 

Naughton (2013)

To Save everything click here – the folly of technological solutionism; 

Efgeni Morozov (2013)

The Shallows - what the internet is doing to our brain Nicholas Carr (2010)