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)

Technology Matters – questions to live with David Nye (2010) Looks exactly what I've been
looking for

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

The End of Ethics in a Technological Society LE Schmidt 2006

Books for Downloading

One of the delights of old age is having the time and capacity to access, download and skim the books available on the internet – whether it’s the archive site which allowed you to read a book for an hour or so but, sadly, has just been attacked by book publishers and forced to remove half a million books from its site. So access the undernoted books while you can!

- Fascists  Michael Mann( 2004) Mann is one of the most interesting sociologists

- The Routledge Companion to Fascism and the Far Right ed P Davis and D Lynch 

 (2002)
- Russell Jacoby is an underrated writer and I recommend 4 of his books 

• The End of Utopia (1982/1999)

• Dogmatic Wisdom – cultural wars (1994)

• Future Imperfect R Jacoby (2005)

• On Diversity (2020)

- Absent Minds Stefan Collini (2006) A fantastic british specialist in intellectual 

history
- Good and Bad Power – the ideals and betrayals of government Geoff Mulgan 

(2006). One of my favourite writers
- The Shock of the Old – technology and global history since 1900 David Edgerton 

(2008) A great english economic historian
- The Dictionary of Alternatives M Parker et al (2007) offers superb insights 

into utopian thought
- Social Justice isn’t what you think it is M Novak and P Adams (2015) great 

read which deals with the Catholic origins of the topic
- The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements ed D Snow et al (2016) 

An important topic for me
- Out of the Ordinary Marc Stears (2021) There’s been a lot of talk since 

Brexit about english identity – although the lead contender for the Tory 

leadership couldn’t give a clear answer last week to the simple question about 

what it was. He should have read this book
- War and Social Theory Neal Curtis (2006) Not quite what you expect with 

the opening chapter focusing on Heidegger
- Hate in Precarious Times Neal Curtis (2021) should be read with 

Passionate Politics – emotions and social movements J Goodwin et al (2001)

- The Marxists ed C Wright Mills (1962) The famous US sociologist was not 

a Marxist – so this book (which I wasn’t aware of until downloading it) is a 

fair-minded assessment of what the doctrine offers.
- Philosophers of Technology SB Hansen (2020) Disappointing for me since 

the author fails to cover the writers I’m familiar with such as Jacques Ellul, 

Neil Postman and Jerry Mander 
- Technology and the Virtues – a philosophical guide to a future worth wanting  

 Shannon Vallor (2016). The US author, who recently moved to Scotland, has 

been exploring the effects of technology for 2 decades
- The AI Mirror – how to reclaim our humanity in an age of machine thinking 

Shannon Vallor (2024) A good read
- Liberalism in neoliberal times ed J Petley et al (2017) Liberalism has been 

under attack for the past few years – and rightly so – but it remains important 

to distinguish it from neoliberalism. Also worth reading is 

Liberalism and the challenge of climate change Chris Shaw (2024) only 149 pages!

MAKING A DIFFERENCE?

A new government is in power. Different people, different politics, different plans. But how much of a difference can they make to people’s lives if the institutions of the state are setting them up to fail? In his new book, Failed State, the political commentator Sam Freedman (author of Comment is Freed) outlines how it feels like nothing works in Britain anymore. 

Why is everything going wrong? It's easy to blame dysfunctional politicians, 

but the reality is more complicated, Sam argues - politicians can make things 

better or worse, but all work within our state institutions, which are utterly 

broken. Last week we and the Policy Institute at King’s College London hosted 

a webinar to discuss the book’s diagnosis and prescription for change, 

featuring Sam alongside Polly Curtis (Chief Executive of Demos), Emma Norris (Deputy Director

 of the Institute for Government) and Duncan Robinson (Political Editor and Bagehot 

columnist at The Economist), with Professor Bobby Duffy (Director of the Policy 

Institute) in the chair.

Event summary; Sam outlined the three big trends from recent decades that he thinks have made it so hard to run the country:

Centralisation (to Whitehall, undermining the capacity and power of local government and then overwhelming central government to the extent that it has no capacity either to deal with big strategic issues or to deliver, and is reliant on poorly performing and unaccountable outsourcing companies; but also within Whitehall, with an overmighty Treasury filling the void of a weakened Number 10 post-Blair to the extent that spending controls are the only strategic driver of Decision-making in government) 

Scrutiny (the executive avoiding scrutiny from the legislature through tricks like timetabling changes in parliament and over-use of secondary legislation, leading to poor quality law-making, forcing both the Lords and the courts to become more involved in improving or challenging legislation; and less effective and robust internal scrutiny by the civil service in response to increased hostility to civil servants from government ministers) 

Media (‘comms has eaten policy’ in reaction to the 24/7 news cycle and social media, such that politicians are incentivised to govern through constant policy announcements rather than developing effective long-term policies, while changing media consumption habits have reduced the money available to hire specialist policy correspondents, leading lobby journalists to report on policy issues as well as politics, but with a focus on the political aspects of policy, further incentivising the government to focus on meaningless announcements rather than effective policies)

Key issues raised in the panel discussion and audience Q&A:

There’s a broader problem of low trust and confidence of citizens in the state, which is self-perpetuating, because if politicians don’t feel trusted to make tough decisions, they will be inhibited and won’t act boldly to improve things
Devolution is messy and creates winners and losers (but arguably is better than the status quo, which mostly creates losers all round)
We’re stuck in a cycle of superficiality and short-termism, with lots of people in Whitehall and Westminster who are good in crises but less on long-term projects
Number 10 is too focused on the detail and not enough on strategic leadership
People in government matter as well as the systems, and we need to incentivise and support Ministers to make good, bold and often difficult long-term decisions

We need a better approach to evidence; Ministers talk the talk but really want policy-based evidence, not evidence-based policy, while civil servants sometimes stifle innovation because of a lack of ‘proper’ evidence

Solutions suggested by Sam and the panellists included:

• Devolving more power (e.g. to mayors)
• Having a more coherent (and limited) approach to outsourcing
• Giving the legislative function of MPs more status and power
• Making MPs more representative of the population
• Involving citizens more in policymaking
• Raising more money from taxes and spending more on local government
• Giving Ministers more control (e.g. powers to appoint special advisors)
• Focusing government on long-term missions to provide strategic clarity

Some reflections; In a 2023 post on his substack (The Policy Paradox), Sam identified three reasons why ‘no brainer’ policies (such as putting more money into preventative health) often never see the light of day. The first is Treasury spending rules - linking to the point in the book about the centralisation of government (the IFG also recently recommended reforming the centre of government to deliver more effectively on policy priorities). The second is misdiagnosis (wrong problem > wrong solution), which links to centralisation, scrutiny and the media. The third is ‘fear of the electorate’ - an often unjustified assumption that the public won’t like a particular policy. In other words, not only is there a risk that, once in government, you pull a policy lever and nothing happens, but you’re also likely to be pulling the wrong lever, or you might not pull the lever in the first place, either because of fear of public (and media) reaction or because the iron grip of the Treasury won’t let you anywhere near the room with the levers in. (Of course, this leaves to one side the whole set of arguments that change also comes about through other means than governments pulling levers.) In his book The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking, the philosopher Roman Krznaric identifies the barriers to long-term thinking (for the sake of argument, let’s equate this with effective policymaking, even if there’s not a perfect correlation), which echo some of the issues identified by Sam and his fellow panellists:

• Human nature (“the inherent short-sightedness of our marshmallow brains”)

• Outdated institutional designs (political systems geared to short time horizons)

• The power of vested interests in an economic system “bent on short-term gains”

• Insecurity in the here and now causing people to focus on immediate needs

• Insufficient sense of crisis (boiling frog syndrome)

The Canaries and Deepening the Opportunity Mission argued that inequality is itself a barrier to the new government’s missions, and The Fairness Foundation will publish shortly a ‘wealth gap risk register’ setting out how wealth inequality damages our society, economy, democracy and environment (and what we can do about it).

UPDATE - I've just come across Mission Control (Reform 2024) which is a think tank offering advice to the new government on how to carry out the mission-oriented government offered by Mariana Mazzacato