At a recent conference I attended, a speaker referenced media ecologist Neil Postman and his “rules” for evaluating the pros and cons of any given technological development. Especially in the new era of AI, people tend to fall on extreme ends of either pessimism or optimism. Some tech moguls have displayed an odd amalgam of both, saying AI is the next leap forward in human progress while also claiming that it needs to be regulated by the government.

Being truly “anti-technology” though is pretty rare when we consider what “technology” really is. The keyboard I’m writing on currently is technology. So is the mug I’m sipping coffee from, and the corrective lenses I’m looking through that let me see the screen clearly in front of me. Doors that include hydraulic levers are technological, as are suspenders and the codex. When we think of technology as a broad category that includes just about everything humans have ever built and innovated, it might be sufficed to say that no one is truly “anti-technology.” But when technologies rapidly change, or change at all, they change society, and often in fundamental ways. The automobile created the suburban sprawl. People were less locally rooted. You could now drive long distances to go to the club, church, park, or restaurant of choice. This allowed people way more mobility, ease, and freedom, but it also led to the creation of the interstate system, which erased a lot of small towns and led to a lot of fatal car crashes. Postman says something similar in this address he made in 1998:

Think of the automobile, which for all of its obvious advantages, has poisoned our air, choked our cities, and degraded the beauty of our natural landscape. Or you might reflect on the paradox of medical technology which brings wondrous cures but is, at the same time, a demonstrable cause of certain diseases and disabilities, and has played a significant role in reducing the diagnostic skills of physicians. It is also well to recall that for all of the intellectual and social benefits provided by the printing press, its costs were equally monumental. The printing press gave the Western world prose, but it made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of communication. 

NewTech ’98 (rsu.edu)

Long story short: every technology has pros and cons. But when a culture loses a hierarchy of values, it gets harder to discern the proper ends of our technology use. Without guiding principles, technology can progress while our moral maturity stays the same or even backtracks. Postman saw this decades ago. In his conclusion, he notes,

What I am saying is that our enthusiasm for technology can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute. The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God’s plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us.

With AI hype curves, a potential for another AI “winter,” and the mental health crisis created in large part by digital media platforms, Postman’s observations are perhaps more important for us to heed than ever.

You can read more of his incisive thoughts on how to think well about evolving technologies here.