Technology: rights or responsibilities? - Part XI
By Dr. Andy Farnell
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The veil of ignorance
I want to move on to talk about the relation between knowledge and respect. Responsibility requires respect. But where does that come from?
I think that technology in the 20th century felt good because our optimism was based on an understanding of it and its potential - both good and evil. We hoped to harness that potential and exercise more control over life. Somewhere we stopped understanding it and began to accept its apparent effects as outside our control - not just as everyday folk, but as scientists and engineers too.
A. N. Whitehead thought that civilisation advances by abstraction, giving us the ability to deal in larger ideas without the baggage of small details. It turns out that those small details are really important. Here I want to invoke one of our duties to technology, the duty to understand it. I do not take A.C. Clarke's note that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" as a positive observation. I think he gave us a warning. Magic is that which fools children into a dissociated sense of amusement and suspension of rational disbelief. Distraction and deception are assaults on our minds.
The "veil of ignorance" or "original position from nowhere" is a thought experiment that asks us to imagine we are totally oblivious to the world and its ways, and of ourselves. We are supposed to imagine choices made on purely moral values not knowing whether we would be advantaged or disadvantaged by any information, social status, money, power, or position. We place our bets, and then as in a television game show, the veil is lifted revealing the hand life has actually dealt us based only on our moral choices.
Digital technology has now created such a veil. Rather than revealing the truth to us it's slowly made invisible all sorts of things like our real class status, our actual wealth, and has hidden away enabling knowledge about the world that our great-grandparents took for granted.
We've been led to believe a complete falsehood - that "technology is neutral". It's a slogan still repeated today by prominent leaders and intellectuals who ought to know better. It is a comforting idea that enables us to believe we are making "neutral moral judgements" as "disinterested amoral business people" and "passive consumers in a digital society". The veil has become an excuse not to look too hard.
Of course that was never the intention of philosophers like Locke, Hobbes, or Rawls, for whom the experiment was a tool for the actually intelligent and informed thinker to "check their privilege".
When the veil is lifted what will we see? When the intoxication of TikTok, Facebook and "convenience" wears off I think many will be shocked to realise where digital technology has placed them in the actual hierarchy and objective fortunes of life. Waking from the dream is going to hurt.
A few decades ago any sixteen year-old left school with a good general knowledge of science. Physics, biology, chemistry, mechanics, were all on the syllabus because these were the skills we thought young people needed for modern life. At my "co-ed comprehensive" the girls studied metalwork and car mechanics while the boys took home economics (cookery and sewing), because "every citizen needs to have modern survival skills".
Take household products as an example. Once you had to know what chemicals were in your kitchen, at least for basic safety. Knowing which ones not to mix and which ones you could mix - such as making a perfect window cleaner from a weak solution of methanol and vinegar. There were such things as chemist shops. For medicinal, domestic, hobbies and craft uses, you could buy unbranded household chemicals over the counter, disinfectants like iodine or potassium permanganate, solvents like acetone, useful acids and alkalies like sodium hydroxide, nitrates as plant food and so on.
These stores were systematically destroyed. One popular explanation is that civil access to the chemical basics of life created danger, so health and safety and counter-terrorism concerns were to blame. That's only slightly true. In reality, business was the dominant force.
As control consolidated into the few domestic product and big-pharma monopolists like Unilever, Kraft, Procter and Gamble etc, a "produstisation" took place. Now, unless you go to a specialist "organic" store you cannot buy "soap", knowing that it is simply hydrolysed fat. You can buy "a luxury experience" or a "nourishing skincare bar".
Simultaneously we stopped teaching basic home skills at schools. Science was dumbed down. Classroom experiments with even the slightest risk were replaced with computer simulations and watching dull videos. Gone is the sheer visceral excitement and lifelong learning impression as the whole class stood nervously 10 meters back while the chemistry teacher threw a lump of potassium into a bucket of water - demonstrating that the Earth and the whole Universe is alive!! And moreover, demonstrating that the reality we live in deserves respect. For disconnected young people now "a reaction" is something you get from posting on social media.
Consider the parallels to digital technology. Labelling laws changed, regressing us back to the Victorian era of hucksters selling coloured water. Whereas "chemicals" (raw reagents) were subject to very strict labelling laws, supermarket products escape the same clear information requirements. Information spoils the aesthetic of beauty packaging and "scares people". Likewise, proprietary software is opaque and magical. Corporations get to "protect" their "secret formulas". Now you just buy mystery chemicals. However, opaque modern products are just as dangerous or more dangerous than raw "chemicals". Only now we don't know what they are and we do not respect them. We've outsourced that 'respect' to absentee "experts". Once you could have used a "search engine" (something people before 2020 used to look up "facts"). But companies stopped publishing things like service manuals, data sheets, full bills of materials - so despite COSHH and other safety regulations discovery can require hours of active research. Or you can use an "AI" which will tell you "Sodium Hydroxide goes great on pizza!"
Whereas we once wrote our own programs and studied "IT" to understand technology, today we teach kids only how to use it. To quote Emma Goldman, "The greatest violence in society today is ignorance". Yet most of technology today positively encourages ignorance. Its market share depends on ignorance. It sets out to make you ignorant so that you will need and depend on it.
We no longer know the difference between what is hidden from us to make things easier and what is deceptively hidden from us to benefit vendors or other invisible agents. As technical designer Mark Hurst put it, "UX now stands for user exploitation". This is a massive epistemological crisis equal and adjacent to the problems of "AI" and disinformation, but nobody dares to talk about it.
As large language models (LLM) replace search and authorship this problem will grow significantly. "Authority" shares the same etymological root as "Author". The replacement of human writing by generative systems erodes authority. A post "AI" world is therefore a world without authority. It is where scepticism and critical thinking is meaningless because one cannot examine the provenance of information. Everything becomes speculation and "mere opinion", and is thus easy to counter with "alternative information" but spoken in a louder voice by an "expert" with more power. This is the root of the populist crisis undermining science. For commercial and political gain we've destroyed the epistemological framework by which real expertise and facts can be respected.
Without attribution we live a world of hearsay. It is postmodern relativism raised to a large power. Any society foolish enough to "embrace AI" will have to contend with the demise of truth in favour of "truth brands". Is that Apple truth? Microsoft truth? Or Google truth? And you can bet your fancy pants those will be "incompatible truths".
We've created a society that values ignorance as a way to keep us "safe" from the burden of thinking. But ignorance is also a foundation of disrespect. Racists, sexists and animal abusers grow-up without positive life experiences of other cultures, the opposite sex or other creatures. The veil of ignorance has an effect I do not think Rawls anticipated, that it paradoxically breeds immorality. Those who have no moral impetus, and are starved of any moral education, feel only fear and contempt toward the unknown. Ignorance is not "liberating" or "bliss", it's terrifying! What we are taught, or what society fails to teach us can be a kind of trauma or bad socialisation.
So it is with technology. We do not respect it. We do not respect its consequences beyond what is temporarily "convenient" for us. "Magic" is an unreliable lover. I'm starting to see that so many people who claim to "love tech" are faking it.
Being "left behind" is a threat. Creepy is the new cool. Cringing. Awkward. When you hear those simpering, adoring comments about "technology I couldn't do without" listen for the note of resentment. Like a beaten spouse plastering on the grimmace of Stockholm syndrome. And, to a frightening degree, one or two generations have already been so traumatised by tech they have a now incurable ambivalent relation to it and the world it mediates for them. What surprises me is how many young kids welcome the smartphone ban. As if they're breathing a sigh of relief! Only the damaged adults robbed of their childhood are vicariously angry.
From birth we are given an endless stream of cheap plastic toys that blink, beep, chatter and then die and are thrown out. As kids we do not respect the genius behind their designs, the labour (often by other children) that went to make them, their cost to the planet in materials, energy and water, and the grave legacy of micro-plastics and heavy metal pollution they leave. Then, as adults we realise that technology bites. It fails and lets us down, betrays our privacy, and to the extent it has a "mind of its own" it is an interloper in our lives. This compounds the already established sense of ambivalence and latent hostility we have towards technology. Add to that "AI", where it produces disinformation, marketing spam, slop and lies.
What we do not see is that technology itself is none of these things. It is the directing minds behind our technology who are the source of its faults and shape our negative attitudes toward it. If we do not control our devices then our devices are simply a representation of someone else's values. If the Internet is no longer a peer-to-peer nexus of people it is just another broadcast system for those in power. If those people are malign, treacherous, greedy, cheap, negligent toward the planet, and contemptuous of other "dumb fucks", then that's what our technology becomes.
We wanted convenience uber alles, so we settled for ignorance. Into the vacuum rushed a hoard of more agile, cheaper unprincipled opportunists, snake-oil sellers, solutionists, fakes and impostors hell-bent on a descent into directionless excess. Technology now means nothing to it's creators except as a way to make money. This is no country for old men like Steve Jobs riding "bicycles for the mind". You think Apple love computers? Think again. Apple loves customers. Customers identify with their computers because Apple's shtick is to play with your emotions and attachment patterns.
Government regulation of tech monopoly is too little and came too late. Besides, it mostly makes things worse, It either replaces moral action and consideration with compliance checklists and shallow performance, or it is a net too coarse and loose for slippery corporate lawyers. It creates rules to be gamed by those with the resources, putting challengers at a disadvantage. It reduces the Law and ethics to mere fines which are factored into the cost of doing business by obscenely wealthy corporations.
By allowing the brats to run amok too long, letting tech go undisciplined, we've made regulation an ugly battle for control. It provokes sound and fury from those small and bitter little men of the US "tech leadership" whose mask slips revealing the fume of their full-on technofascist ambition.
The answer of course is to pierce the veil. People can not respect technology that is so evidently being used against them. One must show people the real emperor's clothes of tech. People deserve to appreciate that a venture like Facebook is really no more than an undergraduate database project with some fancy style-sheets. It exists only by dint of protectionist laws, a broken trademark, copyright and patent system that stops it being torn apart by worthy competitors in a heartbeat.
Or let's explain to people that "AI" is a triumph of pure brute force whose massive costs are hidden. Or that using biometrics for access control is the single dumbest idea in the history of computer security. These are not the places sane nations should be investing money. Instead let governments take an official stance against such foolishness instead of kowtowing as they did at the Bletchley Summit.
By trying to regulate errant industries, governments simply lend them credibility. What we're finally seeing at last is institutions like NIST, FTC, FBI, CISA, NSA, NCSC, European Parliament, and civil representatives like FSF, taking the fight to an intellectual battleground and very publicly calling out BigTech's bluster and bullshit. The US government flat-out called Microsoft a security risk. Which it is.
With its magic broken and it's spell lifted, the power of tech "elites" will evaporate in short order. Projects like social algorithms and the oh so terrifying Wizard-of-Oz contraptions of "AI", face recognition and cybernetic social control will revert to children's toys. They have literally no benefit to people qua citizens. In the cold light of day, when the circus has left town, the grown-ups will finally be able to focus on rebuilding reality; health services, transport, energy, reliable water and power - not these games of billionaire egotists which tarnish technology.
But while we remain on the technofascist/futurist agenda it means clocking-up a terrible loss, a swell of very negative social capital is accumulating all around - but it is barely visible. Personally, the reasons that made me a passionate teacher of computer science have evaporated after a lifetime of service. I find it morally impossible to contribute in any way to what we are building except in the field of civic cybersecurity which is teaching people how to defend against the present mischief of intrusive tech.
Can we rekindle a renaissance in digital literacy? Especially amongst politicians? Can deep knowledge breed a new wave of respect for actually useful technology and enable a fresh generation to retake control of, and responsibility for it? I think it will be a very different kind of knowledge than my generation absorbed, but that new flavour of intellectual-self-defence will be an equally valuable life-skill as when we learned car mechanics and cookery at school.