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Chapter Summary
Chapter 1 investigates the contentious question of how to best define technology. The chapter outlines and critically discusses several approaches. Considering the depth and pervasiveness of technology in our society, this introductory chapter stresses the relevance of studying the intersection of technology and society—what is often referred to as the socio-technical perspective. The chapter includes a discussion of how technologies lead to large-scale, widespread social change and issues such as social and economic inequality. The key argument is that social change occurs not as a result of technology alone but as a blending of micro-, meso-, and macro-level processes. In addition to established approaches to understanding technology, the chapter also covers three of the main contemporary perspectives surrounding the use of technology in modern society. The first is simulation, which is geared toward the development of tools that can resemble or outperform human faculties. The second perspective is augmentation, which attempts to integrate machines and humans into new hybrid actors with added capabilities. Finally, automation is the move toward employing technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence to fully automate many processes and activities previously performed by humans. These perspectives highlight the many points of intersection between the human and the technological, including full substitution, raising important questions about the ethical, moral, and societal implications of endeavours such as augmentation, simulation, and automation. It also raises questions about the need for more intense public debate and scrutiny around ethics and for the teaching of technological literacy across the lifespan.
Learning Objectives
In this chapter, you should learn to do the following:
- understand the challenges in defining and studying technology;
- obtain an overview of historical definitions of technology and their strengths and limitations;
- learn about the complexity of defining technology as not merely material substance, but rather as a complex assemblage;
- critically engage with everyday technology use and resulting potential ethical implications and
- examine contemporary perspectives of technology that blur the boundaries of machine and human elements.