My new book, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Technology (Tsinghua Series in the History and Philosophy of Science), was published by the Commercial Press in May 2021. Come to think of it, this seems to be the first original book in the Tsinghua Series in the History and Philosophy of Science over its two phases; the others are either revised reprints of books long since published, or works based on a doctoral dissertation or an English-language monograph. This Introduction to the Philosophy of Technology was written entirely during my time in the Department of the History of Science at Tsinghua. This is my sixth book, and one of the ones I personally feel best about; below is the self-recommendation piece I wrote for it:
What Use Is Philosophy in the Age of Technology?
We are living in a “technological age.” Technology is the keyword of today’s world; it is everywhere and governs every aspect of contemporary life.
From the grand scale of spaceflight and lunar landings, international conflict, to the small scale of entertainment and leisure, eating and grocery shopping, we are using technology and confronting technology all the time. It is not only programmers at big tech firms and food-delivery riders who have to wrestle with technological systems all day long; each and every one of us is caught up in technology’s entanglements.
Leaders and entrepreneurs may point out the trends of the world and talk with great gusto and flourish about whether we should build chips or impose tariffs; of course, none of that can escape the question of technology. But ordinary people are no exception. We worry when old people can’t handle smartphones; we worry when children are too addicted to them. Should we buy an electric car or a gasoline car, organic food or genetically modified food, tech stocks or baijiu stocks, digital currency or pension insurance, programming classes or art classes for our children…? Behind all these countless questions lurks the shadow of “technology.”
Of course, in any age, human life is situated within technology. That is to say, people always live in an environment already built up by technology, so the various problems they encounter have always been technological problems. Even when dealing with nature, what is involved is nothing more than the question of how to make use of the relevant technologies: spear or bow and arrow, slash-and-burn cultivation or a spark to start the fire… To put it more extremely, all problems of survival are technological problems.
In this sense, our present technological age is no different in essence; the only difference is that the pace of technological change and replacement is much faster than in the past.
But this difference in “speed” is a fatal one. In ancient times, the pace of technological change was always slower than the pace at which human generations changed. In other words, the technological world a person confronted at birth and the technological environment he faced in old age were not all that different. There was hardly much difference even from the worlds of his grandparents and grandchildren. This meant that, with regard to “how to cope with various technological problems,” people always had a long time to adjust. The experience a person accumulated in youth remained applicable in old age, and could even be passed down to one’s descendants as life experience.
As the saying goes, “I’ve crossed more bridges than you’ve walked roads.” Old people really did have the right to pull rank by virtue of age. How to build a bridge, how to cross a bridge, how to understand the relation between bridges and roads, and so on—none of these things was a problem, because across long stretches of history, the old had already come to understand thoroughly the relationship between bridge technology and human life. But things are different now. An old person may have crossed bridges all his life, yet on tunnel crossings over the river he may know less than his grandchildren. Meanwhile, new highways and buildings are changing by the day, and an old man who has spent his whole life crossing bridges may suddenly find himself disoriented and unable to move. By contrast, it is the grandchildren, with smart navigation and ride-hailing apps, who turn around and lead the elders home.
The key point is that, in this technological age, the pace of technological change has overtaken the pace of human generational replacement, and it is still accelerating. Not only is the technological world a person confronts at birth vastly different from the one he faces in old age; even over the mere ten-odd years from childhood to adulthood, many technologies will already have gone through several rounds of iteration.
This situation has made the question of how to understand and how to treat technology unprecedentedly acute. Not only can we no longer draw on the experience of our elders; we must also additionally consider how to help our elders keep up with the tide of new technology. We no longer have enough time or room to adjust slowly to new technologies and gradually work out a proper way of living with them, because before we have even fully grasped the meaning and consequences of one technology, a new generation of technologies may already have arrived.
The impact of a given technology is not always obvious at first glance. Feudal lords used gunpowder to strengthen their armaments, but in the end gunpowder dismantled feudal castles and the knightly order; Gutenberg used the printing press to spread the Bible, perhaps believing that printing could strengthen religious edification, but in the end the printing press strengthened secularization instead. From antiquity to the present, various revolutionary technological inventions, beyond their superficial uses, have often contained profound forces that require people to readjust their ways of life, relations of production, and social structures in order to adapt to them. Yet even in the era when the four great inventions changed the world, the process by which new technologies exerted their influence and human responses adapted to them unfolded on a scale of decades or even centuries. The potential of technology was gradually released, and at the same time countless thinkers and politicians, economic organizations and social structures, also responded step by step—either accommodating or clashing with one another—eventually rubbing along with the tendencies of the new technologies. But today, faced with rapidly changing new technologies, we have long since lost the leisure to cope with them calmly; many revolutionary new technologies become obsolete in less than a decade or two—before thinkers and politicians have even had time to react.
Thus, in the face of technological development, human beings have come to feel unprecedentedly passive. Some technological optimists believe that if technology is left to develop in a wild and unchecked fashion, it can bring humankind a wonderful future, while some technological pessimists believe that technology’s loss of control will send humanity sliding toward an abyss from which there is no return.
But does that mean thinkers and actors no longer need to respond to new technologies? That the young and the old can no longer accumulate experience about new technologies? Not at all. On the contrary, it is precisely in such an age that we need to take technology seriously and understand technology more carefully.
The discipline of “philosophy of technology” itself is a product of the technological age. Ancient thinkers and politicians did not fail to notice technology, but they did not take technology as a theme for inquiry in its own right. The very fact that “technology” has become a topic of philosophy already signals the urgency of our age’s predicament.
But what use is philosophy? Can it help entrepreneurs formulate better technological strategies? Can it help the elderly use electronic payment systems more effectively? Clearly, philosophy seems powerless with respect to these concrete problems. In an age of constant change, philosophers are still reading classic works written decades or even millennia ago—how could they possibly keep up with the speed of technology?
So what can philosophy do? That is precisely what I try to explore and present in An Introduction to the Philosophy of Technology. In short, philosophy has no specific “use” in the narrow sense, but through critique and reflection it can broaden our horizons, open up our thinking, and recover some room to respond calmly. Or rather, after coming into contact with the philosophy of technology, we become more “sensitive,” more alert to many of the detailed activities through which we deal with technology in everyday life, and to the conflicts and predicaments embedded in those activities. At the very least, studying the philosophy of technology can add another layer of “hesitation” to our judgment, and thus another round of “weighing” and deliberation.
Sensitivity, hesitation, anxiety, confusion—these emotions are not necessarily bad things. For example, the purpose of signs on a highway is to draw the driver’s attention, to make the driver briefly distracted from high-speed driving, to fall temporarily into a state of sensitivity and hesitation, and only then to judge the situation and make timely adjustments. The signs themselves cannot control the car, and have no effect whatsoever on acceleration or turning. But they can exert an indirect effect by putting the driver into a state of alertness.
The philosophy of technology is similar. Even an optimistic philosophy of technology has no positive effect on the development of technology itself. On the contrary, philosophy often “holds things up”: it seeks to make people alert, even to urge them to look in the rearview mirror. Even when the car has already gone out of control, the driver still needs, or rather needs even more, to remain vigilant; only when we examine our situation with a more detached attitude can we discover more room for maneuver or hidden side roads.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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