Unit introduction

All of our lives are shaped by technology every day, and increasingly, these technologies are structuring the opportunities we have to live, work, play, and relate to one another. As technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) creep further into our lives, the need is greater than ever for careful reflection on their nature and implications. This unit investigates technology, from its development and creation through to its deployment, and the range of effects it has on society.

It is commonplace, especially in the West, to flippantly suggest that our tools are merely neutral, with no values built into or embedded in them. True, technologies can be used for good or ill, and the person wielding the tool is a more obvious subject of moral appraisal. But human priorities, values, and beliefs help to answer the question of which technologies get made, why, and for whom. Is technology neutral? Is AI objective—or simply a more efficient (and opaque) way of making value-laden and biased decisions?

We also consider a series of questions about how technology mediates our views of the world. Does interacting with female voice assistants and seeing overly sexualized robots in movies and TV reiterate the bias that women are subordinate? Is censorship the answer to hate speech and rampant misinformation online? And what’s the value of free speech, anyhow? Should we be comfortable offloading the task of killing to machines, as we are already gradually doing in warfare? Could that make war too easy, or too undignified? Or are those kinds of concerns just silly moralizing?

Lastly, we survey a series of technologies and their effects on society. Should the government be allowed to surveil us? And is it acceptable that the police might use AI to forecast when and where crime takes place—or even who might be most likely to commit a crime in the future? What if autonomous vehicles turn out to be merely playthings for the rich, at the expense of the poor? Answering these questions requires going deeper into the nature and significance of values like privacy and justice. When AI and robots become sophisticated enough to replace most human labor, what will be left for us to do? Should we look forward to a utopia of leisure, or dread the ennui and poverty that could result?

What’s the best way of incorporating technology into our lives without sacrificing the deepest and most significant interactions and activities that make life worth living? We can only answer this question after rolling up our sleeves and delving into the philosophical foundations of our views, our tools, our selves, and their connection.

By the end of this unit, you will be able to:

Dr. Ryan Jenkins, Associate Professor of Philosophy and a Senior Fellow at the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, leads us through an exploration of the ethical dimensions of technology to help inject some nuance into our understanding of technology and its role in our lives.