EU’s AI Act: Why do we need it?
Part 2: Questioning the role of technology
(Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atomic_cloud_over_Hiroshima.jpg#/media/File:Atomic_cloud_over_Hiroshima.jpg by George R. Caron. Published by the Government of the United States)
The questioning of the role of technology began almost as soon as that role became ‘overblown’ in human affairs. This blog captures some of those early questions, some of whose relevance began to be appreciated once again in post-WWII period, and relates them to issues raised by the AI Act.
WWII and concerns in the heart of the Modern establishment
After WWII, when the devastation caused by the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still fresh in the public mind, negotiations were carried out to set up an international agency to control atomic power at a world-government level. In 1948 the talks stalled. The use of these first atomic bombs had horrified many scientists at the human suffering their knowledge and expertise had brought about. Einstein, with 7 prominent scientists, published a letter in the magazine The bulletin of the atomic scientists that questioned whether the role played by science and technology in society was as unproblematic as it had been hitherto assumed to be.
The magazine itself was a publication started by a group of concerned scientists after the use of the atom bomb to engage directly with the public and alert them to the hidden dangers of the ‘”Pandora’s Box of modern science”’. The letter by Einstein and his fellows stated: ‘[S]cientists have a special position in the tragic situation in which mankind exists today. It is through the work of the scientific community that this great menace has come upon humanity and now threatens to destroy our civilization’ (Einstein et al 1948).
This manifest discomfort over the role of science and technology vis-a-vis human society from the very heart of the modern industrial civilization – from the creators of scientific knowledge – brought this questioning mainstream, but it did not create it. The discussion over the widespread use of science and technology can be traced back to the beginning of the modern era.
Role of technology
The point has been made that humans have an innate proclivity for solving their problems through technology. Using tools allows us to achieve goals that are beyond our mere physical capacities as beings with finite physical and mental resources. The
‘paleoanthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan—in particular [in] his widely recognized Gesture and Speech (originally published in French in 1964) …. argues that there is a fundamental continuity from the biological to the sociological and that this continuity is realized through the mediation of technology. He sees the use of tools (made possible by the freeing of the hands when in the upright position) as a process of ‘exteriorization’ in which the process of evolution is transferred from the zoological domain to the technical domain—or as [Bernard] Stiegler suggests “the continuation of life by means other than life”’ ( Introna 2023).
Taking this point further, Bernard Stiegler contends that technology does not only extend our reach in achieving goals but the goals we try to achieve through technology also reflect the kind of ‘human’ we are seeking to be (Introna 2023). For example, a microscope shows that we are ‘inquisitive’ and we wish to ‘know’ while a mobile phone reflects our desire to communicate more easily, widely or rapidly.
As expression of humanity
To this important insight, however, we must add a caveat: any technology is only a partial expression of humanity. Despite the validity of the argument that technology is a way of our extending our ‘human’ capacities, historically we have expressed our humanity in other significant and far-reaching ways too. Technology alone is inadequate as a full expression of what it means to be human.
Here I use the term human in the sense that the 17th century thinker Thomas Hobbes used it to mean a ‘natural person’. To quote Hobbes: ‘A person is he [sic] whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether truly or by fiction’ (Hobbes 1651, ch. xvi).
Writing more than three centuries after Hobbes, and in the context of AI, it is important to stress as well that this ‘person’ is someone owning the faculties of ‘sense’, ‘imagination’, ‘speech’, ‘Reason’ and ‘Passions’, and capable of relating their actions to the notions of ‘discourse’, ‘knowledge’, ‘power’’, ‘worth’, ‘dignity’, ‘honour’, ‘worthiness’, ‘manners’, ‘felicity’, ‘misery’ and ‘religion’, which were the other topics that Hobbes included in the part of his book titled ‘Of Man’ where he gave this definition of the natural person.
Although reflections on the impact of technology upon such natural persons have been growing more urgent in the past 50 years or so, even before this, voices of worry and discontent were raised ever since mid-18th century, when the widespread adoption of technology began in societies like those of Britain and France.
The shrinking human
As is well known, the 18th century saw radical changes in British society. By mid-century, the first industrial revolution caused widespread replacement of handcrafted products with machine-produced goods. The factories using machines needed unskilled labour on a large scale in place of skilled labour that had dominated the production of handcrafted goods for trade.
The intellectual context of the first industrial revolution
The industrial revolution came about in the context of an intellectual dismay with the wars and battles of institutionalised Christianity that in England had culminated in the English Civil Wars of 1642–1651. Even though religion had played an important social and intellectual role in people’s lives for over a thousand years, since the 16th century in Europe institutionalised religion had been a cause of unrelenting wars over territory, power and belief.
At the same time, discoveries and enterprises, fuelled by scientific inventions, such as the discovery of the Americas, had vastly improved the material wealth of kingdoms, like those of Spain and Portugal, that had taken a lead in supporting scientific knowledge. The appeal of a more ‘objective’ and supposedly dispassionate scientific way of thinking, compared to contentious religions, was immediate and clear.
This development was made more popular and prominent by another relatively recent technology to have been imported from the east: printing. Supported by the spread of printing technology and a wider discourse on the nature of society, a new middle-class of bourgeois wealthy began to challenge established dogmas in political, social and economic fields in the name of the ‘natural’ equality of all individuals.
In time, theories like that of Utilitarianism contended that the correct end of political systems was the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people rather than an increase in the power of a divinely ordained monarch, recognised by the Church.
Economically, the discipline of political economy emerged to connect political interests of the State with the economic interests of the trading classes (Robertson 2013). The result was a great ferment throughout Western society. Consequently, 18th century in the Western world is known as the Age of Enlightenment, which was marked by the ‘rise of new sciences, faith in Reason and expanding trade’.
Two great political revolutions – the American revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 – supplanted the concept of the divine right of monarchs to rule by virtue of their births by another – the concept of rule by the representatives of the people. The revolutionaries asserted the natural right of all individuals to equality as well as ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness‘. Further, the moral authority of the Church, which had hitherto checked and balanced the power of secular governments, was expressly denied a place in governance. So, how did all this relate to technology?
Technology in the workplace and new ethical dilemmas
It has been said that human beings are capable of holding contradictory viewpoints together in their minds and consider both the truth at the same time. Nowhere is that clearer than in the story of Western Europe at the turn of the 18th century.
In this Age of Enlightenment, when political theory seemed to be stressing the centrality of ‘human’ interest to all public endeavours, the scale of machine-use began to shrink the human interests that could be protected in the workplaces where the majority of people earned their livelihood.
The industrial revolution in England began the displacement of skilled labour as the main producer of manufactured goods. The cotton industry was the first to experience this impact. Writing in 1915, B. L. Hutchins described the effects of machine-use on cotton manufacture in late 18th century in these words:
‘With the increased complexity and elaboration of machinery, a change came. The profitableness of the trade brought in larger capital, and led to the erection of mills, with water power as the motive force. In such buildings as these machinery could be set up, and labour could be drilled, organised and subdivided, so as to produce a far greater return on the invested capital than in the weavers’ shops.’
She continues:
‘The downfall of prices in weaving, which for the workers concerned was as tragic as it was astonishing, can be seen in a table in “Social and Economic History,” Victoria County History, Lancashire, vol. ii. p. 327. Miss Alice Law gives the prices for the whole series of years 1814-1833; as the work is fairly accessible I reproduce only samples, which show the trend sufficiently well.
Prices for Weaving one Piece of Second or Third 74 Calico.
|
1814. |
1820. |
1821. |
1833. |
|
s. |
d. |
s. |
d. |
s. |
d. |
s. |
d. |
| Average price per piece. |
6 |
6 |
2 |
11 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
4 |
| Average weekly sum a good weaver could earn |
26 |
0 |
11 |
8 |
12 |
7 |
5 |
4 |
| Sum a family of 6, 3 being weavers, could earn. |
52 |
0 |
23 |
4 |
28 |
3¾ |
12 |
0 |
Indispensable weekly expenses for repair of
looms, fuel, light. |
5 |
3 |
5 |
3 |
5 |
3 |
4 |
3 |
Sum remaining to six persons for food and
clothing per week. |
46 |
9 |
18 |
1 |
23 |
0¾ |
7 |
9 |
Subjected to the competition of power-looms, the hand-weavers were compelled either to desert their employment and seek factory work, as in fact the younger, more capable and energetic of them actually did, or to reduce their rates of pay, which in time reached the point of starvation.” (Hutchins 1915, pp. 36-37, emphasis mine).
The situation soon created a pressing and urgent discomfort with this overblown use of technology and consequently brought about protests and counter-movements from late 18th century itself at both popular and intellectual levels.
At the popular level, the protestors baulked at the fact that technology shrank the space for a certain expression of the humanity of the workers. This expression in a large number of cases had had a ‘whole person’ dimension partaking of aesthetics, skills and a collegiate lifestyle of the craft guilds.
Following the new objective, theoretical and rational worldview now in ascendance, workers were turned into a category – ‘labour force’ – for supplying large-scale industry, where incredibly fast machines worked by unskilled labour fared better than skilled individuals. Here, as Hutchins pointed out, workers as ‘labour’ were ‘drilled, organised and subdivided’ (Hutchins 1915, p. 36), often performing mechanical, repetitive labour for hours on end, their humanity subordinated to the business need of maximum profit. Soon this spread of technology was challenged by the workers affected by it and the political elite faced new ethical dilemmas.
The moral challenge of the Luddite movement
A good example of the questioning from the working people was reflected in the Luddite movement. It remains perhaps the most famous backlash against this straitjacketing of the individual’s identity and agency in favour of technology-enabled human reduction, which has left its impression on the English language by bequeathing it the term ‘Luddite‘ for someone who holds back from technology. The Luddite movement was a visceral response from those skilled workers who felt that machines were destroying their livelihood for the sake of profits for the capitalist owners of the new mills and factories. It directly asked the question: is it moral to deprive human beings of control over their lives and productivity so that the capitalists may increase their profits? This questioning moved the poor strongly enough that it took a violent form.
Between 1811 and 1817 organised groups of skilled workers actively destroyed industrial machinery that was threatening established industries in each region to which the movement spread. Nottinghamshire, Lancashire and parts of Yorkshire were particularly affected. The activists wrote letters and petitions too setting out their aims and grievances. They employed a moral idiom against practices that they understood as prioritising profits above human suffering.
In the Foreword to the collection Writings of the Luddites, Adrian Randall points out that many movements beyond the Luddite disturbances of 1811–1812 chose to identify with what they believed Luddism had stood for. There were clear moral strains that the working classes and the poor seemed to be asserting.
These included, first of all, an unashamed assertion of the rights of the ordinary people. This was seen in the adoption of the figure of an ordinary protestor, Ned Ludd, an apprentice stocking-frame knitter as the symbol for the movement. Ned had destroyed the frame he had been working on when told to ‘square his needles’ (Binfield 2004, p. xiv).
Randall suggests that the protestors were conscious of asserting ‘the right of the poor to earn their own livelihood and to defend the custom of their trade against dishonourable capitalist predators’ (Binfield 2004, p. xiv). In one of the letters, the anonymous writer spoke of taking the life of the ‘wicked tyrant who persicuteth the Good and Righteous’ thereby attributing ethical stature to those who as ‘Good and Righteous’ had a right to pursue their time-honoured vocation that the ‘wicked tyrant’ industrialist was destroying (Binfield 2004, p. 232). The skilled worker and the poor, Randall says, were resisting the notion that market forces rather than moral values should ‘shape the fate of labour’ (Binfield 2004, p.xiv).
Second, this moral stance resonated with a deep sense of history, connection with place and a morality asserting the individual’s right to the labour of their hands. To defend these notions the protestors adopted violence even in the face of draconian punishments, exhibiting a strong sense of moral outrage at the destruction of their way of life through the power of money, merely to make more money.
Yet, what gave force to the goals of production and profit at the turn of the 19th century was their subsumption in the rising morality of a new philosophy of what will become established as Liberalism by mid-19th century. At the time of the Luddite movement, this philosophy could be said to have been represented by a number of Whig politicians in parliament. Despite their overarching support of equality of all humans and their beliefs in philanthropy, these politicians were caught in a dilemma by the Luddite moral questioning. In the age of the ‘rise of new sciences, faith in Reason and expanding trade’ there were ethical principles that militated against holding on to the worldview – of faith, small communities and rule by tradition – that the Luddites seemed to be fighting for.
‘God is dead’ – now what?
By the end of 18th century a distinct modern political philosophy had arisen in Europe though the name Liberal was not yet always applied to it. The word ‘liberal’ had had the connotations of generous, particularly in the context of the well-off segments of society, since ancient times. From this time onwards though a ‘Liberalism’ blossomed forth, not as an attitude, but as a fully-formulated worldview that became the dominant lens for modern people for viewing the reality of the world around them. In doing this, Liberalism gave a blow to two sources of meaning and direction for human life almost everywhere since the dawn of time: religion and customs.
The 19th century German philosopher Nietzsche (1844–1900) is famous for his formulation ‘God is dead!’. Lecturing in the 1950s, Martin Heidegger suggested that through these words Nietzsche was capturing how modern science and technology had brought about an end to the supremacy of the ‘suprasensory’ world in human affairs:
‘God is the name for the realm of Ideas and ideals. This realm of the suprasensory has been considered since Plato, or more strictly
speaking, since the late Greek and Christian interpretation of Platonic philosophy, to be the true and genuinely real world.’ (Heidegger 1977, p. 61, emphasis mine)
This ‘real’ world, this kingdom of God, that was to receive us after our deaths, focussed our minds here on earth on behaving in a prescribed ethical manner that was grounded in faith and belief, which, crucially, were felt but could not be proven.
Remember at this point that the intellectual project of the Enlightenment Age was attempting to rid the society of incessant wars over religious interpretations that also could not be proven one way or another. To the intellectuals, it was this unverifiable, extremely personal nature of the existing ethical norms that was responsible for repeated destruction of people’s peace.
Hence, the Liberals settled on the scientific method (through focussing on the sensory via observation, logical proof, universality and replicability) of establishing the ‘truth’ as a more sensible and, importantly, more peaceful path even in human affairs, instead of leaving it as the preferred method only in the academic world. At this time of wealth pouring into Western Europe from the destroyed or subjugated civilizations of Latin America and Asia, it seemed plausible to argue that the European ‘courage’ and advances in science and technology, especially the technologies of war and trade, had enabled this vast transfer of wealth from the decadent and scientifically backward civilizations to the rising civilizations of the West.
It is useful to not forget at this point that glory in wars and violence against enemies were still held to be honourable virtues throughout most of the world, including Europe. Thus, the contradictions of a humane philosophy, advocating the equality of all humans, bringing about forced destructions of other people’s way of life was to become clear only with the passage of time.
What the Luddites faced was a new worldview in parliament that ended up supporting the ‘interests of religious dissenters, industrialists, and others‘, which attitude will become an integral part of the Liberal political outlook in the Victorian era. This coupling of the political, economic and the ethical meant that for the first time there was no authority comparable in its stature to religion or tradition to challenge the morality argued for by the political and economic elite. Thus religion, rooted in a different sphere of human experience (the ‘suprasensory’), and custom, rooted in the collective memory of past experiences, were no longer to be allowed any say in the public domain, leaving a shrunken version of the human, rooted only in Reason, all power there.
The ethical contradictions of a theoretical, scientific humanism and the defeat of the Luddite morality
This had important consequences for the nature of the ‘ethical’ in the modern world. Traditionally, religion had been tasked with advocating the rights, as also the duties, of Everyman. Certainly, privilege existed but religion was, amongst other things, conceived as a vehicle for adjusting philosophy to the everyday. It provided simple rules, incentives and punishments, in a majority of cases, that often allowed people to live out the contradictions that the quotidian throws our way in myriad different ways.
At very many turns, as in the Luddite question, the thinkers of the modern era continued to struggle with the dilemmas of finding more definite rules based in logic that could replace the incomprehensible effects of religion upon the ordinary people. The great Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, captured the dilemma in his famous work Crime and Punishment.
From the Age of Enlightenment, however, not only philosophical ethics, but also everyday morality, flowed from ‘Reason’ or human argument or we might even say human argumentation. This gave rise to what Heidegger identifies as the ethics of the ‘social conscience’:
‘The otherworldly goal of everlasting bliss is transformed into the earthly happiness of the greatest number. The careful maintenance of the cult of religion is relaxed through enthusiasm for the creating of a culture or the spreading of civilization. Creativity, previously the unique property of the biblical god, becomes the distinctive mark of human activity. Human creativity finally passes over into business enterprise’ (Heidegger 1977, p. 64).
It will take almost two centuries and wars, forced migrations, the horrors of institutionalised slavery, and two world wars before the realisation that the social conscience is as subjective and historicised an artifact as the doctrines of religions. At the time of discussing the Luddite disturbances the parliamentarians were unable to see where the unity of political, economic and ethical elite – through the exaltation of universal theories of human affairs applauding only the human creativity that was passing into successful business enterprise – was going to lead to.
Discussing the reaction of the Parliament to the Luddite movement, O’Keefe explains that ‘the Parliamentary reaction cannot be fully understood without reference to the role of the classical economists especially of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus.’ Together the influence of these thinkers was twofold. First, they advocated a “‘simple system of natural liberty'” (Adam Smith quoted in O’Keefe, p. 58), arguing that each man be left ‘free’ to pursue his interest as he saw best, yet, that seemed not to apply when bigger ‘natural’ forces were in operation. This second principle meant that these thinkers firmly believed that ‘natural laws’, controlling wage levels and population–food supply equations would guarantee the failure of any legislation trying to address falling wages and starvation amongst workers.
Thus, ironically, the humane advocacy of every man’s freedom had the effect of leaving the poor and the workers to their fate. Yet, at the same time, the Parliament did pass a law to award the death penalty to the anti-machinery, anti-capitalist Luddite rioters. Some ‘Benthamite Utilitarians’ did oppose the measure on the grounds that the death penalty was too harsh a measure against the rioters but not because ‘the introduction of labor saving machinery was bitterly resented when depression, unemployment and food shortage were widespread’ (O’Keefe, 1953, p. 38). Raymond J. O’Keefe, Jr contends that there was a general ‘fatalism’ amongst the MPs as they believed that ‘the progress of invention and science could not be stopped … Relief was not possible. There was no help. Endurance was the only recourse of the poor’ (O’Keefe 1953, p. 48).
Compare against this contradiction the fact that the workers in many cases also expressed ‘anger over the loss of the Illizabethan [sic] [labour] legislation’ (O’Keefe 1953, p. 42). Without making an oversimplified comparison between the two situations, it should be pointed out that under the old dispensation, with a paternalistic ruling class and greater weight of religion, it had been possible under Queen Elizabeth I to make humane, local-level interventions and impose humane taxation to regulate the condition of the workers and the poor. Without as well denying the extremes of oppression that often resulted from absolutism and heavily institutionalised religion, this was an ability of prioritising humans above machines or profits that was seemingly lost under the new scientific worldview where human interest was subordinated to economic ‘forces’.
Image courtesy http://rebel-speak.de/level4/chapter4/luddites2.html#top
The cult of discovering abstract ‘realities’ and forces in human affairs by arranging a string of facts to explain given conditions at this historical juncture was also, as Lewis Mumford says, resulting in ‘an effort to discredit an essential part of organic experience, memory, which establishes continuity with a longer past and a wider environment’ (Mumford 1964, p. 65). Under the new dispensation, from late 18th century, any practice was of no value in the emerging ethical order simply because it had been a part of a people’s tradition or had been stipulated by religious authority.
In its place, however, the equally abstract notion of the ‘nation-state’ was unseating God as the new deity to whom sacrifices could be made in good conscience. The parliamentarians were made helpless not only by the science of economics but also by ‘the arguments of the new manufacturers who reasoned that their personal interests were the interests of the nation as a whole’ (O’Keefe 1953, p. 56). By increasing the efficiency of industry, machines helped to increase profit and increasing national wealth took precedence over the suffering of the workers. In effect, the new human-centred worldview shrank the human interests that could be protected against the capitalist and the machine.
It was this morality of a doggedly objective human affairs, of the rejection of the past and of religion, of faith in redemption by science alone, and the ordering of the practical and the moral both by a unified elite that helped defeat the Luddites in parliament. The government of the day used armed force to protect the property of the capitalists, and promulgated the death penalty for the breaking of industrial machinery.
Technology around the world and the ethics of development
The interests of the ‘nation’ and the immutable laws of the ‘market’ were some of the theories that the Liberals believed were as true and unchanging as the laws of physics. Hence, in a civilization that lived in line with the universal laws the human had to adapt to the market and not the other way round.
It was not only the Luddite workers in Britain whose tradition-oriented morality was culled at the alter of modern progress and ‘mega-machines’ but with the advance of European colonialism indigenous knowledges around the world were lost, discredited and absorbed into a global economy of free market and industrial capitalism. None of it was without resistance or local questioning of the new industries and economic practices though.
The unifying of political, economic and ethical power made it difficult to see that under the rhetoric of Liberal ideologies the old patterns of power persisted. The new factories that brought ‘glory’ and ‘wealth’ to the ‘nation’ were not too different from the paths pursued by kings and queen throughout history to enrich their kingdoms. Many such rulers had been enlightened and caring towards the people. The farsighted rulers had always tried to promote trade and look after the daily comforts of their people.
What the new age did try to do was to ground these ruling principles into universal, logical, scientific rules but in doing so they ended up with as many contradictions as the systems they had been denouncing. The alarming issue was that with the power of ‘mega-machines’ and the weaponising of trade around the world, the scale and nature of devastation wrought when the theoreticians got it wrong – which they often did as in the case of the Trail of Tears, the Belgian atrocities in Africa, the cruelties of the slavery and indenture system in the Americas to the experimentation before the final building of the Panama Canal in Central America, the wars for the progressive right to sell addictive opium to Chinese people against the wishes of its government – was horrendous. Yet, like religious dogma supposedly objective theory can also build truths and justifications that take a lot on faith.
The Science of marvellous industry
However, within the Western world, these effects were felt rather than completely understood in the 19th century. Helena Rosenblatt argues that the Liberals of early 19th century, despite their belief in commercial freedom, responded to the conditions (of the poor and the workers being forced into unhealthy squalid urban centres, away from the space and natural environments that humans had evolved to live in like the other animals) by recognising in many cases the rights of governments to ‘regulate any type of industry’; many stressed that it was acceptable for governments to intervene and support the workers made redundant by the introduction of technology in production, and that governments could even restrict the use of new machines and find work for the unemployed because it was their duty to constantly ameliorate the conditions of their subjects. An important tenet of the new Liberal ethics was intervention to protect the weak against the strong (Rosenblatt, Ch. 4, 36 mins.).
But, fuelled by the technology-enabled control over humans on other continents and the environment, the belief in ‘constant improvement of material technology and increasing standards of living through human inventiveness and effort’ (Freeden 2015, p. 61) remained a central Liberal tenet.
Karl Marx and a scientific challenge to the economics of Liberalism
The next, and a truly powerful, challenge to the role of technology was much more scientific but an indirect one. The name of Karl Marx (1818–1883) is associated with the most systematic body of thought that recognised that modern industrial capitalism was reducing the majority of human beings in Western societies to cogs in the wheel of production. It robbed them of all meaningful experiences of being human.
Using empirical methods of analysis that could not be sneered at for being unscientific, Marx established that the profits from industrialisation came from ‘value’ created by the labour of the workers and not the machines. Though the material improvements clearly brought about by modern inventions like railroads and shipping, telegraph, and factory-produced, and therefore cheaper, clothing were hard to overlook, Marx attacked the primacy of the profit motive and the role of ‘machines’ in the oppression of the workers:
The simplification of the machine, of labour is used to make a worker out of the human being still in the making, the completely immature human being, the child – whilst the worker has become a neglected child. The machine accommodates itself to the weakness of the human being in order to make the weak human being into a machine (Marx 1859).
Marx further condemned the fetishization of money-making as the supreme goal, which allowed the subordination of all human needs, goals and values to the ‘need for money’. He lamented that to the worker
A dwelling in the light … the simplest animal cleanliness [is denied]… None of his senses exist any longer, and (each has ceased to function) … The crudest methods (and instruments) of human labour [are coming back]… The savage and the animal have at least the need to hunt, to roam, etc. – the need of companionship (Marx 1859).
In opposition to almost 200 years of intellectual celebration of human Reason as the primary and highest human faculty, Marx brought back the power of the emotional (though he himself would not have used this term) through the exaltation of the mass or collectivity. In his work Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx put forward this view of human essence:
The human aspect of nature exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist for him as a bond with man – as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him – and as the life-element of human reality … But also when I am active scientifically, etc. – an activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others – then my activity is social, because I perform it as a man (Marx 1959, p.44).
Instead, political and economic theories of the time, particularly the discipline of political economy, diminished the humanity of the worker and the proprietor both by exhorting them to a single-minded pursuit of money at the expense of their sociality. This pursuit
changes the worker into an insensible being lacking all needs, just as [it]… changes his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. … This science of marvelous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave (Marx 1959).
In setting out his vision of a communist utopia, Marx elevated the interest of human beings – interests that took in physical, mental and material needs – above those of wealth production, and thereby hinted at the role that technology should rightly play in human society.
Polytechnics and Monotechnics
This relationship of technology and humanity was further investigated by Lewis Mumford in the 1930s. Mumford distinguished between two kinds of technologies: polytechnics, which are ‘life-oriented’. These technologies can be integrated with human needs and potentials. In their form, polytechnics are often small-scale and versatile tools that enable humans to pursue pre-determined goals. These are in contrast with monotechnics, which produce what he called ‘mega machines’. Mega machines are capable of extraordinary power and efficiency but they demand human workers to mould themselves to disciplines that regiment and dehumanize them (Sismondo 2010, p. 30). In this Mumford is close to the Marxian view in which technologies that reduce humans to poorer versions of themselves are to be condemned even though they may produce far larger power and profit.
Until the end of WWII, and the visible destruction caused by particular technological applications of scientific knowledge, these views remained mostly on the margins in the context of science and technology. In fact the widespread view of science as a dispassionate and objective, purely rational enterprise continued to influence the organisation of all forms of human social interactions.
Responses to the challenges of a technology-oriented economy
The Marxian challenge as we saw attacked the enriching of the capitalists at the expense of the workers rather than the use of machines directly. The Liberal response was to accept and absorb this criticism and by mid-20th century a far more equitable distribution of national wealth through progressive taxation and a welfare state was the rule in most Western societies.
What of technology though?
It grew. The response of industry and science to criticisms of the poor conditions of the working classes was to expand their realm from national infrastructure to private use in the form of cars and radios, washing machines and electrical labour-saving devices. The workers were drawn into the national rhetoric that led to a mindless race amongst countries to divide up the earth as bundles of ‘resources’. A blind belief in the ‘need’ for constant economic growth meant that scientists like Turing, in all good conscience, could focus their efforts on the need for inventing machines that could make production and sale faster and faster and more efficient endlessly. In international affairs, the race for resources caused two world wars in the first half of the 20th century.
Penopticism
Writing late in the 20th century, Michel Foucault asserted that despite appearances, this lop-sided view of human progress through material accumulation and subjugation of nature had led to the subversion of that other Liberal tenet which had been ensuring the freedom of the human individual to live a good life as they understood it, without harming others around them.
The veneration of the objective and analytical had allowed power to be exercised more and more in an impersonal and faceless manner. Far from freeing the individual, new ‘technologies’ of power had emerged along with the mechanical use of technology in industry that sought to rule and control by capturing ‘data’ about each and every individual and then subjecting all individuals to a correcting ‘discourse’ that trimmed the unruly, the independent and the questioning aspects of humanity so that great masses of them, collected in urban centres to provide labour to huge business enterprises, could be fashioned into ‘workers’, ‘prisoners’, ‘students’, ‘patients’ and other neat and identifiable categories rather than a great collective of heterogenous people.
‘Penopticism’, as Foucault has labelled it, brought in a new kind of power relation in society where anyone who controlled the ‘mechanisms that analyse distributions, gaps, series, combinations, and which use instruments that render visible, record, differentiate, and compare’ (Foucault, p. 208) can exercise tremendous power and control upon individuals in society while the mechanisms themselves are so light as to be almost invisible.
It is such light, invisible but extremely powerful technologies of surveillance and control that the AI Act aims to take a stand against. To do so, however, it still needs to deal with the contradictions between the motives of constant economic growth and the freedom of the individual that it has inherited from the modernist discourse of the past four centuries and which, as we shall see, leave it only partially capable of challenging the power of big business that in new ways control the individual through the power of technology.
References
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EU’s AI Act: Why do we need it?
