IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015 - 100

Are
Technologies
Innocent?
Part One
Michael Arnold and Christopher Pearce

T

his is the first of a series of seven
short articles to be published in consecutive issues of IEEE Technology
and Society Magazine, and when
taken collectively, argue that our
technologies can and should be taken seriously.
At this point I'm sure the reader will assert that our
technologies are taken seriously, and not the least by
members of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of
Technology (SSIT)! But I would like to push this argument much further than most are prepared to go. I want
to argue that the existence and the actions of technologies are not only important in an instrumental way, they
also have important moral implications, and if technologies are truly to be given the respect they deserve, they
should be held to account for their actions - not only in
instrumental terms, but also in moral terms. Technologies are not innocent, and until and unless this accountability occurs, we are not taking technologies seriously.
Restricted and partial assessments of technologies are
of course commonplace. Technologies of all kinds - from
an edged stone to the Rosetta Philae probe - are important to human beings in cultural, scientific, and existential terms. It therefore follows that the performance of
an artefact requires careful and critical assessment, and
numerous strategies have been developed to this end.
Some forms of technology assessment are fine-grained

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2494401
Date of publication: 17 December 2015

100

1932-4529/15©2015IEEE

and small-scale, attending to specific technologies in specific contexts (Human-Computer Interface evaluations,
software usability studies, user-centred design methods,
and so on), while other approaches are more sweeping, and critique Technology in epochal and essentialist
terms, rather than focusing this or that example (see for
example Heidegger, Ullul, or Mumford).
But the argument put in this series of articles is
that the normative standards by which technologies
are assessed be extended from these exclusively
instrumental concerns, to the noninstrumental realm
ordinarily occupied exclusively by humans. It is argued
that it is not only the engineers and technicians that
should be held to moral account for their design
work, and not only the manufacturers of the technologies, and not only the people using the technologies, but also the technologies in and of themselves.
Only when technologies stand on their own feet as it
were; are distinguished from their human designers,
manufacturers and users, and are held to be morally
accountable for their actions, can we say that those
technologies and their actions are assessed appropriately, and are taken seriously.

The Normative Realm of Morality
In the Western metaphysical tradition, to be held accountable for one's actions in a moral or ethical sense is a privilege and a responsibility afforded only to humans, and
non-humans (such as an animal, a rock, or a machine)
are "accountable" in a much more limited sense. The
limited sense in which a non-human might be held to

IEEE TEchnology and SocIETy MagazInE

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December 2015
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015
