What is technology? and why ask this?

Approaching technology from a philosophical standpoint is not a new endeavour. Since antiquity, philosophers have asked the question: What is technology?

Before we begin to try and figure out if there's an answer, and if so what that is, it's important to question why ask this at all? I am not a philosopher and wouldn't it be more worthwhile to ask real, hard questions that make a difference? Why ask such ontological questions that probably don't have any concrete answer? Why bother?

There are lot of real problems that need attention right now. How will we address the job losses caused by the advent of AI? How will we ensure equitable access to AI? How will we ensure AI remains ethical and humane? Should AI generated artwork count as art? These questions are rooted in today and need immediate attention and action. So, why start with something as vague as what is technology?

To answer this I turn to a branch of philosophy called phenomenology. Founded by Edmund Husserl and then developed further into the domain of technology by Martin Heidegger.

Phenomenologists seek to describe how things reveal themselves to our consciousness, which Heidegger calls Dasein or "being-here", where our description and understanding of things is not distorted by theoretical concepts that arise outside of our experience of those things.

Thus, phenomenologists have the hard task of getting to the pure description of things, descriptions that are to be arrived at without giving in to our usual tendency to fit complex and intricate experiences into ready-made conceptual categories.

This is a difficult task because not only do the concepts we use to describe experiences remain largely unexamined, we don't even realise when an inappropriately chosen concept is distorting our understanding.

Take a moment to think about this. When you see a red notebook, you immediately recognise it as being "red" and "notebook", but where do you get these concepts of "redness" and "notebookness" from? Do you question what it is to "be red"? Probably not and for something this trivial it might not matter but what about phenomena that aren't as trivial, phenomena like technology.

Phenomenology wasn't developed in order to describe any sort of phenomena, it is primarily concerned with phenomena that remain "hidden in plain sight".

In his essay “Phenomenology and Technology” Iain Thomson characterises these phenomena as (1) masked by distortion of inappropriate theories, and (2) concealed by their very immediacy, ubiquity, or obviousness. It claims that, paradoxically, what is closest to us in the everyday-ness of life becomes further from us in our ability to question and understand it critically.

Technology is exactly this kind of a phenomena.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21st Century

The technology that will probably define this century, Artificial Intelligence, has it's roots embedded in tests like the Turing test, a test for intelligence in a computer, requiring that a human being should be unable to distinguish the machine from another human being by using the replies to questions put to both.

What are we missing about technology that is increasingly "hidden in plain sight" not only by the everyday proximity we have to it, but also by the objectives and incentives that drive its development.

Asking "What is technology?" is an attempt to address the unnoticed conceptual biases which – like lenses we see through but do not see – tacitly inform and frequently distort our basic sense of ourselves and our worlds. As designers, we often question our own biases before we attempt to make anything. But what about the biases that come not from our thinking, rather from the things that even make it possible for us to think?

Before we start looking for solutions to the real problems from before, it is important to ask what even makes these problems possible? Are we sabotaging our ability to answer real questions by not answering this question first? Moreover, are these problems a result of not having the answer? It might be a question I cannot answer, or find an answer to, but I think that's what makes it even more important to ask.

We’ve all written this essay for a high school assignment, Technology : A boon or bane? where the typical explanation usually goes along the lines of technology being inherently neutral, and it’s impact being in the hands of the person using it. But what makes us assume this inherent innocence of technology? And why do we make this divide of technology and people?