What Technology Does

On the logic of enforced order and the law of unintended consequences

Recently I was doing a talk on AI Ethics for a government organization, and the department head said, “We have a mandate to do no harm.”

I said, “I have bad news for you.”

All technology has impacts. If the impacts get large enough, it causes harm somewhere.

Photo by Sharath G. on Pexels.com – I want us to look at this and SEE it, because this is a big impact tech, even if it is a lower carbon form of electricity.

I’m not talking about computers, or Silicon Valley, or even AI… I’m talking about the more root question of technology that encompasses agriculture, writing, the wheel, and systems of government: This is the suite of technologies that are sufficiently advanced that they are not only indistinguishable from magic, they are indistinguishable from reality.

Thought of this way, technology has its own logic, which sits on a single assumption that is never questioned or made explicit: We make order (in some place) at the expense of causing increased disorder somewhere else.

We embody and enact that logic

We take water from the ground and place it in irrigation channels at the expense of the downstream users of the water (or the buildings sitting on top of the aquifer).

We build cars that require an entire systems of roads and extraction of power to give them the ability to drive.

We create business models that require ever-larger CPUs and databases and ever-reduced privacy expectations to “extract value” for the organizations that figured out that we leave traces of ourselves everywhere we go.

In each case, we focus our collective efforts on one part of a vast system, say, “This is worth making bigger,” and neglect the impacts on the surrounding components.

Although we couch it in more complex considerations, at root it is that blunt: Every technology prioritizes a particular form of the world and by doing so makes other forms less likely, even if they already exist.

It concentrates energy/matter in particular places by taking it from other places.

But it gets worse.

Because of the second law of thermodynamics, it is worse than a zero-sum game.

There can be no technology that “does no harm” because (at least) the energy to create order must come from somewhere. There is no truly clean energy, because we must count the entirety of the system, not just the end point if we are to reason fully about the impacts of our work.

There are no isolated systems. There is no “away,” there is only “where we are not looking.” And that is where unintended consequences arise.

Some Good News

Well, that’s bleak.

Fortunately, I also have some good news. When we look directly at the logic of a system, it is easier to come to terms with it. If we are wrong about the compromises, we make them accidentally and with no consultation. If we bring them into the field of “what we can think about,” we can make those choices more intentionally and add an element of mitigation.

If the solution to pollution is dilution (a debatable claim) at least, “The solution to disruption is time to accommodate.”

In addition to being open, all systems are evolutionary. It’s only when the “contaminants” pouring across the boundaries overwhelm the surrounding systems that the harm grows unbounded. The tiny amount of background radiation from naturally occurring Uranium can be absorbed; the concentrated amount from a spent fuel rod will kill you in moments. (1) A lot of our modern technologies create a lower-dosage equivalent of spent fuel rods… they use the power of computing or industrialization to concentrate the impact into smaller and smaller and more and more concentrated packages, so the harm is more immediate and harder to survive… for surrounding institutions, for societies, and for the environment.

We do have the chance to do less harm, to monitor and mitigate, and to make better choices about how and when to deploy technologies. We have the ability to choose human scaled systems that people can understand and respond to. We can prioritize (for example) bicycles and public transit over cars… but to do that, we first have to recognize that there is a choice, and not allow the logic of the dominant technology to remain invisible and dictate itself as the only “reality” that is possible.

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1. “For example, 10 years after removal from a reactor, the surface dose rate for a typical spent fuel assembly exceeds 10,000 rem/hour – far greater than the fatal whole-body dose for humans of about 500 rem received all at once.” – https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/radwaste.html

Is It Hard?

I published this several years ago, but I don’t know when, and I don’t know which blog it was. I stand by it.

In an “Ask me Anything” moment recently, a friend asked me, “How hard is what you do?”

“Hm,” I thought. “I wonder which part of ‘what I do’ we’re talking about here.”

I decided to go with “Staying centred and optimistic in the face of… Everything.”

Well… it was hard to learn.

Actually, that’s not quite true. The hard part was not the learning, but the unlearning.

I can tell you the details of an enormous number of constructions of reality. I went to school for about a zillion years.

That’s learning, on one level. But it’s learning in the brain. It’s like being able to tell a story without it having any emotional impact.

The hard part was incorporating it, that is, bringing it out of my brain and into my body.

This is the learning I want to help people with; it is a process of embodying a different set of stories about the world.

Unlearning is a process of disentangling our body’s habitual responses from their triggers. This is not just what we think; it’s the spontaneous flood of chemicals that underlies the blush of embarrassment, the flash of rage, the collapse of despair, the surge of desire and the buckling of knees from That Look…

It’s also, and more importantly from a political stance, the critical theory that tells us that our own location in the world is contingent and largely a matter of happenstance, and that our thoughts about it (especially the ones that defend it) are socially conditioned.

The first part of learning is accepting that the response could be different; “Everybody” would not do “This” under these circumstances (whatever “this” was.) An alternative exists, now I need to learn how to do it. I need to bring it out of the realm of thought (words in my head) and into the realm of belief (reactions in my body.)

Know that, know how…

It turns out that emotional integration has a lot in common with woodworking.

Shaping. Smoothing. Learning the skills.Trying not to hurt yourself when you slip.

It proceeds in stages, this process of descent from the mind to the body.

I learn a new idea, and puzzle it.

New ideas are tactile to me… I ruminate on them, feel them out, gather them and put them into conversation with their companions inside my mind. There is a process of contemplation, of having a new concept to describe a familiar experience… and I hold more than one thing to be “possibly true,” sometimes for years.

And then, sometimes, an, “Oh! I see.” (Although truth be told what this really means is, “Oh, I feel!”)

I remember the first time on the yoga mat that I realized the parallels, when I understood that how I do anything is how I do everything. (Let us hold this idea loosely; it is only partially true.)

I had a “bad” practice, which is to say I couldn’t bend myself into my usual pretzel form. I was so mad at my body. “This is usually easy. Are you kidding me? My toes are right there!” And I stopped in the middle of the self-talk and realized the truth of “Aparigraha” – or non-grasping. I was fighting the world as it was, wishing for it to be other, and berating myself for my inability to bend reality (and my right hip.)

Then it slipped away, as insights are often wont to do.

The thought was still there. I could remember it, and I would catch myself doing the same thing, sometimes even quickly. But it can be a long process from “knowing you are making a mistake,” to “not making it.”

Not my butt.

For a concrete example that has nothing to do with The World Situation, let me refer to something I am still learning (and may always be learning): How to run long distances.

I am a terrible runner. My heart rate spikes into the 180s when I’m still going so slowly that I protest, “But both my feet left the ground!” I have gone through C25K up to week 7 twice this year before going back to shorter intervals so that I wouldn’t barf. I once took over a year to get through a 13-week “Learn to run” program and I still took 88 minutes to run 10k. (Technically running! Both my feet left the ground!)

What’s hard about this isn’t really the running, although that’s pretty unpleasant. It’s the mind space, not the physical activity, that is the really challenging part.

But more than that, it’s the process.

It’s an ongoing question: Is this honouring my commitment to listen to my body?

To find the answer, I “go inside.” Past the whiny, “I don wanna, it’s cold, it’s raining, I’m hungry, why don’t we just watch something funny.” Also past the judgemental voices, “You never finish anything, you suck at this, you’re lazy, you should take better care of yourself, nobody is going to want to…“ whatever. (Notice there’s a lot of “Yous” in there? That’s a clue.)

Past the voices, really.

I ask, “Does this feel right? Is it aligned?” And then I feel for the answer.

Yes.

It’s not striving. I’m not trying to prove something. I am exercising discipline, not punishment. So I keep going.

“Do or do not,” is easier than, “Which equally valid choice do I make?” But the process is much the same in the body.

So, is it hard?

It’s hard to teach. I’ve said that teaching meditation is kind of like teaching swimming, only your back is turned to the pool, you’re blindfolded, and you don’t know whether they are actually in the water or not.

It’s not quite that bad, because… you know. We have words. But so much of it is, “Have you tried…”

I said to one of my meditation teachers, “Here we are, all trying to get to enlightenment, but none of us really sure what it looks like.” Or as Ram Dass put it much more poetically, “We’re all just walking one another home.”

After these decades of working with education and spirituality side by side, I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of the spiritual practices are for this challenge exactly… unlearning the conditioning, incorporating deep wisdom, and reclaiming our own ability to connect with a deeper thrum of reality under the surface of things.

Oh, but it’s a practice. It’s not a list of rules. You can’t check them off. There’s no looking over to see whether the other person is doing it right.

You can ask for a spot, or you can offer one, but eventually you need to lace up your shoes, get on your mat, kiss the girl, ask for the raise, tell the truth, make the move, put on your big girl panties, write the blog post, open the course, and accept the outcome.

Yeah. It’s kinda hard.

But it’s a lot easier than not doing it was.

Condensed Sunlight

E = Mc^2

We all know (I think) that this is the equation that governs the burning of the sun.

Energy can be converted to matter and matter can be converted to energy. It’s happening all the time, not just in nuclear reactions, but in the cells of your body. In the same way that ice and water are really the same thing, energy and matter are one. Hydrogen nuclei combine in the heart of the sun to form Helium, and the He nucleus is just a tiny bit lighter than the H nuclei from which it was formed. The missing mass is released in the form of an energetic photon, which bounces its way out of the sun (eventually) and swims off through the (nigh) vacuum of space. If it happens to arrive at the point he earth is crossing, and if it happens to hit one of the green living forms, it may be eaten, absorbed, consumed in a flash of quantum flame… and provide the activation energy for the formation of a molecule that is just a (even tinier) bit heavier than the atoms that went into it… the energy in the photon is converted into matter.

Back and forth, E, m, E, m, sometimes a massless particle, sometimes in one form, sometimes another… through the ATP process, into the cells of a human form, moving my fingers on the keyboard, reordering the neurons in my mind to make thoughts, stories, perceptions, to flow out of the fingers and into the reordering of electrons on a machine both in front of me and (nearly) simultaneously on another machine several thousand miles away… where it sits until a machine picks it up and shows it to another form whose neurons move in response….

I pause to contemplate the Heart Sutra, and Thich Nat Han’s statement that what we are empty of is independent form. My edges are blurry, my fingers can never actually touch the keyboard; there is always space between particles… it is only the repulsive forces that I feel, and the electrons travel up my hands, up the arms, again reforming the neural structures of my brain in response to the ever-flowing E, m, E, m… c^2 so huge (on our scales), the amounts of matter/energy involved so small that we can’t imagine, can’t conceive, can only just brush the surface of the reality involved before turning away.

We are condensed sunlight, breathing condensed sunlight, basking in (not condensed) sunlight, forged in cosmic fire, conversing with stars. There are galaxies in your body. They are also in the ant, the acorn, the snake, and the virus. They dance down cascades, caress meadows, and burst forth from volcanoes.

“Who am I to…” I hear people say. Why do I think that I have special access to awareness, to intuition, to auspicious coincidence?

No.

That’s what they want us to know, these teachers we have not been able to hear for the last thousands of years. This is normal. Everyone can do this. There’s nothing special about it. We just need to learn how, like swimming, or dancing, or driving a car. Driving the local part of condensed starlight we find ourselves in, that’s the work.