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

My Best Work

Which element of your best work do you most want to #amplify this year?

Instead of considering simply doing more work, take the time to consider which elements of your work would most light you up to amplify. What’s holding you back from amplifying it? Is it that obscure little thing no one will care about? Or is it that if they see it, they’ll care too much and call the Imposter or Weirdo Police?

There won’t be a time in the future where it’ll be easier to amplify that part of your work.
p.s. You can’t stand out and fit in at the same time. – Charlie Gilkey asked this as the 10th prompt in Tracking Wonder’s Quest2016 writing challenge.

What would most light me up?

That’s the part of this question that jumps out for me. What is it that, when I talk about it, brings out happy-conference-Seonaid? What makes me gesture expansively, drawing people towards me, making me feel whole-hearted and… what is that sensation? Clicked in. Like I have found the part of the universe which fits me perfectly.

Click.

It’s structures, systems, and the implications of technology. It’s phase transitions, social construction of reality, knowability, and nearly-inexpressible thoughts. Ideas flickering just at the edge of my comprehension. That’s where I come alive, glow, wave my hands, draw upon my entire life experience, and generally want to hug anybody who lets me speak at length.

It’s this:

(This is from before I spent three months drawing every day. I keep planning to draw it again with my newly developed skills, and fill in the rest of the book, but if I don’t follow my own advice from one of the incomplete pages, it will die in the basket at the foot of my bed.)

TechOfPeace.pdf

The next page, which I have not yet made, is about Local Order. Also, I have markers now. And I promised a group of 130 people that I would finish it. So I guess I’m out of excuses.

Permaculture and Me

I am pleased to announce that I have just returned from the spectacular Vancouver Island to the also spectacular, if colder, Cape Breton Island, bearing a new Certificate in Permaculture Design:

I can’t tell you how excited I am to show you this. Also, isn’t it pretty?

A couple of weeks ago, I undertook the journey to OUR Ecovillage in Shawnigan Lake, B.C. to study permaculture (and Earth Activism) with Charles Williams and Starhawk. (I stopped in Vancouver for a tour of the Quest Food Exchange, a visit with new friends, and a brief foray into a city with Actual Public Transit.) The two weeks were spectacular, and riveting, and magical. We learned and learned and learned and learned, and somehow I gave up coffee and started spontaneously waking up with the sun.* We learned to find contour lines with three sticks, some string, and a rock. We built walls out of mud. We practiced communicating and working in teams and standing up in the face of a threat. We made biochar and aerated compost and a Really Big Compost pile that was cooking away beautifully when I came home. We ate outside and stayed around the fire until all hours. There was at least one instance of ecstatic dancing.

I also started going out of the building with the bathroom in it to find the composting toilet. Even when it was raining. So you know that there’s something going on there.

But what, you may ask, is permaculture? (Or perhaps, “isn’t that something to do with farming?” To which the answer is, “Yes. Sort of. Maybe. It depends.”) Permaculture includes an approach to growing food, but it is a more comprehensive relationship with entire processes. I described it, by the end of the course, as “the engineering I’ve been looking for all these years.” That is to say, it is a way of working in the world that acknowledges our roles as creators, modifiers and agents, but also works with rather than against the processes we are embedded in. I woke up yesterday morning thinking about a science and technology in which we are acknowledged as part of the system, rather than maintaining the pretence of objectivity. In which our bodies are acknowledged and our need for food and shelter is honoured, but the need for everything around us to have bodies and food and shelter is equally esteemed. We build systems that provide habitat while they are also providing nuts, fruits, shade, water retention in arid landscapes, space and food for chickens and honey bees, firewood and and and and… We work to reconnect loops that have been lines for far too long. Instead of consuming at one end, producing waste at the other, externalising costs step by step all along the way, this is an approach that might (finally) get us to Beauty All the Way Down.

I’m in love.

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* Results not typical.