Technological Morality

Item Posted By: Anthony Booth

Technology tends to be taught, and also thought of, as an accumulation of knowledge. Though it, in common with any expressible concern, must be this way in some considerable degree, still the issues, both great and small, of design in industry cannot be reduced to mere deduction from existing patterns of thought.

Traditionally technological activity has been hemmed in on one side by commerce and on the other by science. Commerce frequently and willingly assumes an authoritarian mood of demanding the solution of problems with absolute right to "he who pays the piper calls the tune". Science seldom deviates from a modernist mood in which a rational determinism holds sway, looking back to established facts and who established them, and treating these as the only proper authority.

Thus the establishments of both science and commerce proclaim their own respective forms of authority, and the emergence of proper concern for values in the technological mentality is thereby stopped. Technological innovation which does occur in spite of these barriers is increasingly only possible when isolated in informally organised enclaves (internet is a great prospect in this sense).

I observe alike in engineers, lay persons and school children the assumption that the value systems for technology are to be absorbed from their presumed masters in science and commerce. Needless to say, I do not think this is a good thing.

The technological synthesis is too big and too important to be left to this fractured form of mental process. I am not alone in these thoughts, but speaking particularly of the UK, I find very little concern and even less will to put these things right in the engineering culture and institutions.

Sad, isn't it!

• 1. Anthony Booth