Technology Is A Social Thing
An individual may create a technology, but society always reshapes it. This is important to understand in a time of rapid technological change.
All technologies have come into existence through human imagination. A human sees a problem and then imagines how it may be solved by a tool. Then off they go, tyring to figure out how to bring their idea to life. Sometimes they blow themselves up or electrocute themselves in the process. It’s often messy. But in the end, technologies evolve through social interactions.
One might think that the distant ancestor who invented the stone axe cut their finger trying to chop something. Their caring friend realised that adding a handle to the axe might help them out. We of course, have no idea if this is what happened. But it makes for a nice story.
The railway is another example. The original idea was to move coal from the mines in rural Britain to urban centres. Then someone figured out you could move livestock, then materials and lastly, oddly enough, humans. Though such a ride back then would’ve been rather unpleasant as there were no seats or roofs. That’s why it’s still referred to as cattle class.
Software and hardware products that become highly successful are most often because they’ve experienced high degrees of social interaction and the companies that make them take the time to listen to people.
While it’s claimed that Steve Jobs didn’t listen to people, I think that’s highly inaccurate. One has to have a fair degree of understanding how people use technologies in order to develop them to begin with. Jobs’ uncanny knack was to take that understanding and present products in ways people hadn’t combined them before. Hence the iPhone. Still, quite brilliant.
Many technologies start out with a singular use in mind. Some are created to solve a singular problem and that’s really all they ever do. Like a special tool to fix one part of an engine. But the engine itself is made up of many parts that have evolved through social interactions, not just through engineers, but societal feedback as well.
This is why we have many different kinds of cars today. We need some to move a lot of people, a bus, or a lot of goods, a tractor trailer, or go very fast around windy ribbons of tarmac and crash into things. A race car.
We are often lead to believe in today’s digital technology world that they’re invented to solve for a problem. It’s a rallying cry for Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs. It’s also why there’s been a lot of problems with technologies like social media and so many hiccups with the arrival of Generative AI tools from ChatGPT to Google’s botched Gemini launch.
A technology is always influenced initially by the sociocultural environment and factors in which it is brought into existence. These factors include the socioeconomic climate, political situation, social groups and so on.
The eminent Marshall McLuhan said that “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” To a degree, he is correct. They do shape us at first, but then we reshape them. How we reshape them, I argue, is through sociocultural influences as a technology moves into a society.
As the railway, uhm, picked up steam so to speak, it moved into broader society, out of the narrow confines in which it was invented to solve for a singular problem; move more coal faster and cheaper. Other social actors saw other uses. The railway was socialised (no, not the political idea!) and thus society reshaped the railway.
Society is beginning to reshape social media as well. It began as highly social and a lot of fun. The technologists that invented it saw they could make a lot of money by deploying algorithms to capture eyeballs, juice up our dopamine and it all went sideways. It can take a while for society to begin to reshape a technology, what I term as a use of cultural agency, but eventually, it does.
Artificial Intelligence ( branding term for a bunch of technologies as there is no singular AI) through Generative AI (GAI), or Large Language Models (LLMs), is the first AI tool to enter society at scale. Unlike social media or even the internet, GAI was quickly realized as a significant agent of social change.
While some AI tools like Machine Learning, Neural Networks and Natural Language Processing have been around for decades, their influence on broader society has not significantly shaped us. But we saw that GAI could. This presents a very interesting situation, because it almost instantly created a tug of war between the creators, the market and broader society. It is too early to say if GAI will change our sociocultural systems.
Some change will happen, but broader society is already actively involved in working to shape GAI. So it will be an interesting new dynamic. The involvement of broader society in the way AI is coming into our society involves political and economic systems, militaries, civil and human rights, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists.
Technologies are inherently human. We imagine them, we create them, they shape us then we reshape them based on various sociocultural factors. Technologies drive a lot of social change, often taking longer than we think. Although this has sped up a bit over the last couple of decades, but not as fast as we may often think.
Societal and cultural change is a big, messy, fascinating thing. Impossible to predict, especially in how a technology will evolve, but important to discuss, debate and forecast. All this helps technologies evolve and ultimately determines how we will reshape a given technology.