The experience of technology

Human-machine relations

Don Ihde

pp. 3-15

in: Don Ihde, Technics and praxis, Berlin, Springer, 1979

Abstract

The question of technology has been posed in many ways. That is perhaps not surprising in that the presence of technology is so pervasive. Treatments of technology span a diversity of views in philosophy as well. For example, there is a growing literature, often from the analytic tradition, which devotes itself to the question of artificial intelligence and the puzzle over whether or not machines can or could "think". There are others, I would term them romantic, who see in technology a growing menace to humankind's basic organic relationship to "nature". Still others, Utopian in hope, who see quite contrarily the only possible development of humankind in terms of increasingly sophisticated technologies toward the day of a "new Athens' in which machines finally are the slaves which allow us to develop a greater culture. Others see in certain kinds and uses of technology the potential for even greater alienation and exploitation.