In our February session of the Tech Leaders Salon, we explored Martin Heidegger’s seminal work, The Question Concerning Technology. Heidegger, as with any good philosopher, is doing three things:
- Asking questions to open up a path and figure out what the essence of technology could be;
- Stating the obvious, albeit in a new way; and
- Leaving a lot of space for the reader to figure things out on their own.
The key observations that he makes may not be all that new. I will be offering a caricature in what follows, but it is for illustrative purposes.
The Essence of Technology
For Heidegger, the essence of technology is not technological. The essence of technology is relational. It also makes us see new things (a “clearing”) and conceals old ways of seeing things, “enframing” how we view and interact with the world. By way of contemporary examples, consider Blockbuster vs. Netflix and e-commerce vs. in-person shopping.
Technology shifts how we perceive and interact with the world. Everything becomes a resource, a “standing reserve”: the river is a source of energy, transportation is a means for moving goods or tourists, and people are resources for work, tourism, or medical care. While this is debatable, as we discussed in the comparison between peasants and employees, it is a point that merits some reflection.
The Dangers and the Balance
The questions that Heidegger asks are along the lines of the following:
- If technology reveals new ways of seeing the world, hides previous ways of seeing it, and is always available to us as a standing reserve, what are some of the dangers that this brings upon us as humans?
- What can we do to save ourselves from being fully conditioned by technology?
- What needs to be done to maintain a balance between using technology to improve our lives and making them more convenient without necessarily becoming over-reliant on it?
While this approach seems like an either/or one, I think it is an important step to determine the extremes, or polar opposites. Aristotle, whom Heidegger cites in his essay, says that excellence is to be found in the balance between extremes. The goal is to understand what the extremes are to be able to determine where the balance lies.
In the case of technology, one extreme is that of Ted Kaczynski. On the other extreme is someone who might think that humans should just be using technology to do everything because humans are by nature defective. One is a Luddite; the other is an extreme version of a transhumanist, biohacker, or tech-bro maximalist.
Shifting Behaviors and AI
During our discussion, several examples were brought up regarding how new technology is affecting our behavior: from the introduction of the typewriter all the way to AI, we may have stopped writing by hand, lost focus, got hooked on social media, kids are glued to tablets, started spending less time outside, and became less active.
But the very same technology made other things possible: it became easier to write and edit documents; movie and series industries were born, helping us create new ways of storytelling and new forms of work.
With AI, similar dangers and benefits reveal themselves to us. With it, new ways are introduced to make our lives more flexible and convenient; however, we might also end up seeking efficiency and convenience for convenience’s sake.
The Saving Power of Art
Heidegger finds solace in art as a creative activity that involves a mix of technical skills, knowledge, and expressive activity to bring about new ways of seeing things, of truth and insight, that make us see, understand, and experience the world in a new way. Art is a poetic revealing.
As Heidegger put it:
“It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances.”
“We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature.”
“[M]odern man must first and above all find his way back into the full breadth of the space proper to his essence. That essential space of man’s essential being receives the dimension that unites it to something beyond itself . . . that is the way in which the safekeeping of being itself is given to belong to the essence of man as the one who is needed and used by being.”
“Could it be that the fine arts are called to poetic revealing? Could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part may expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew our look into that which grants and our trust in it?”