Topic : Technological Neutrality. Why does it have to be a yes/no question? Why not just Sometimes Yes?
This week’s reading, “An Engineer Considers Technological (non) Neutrality”, reviews the ethics literature around the “neutrality” versus “value-ladenness” of Technology. The author gives examples of the pros/cons of one view being more dominant than the other, and placing people in one camp or another.
One of the acknowledged difficulties the author faced was summarized in a section heading: The fuzziness of neutrality/value-ladenness. Value is not discernable in any generalizable or consistently recognizable way, but numerous examples in the text prove it exists (cars, guns, ”The Black Pearl” all embody Freedom, and guns also embody Death). Some technologies do seem pretty neutral. A screwdriver was said to embody its Manufacturer’s value of quality, but as a class, as a technology, it is pretty instrumental, i.e., value-neutral.
All this to say, I posit that Technology is sometime neutral, sometime value-laden, and it is incumbent on the engineer to look beyond the specifications of his/her invention or design, and acknowledge that he/she will have potential responsibility for the uses it is put to, and possibly for the values assigned to it. Would you agree that “Maybe yes/Maybe no” is actually the true state of affairs? And if so, can we live with it?
Engineers of bicycle pumps likely will not spend much time on it. However, engineers working with AI, with robotics, with drones, should think hard about their creations. What if we made every patent application subject to a “value analysis?”
Instruction: You only need one source and i have attached the pdf of the reading.