Automation technology in the Dynamics of Modernity: An Essay on Technology, Social Organization, and Existential Concerns (original) (raw)

2018, nformation, Communication, and Automation Technology Ethics in the Knowledge Society Age

The thoughts presented and discussed in this essay all point to the critical conception that technology is never in any general sense ‘neutral’, although, as I will try to show, modern technology and its (techno)scientific base is quite largely, although sometimes implicitly and unconsciously, understood to be so. The reason for this non-neutrality is, as I will argue, that technology and its science is always and inescapably rooted in and informed by human interpersonal relationships. Moreover, technology is thus also always embedded in a cultural context. Or differently put, an irreducible part of social organization and its imagination, worldview and ideology. Throughout the essay I will place in dialogue contemporary issues and phenomena revolving around (especially) automation technology with the visions, claims and notions of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, two of the most influential programmatic pioneers of modern technoscience. In sections two and three this dialogical exchange centers on social, political and economic issues with a special focus on the themes of labor and equality. The fourth and final section transitions over to a critical discussion on how the modern technoscientific imagination, with its technological understanding of truth/nature/being, is conceived as answering and overcoming existential concerns about human life and its mindedness.