technology and society in the industrial age assignment

Unit 5: Revolutions, 1750 - 1900

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Primary Source Set The Industrial Revolution in the United States

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The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

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The Industrial Revolution took place over more than a century, as production of goods moved from home businesses, where products were generally crafted by hand, to machine-aided production in factories. This revolution, which involved major changes in transportation, manufacturing, and communications, transformed the daily lives of Americans as much as— and arguably more than—any single event in U.S. history.

An early landmark moment in the Industrial Revolution came near the end of the eighteenth century, when Samuel Slater brought new manufacturing technologies from Britain to the United States and founded the first U.S. cotton mill in Beverly, Massachusetts. Slater’s Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, like many of the mills and factories that sprang up in the next few decades, was powered by water, which confined industrial development to the northeast at first. The concentration of industry in the Northeast also facilitated the development of transportation systems such as railroads and canals, which encouraged commerce and trade.

The technological innovation that would come to mark the United States in the nineteenth century began to show itself with Robert Fulton’s establishment of steamboat service on the Hudson River, Samuel F. B. Morse’s invention of the telegraph, and Elias Howe’s invention of the sewing machine, all before the Civil War. Following the Civil War, industrialization in the United States increased at a breakneck pace. This period, encompassing most of the second half of the nineteenth century, has been called the Second Industrial Revolution or the American Industrial Revolution. Over the first half of the century, the country expanded greatly, and the new territory was rich in natural resources. Completing the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 was a major milestone, making it easier to transport people, raw materials, and products. The United States also had vast human resources: between 1860 and 1900, fourteen million immigrants came to the country, providing workers for an array of industries.

The American industrialists overseeing this expansion were ready to take risks to make their businesses successful. Andrew Carnegie established the first steel mills in the U.S. to use the British “Bessemer process” for mass producing steel, becoming a titan of the steel industry in the process. He acquired business interests in the mines that produced the raw material for steel, the mills and ovens that created the final product and the railroads and shipping lines that transported the goods, thus controlling every aspect of the steelmaking process.

Other industrialists, including John D. Rockefeller, merged the operations of many large companies to form a trust. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust came to monopolize 90% of the industry, severely limiting competition. These monopolies were often accused of intimidating smaller businesses and competitors in order to maintain high prices and profits. Economic influence gave these industrial magnates significant political clout as well. The U.S. government adopted policies that supported industrial development such as providing land for the construction of railroads and maintaining high tariffs to protect American industry from foreign competition.

American inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison created a long list of new technologies that improved communication, transportation, and industrial production. Edison made improvements to existing technologies, including the telegraph while also creating revolutionary new technologies such as the light bulb, the phonograph, the kinetograph, and the electric dynamo. Bell, meanwhile, explored new speaking and hearing technologies, and became known as the inventor of the telephone.

For millions of working Americans, the industrial revolution changed the very nature of their daily work. Previously, they might have worked for themselves at home, in a small shop, or outdoors, crafting raw materials into products, or growing a crop from seed to table. When they took factory jobs, they were working for a large company. The repetitive work often involved only one small step in the manufacturing process, so the worker did not see or appreciate what was being made; the work was often dangerous and performed in unsanitary conditions. Some women entered the work force, as did many children. Child labor became a major issue. Dangerous working conditions, long hours, and concern over wages and child labor contributed to the growth of labor unions. In the decades after the Civil War, workers organized strikes and work stoppages that helped to publicize their problems. One especially significant labor upheaval was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Wage cuts in the railroad industry led to the strike, which began in West Virginia and spread to three additional states over a period of 45 days before being violently ended by a combination of vigilantes, National Guardsmen, and federal troops. Similar episodes occurred more frequently in the following decades as workers organized and asserted themselves against perceived injustices.

The new jobs for the working class were in the cities. Thus, the Industrial Revolution began the transition of the United States from a rural to an urban society. Young people raised on farms saw greater opportunities in the cities and moved there, as did millions of immigrants from Europe. Providing housing for all the new residents of cities was a problem, and many workers found themselves living in urban slums; open sewers ran alongside the streets, and the water supply was often tainted, causing disease. These deplorable urban conditions gave rise to the Progressive Movement in the early twentieth century; the result would be many new laws to protect and support people, eventually changing the relationship between government and the people.

The Industrial Revolution is a complex set of economic, technological, and social changes that occurred over a substantial period of time. Teachers should consider the documents in this collection as tools for stimulating student thinking about aspects of the Industrial Revolution.

Suggestions for Teachers

• After providing a definition of the Industrial Revolution and explaining the time span across which it took place, teachers might supply small groups of students with a set of the documents in this primary source set. Students can categorize the documents by whether they provide information about what happened, why it happened, or its effects. Some documents may fit into more than one category. When small groups have completed their work, the teacher can facilitate creating a class list of events of the Industrial Revolution, causes (or supporting factors), and effects. Students may search the Library’s online collections to find additional evidence to support the causes and effects on the class chart.
• Using the documents in this primary source set, students can create a timeline of important events in the Industrial Revolution. The last document in the set is dated 1919. Was the Industrial Revolution over by 1919? Challenge students to find evidence in the Library of Congress digital collections to support their answer (there are documents that suggest industrialization in the South was still taking place into the 1930s).
• Understanding a historical event as it was experienced by those who lived through it is an important skill of historical thinking—and one that can be difficult to develop. Teachers may challenge students to study documents in the collection to identify varied perspectives on the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution, as experienced by people of the day. Would students classify the responses as mainly positive, mainly negative, or about equally divided? How did people respond to what they perceived as negative effects of the Industrial Revolution?
• In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, which highlighted achievements of the United States and other nations in a variety of fields, including manufacturing and technology. An entire building was devoted to electricity. Using the primary source set as a starting point, ask students to design an exhibit about the development of American industry for the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Additional Resources

Detroit Publishing Company

Built in America

Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress

Inside an American Factory: Films of the Westinghouse Works

National Child Labor Committee Collection

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Inventors and Inventions of the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution (1750–1900) forever changed the way people in Europe and the United States live and work. These inventors and their creations were at the forefront of a new society.

Spinning and weaving

The creation of the following ingenious machines made possible the mass production of high-quality cotton and woolen thread and yarn and helped transform Great Britain into the world’s leading manufacturer of textiles in the second half of the 18th century.

The spinning jenny. About 1764 James Hargreaves , a poor uneducated spinner and weaver living in Lancashire, England, conceived a new kind of spinning machine that would draw thread from eight spindles simultaneously instead of just one, as in the traditional spinning wheel . The idea reportedly occurred to him after his daughter Jenny accidentally knocked over the family’s spinning wheel. The spindle continued to turn even as the machine lay on the floor, suggesting to Hargreaves that a single wheel could turn several spindles at once. He obtained a patent for the spinning jenny in 1770.

The water frame. So called because it was powered by a waterwheel , the water frame, patented in 1769 by Richard Arkwright , was the first fully automatic and continuously operating spinning machine. It produced stronger and greater quantities of thread than the spinning jenny did. Because of its size and power source, the water frame could not be housed in the homes of spinners, as earlier machines had been. Instead, it required a location in a large building near a fast-running stream. Arkwright and his partners built several such factories in the mountainous areas of Britain. Spinners, including child laborers, thereafter worked in ever-larger factories rather than in their homes.

The spinning mule. About 1779 Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule, which he designed by combining features of the spinning jenny and the water frame. His machine was capable of producing fine as well as coarse yarn and made it possible for a single operator to work more than 1,000 spindles simultaneously. Unfortunately, Crompton, being poor, lacked the money to patent his idea. He was cheated out of his invention by a group of manufacturers who paid him much less than they had promised for the design. The spinning mule was eventually used in hundreds of factories throughout the British textile industry.

Steam engine

Through its application in manufacturing and as a power source in ships and railway locomotives, the steam engine increased the productive capacity of factories and led to the great expansion of national and international transportation networks in the 19th century.

Watt’s steam engine. In Britain in the 17th century, primitive steam engines were used to pump water out of mines. In 1765 Scottish inventor James Watt , building on earlier improvements, increased the efficiency of steam pumping engines by adding a separate condenser, and in 1781 he designed a machine to rotate a shaft rather than generate the up-and-down motion of a pump. With further improvements in the 1780s, Watt’s engine became a primary power source in paper mills, flour mills, cotton mills, iron mills, distilleries, canals, and waterworks, making Watt a wealthy man.

The steam locomotive. British engineer Richard Trevithick is generally recognized as the inventor of the steam railway locomotive (1803), an application of the steam engine that Watt himself had once dismissed as impractical. Trevithick also adapted his engine to propel a barge by turning paddle wheels and to operate a dredger. Trevithick’s engine, which generated greater power than Watt’s by operating at higher pressures, soon became common in industrial applications in Britain, displacing Watt’s less-efficient design. The first steam-powered locomotive to carry paying passengers was the Active (later renamed the Locomotion ), designed by English engineer George Stephenson , which made its maiden run in 1825. For a new passenger railroad line between Liverpool and Manchester, completed in 1830, Stephenson and his son designed the Rocket , which achieved a speed of 36 miles (58 km) per hour.

Two important inventions improved the safety and efficiency of steam trains and railways in the late 19th century. In 1897 American inventor Andrew J. Beard patented the Jenny coupler, a device that automatically connected railway cars. It revolutionized the railroad industry by eliminating the need for brakemen to manually couple the cars, a dangerous job that often resulted in serious injuries. About the same time, Canadian American inventor Elijah McCoy patented a lubricating device for steam engine bearings. His portable “lubricating cup,” or “McCoy lubricator,” automatically dripped oil onto engine bearings while the train was in motion, keeping the engine properly lubricated. This device became extremely popular as it allowed trains to run continuously without having to stop frequently for lubrication.

Steamboats and steamships. Steamboats and steamships were pioneered in France, Britain, and the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The first commercially successful paddle steamer, the North River Steamboat , designed by American engineer Robert Fulton , traveled up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany, New York, in 1807 at a speed of about 5 miles (8 km) per hour. Eventually, ever larger steamboats delivered cargo as well as passengers over hundreds of miles of inland waterways of the eastern and central United States, especially the Mississippi River . The first transoceanic voyage to employ steam power was completed in 1819 by the Savannah , an American sailing ship with an auxiliary steam-powered paddle. It sailed from Savannah, Georgia, to Liverpool, England, in a little more than 27 days, though its paddle operated for only 85 hours of the voyage. By the second half of the 19th century, ever larger and faster steamships were regularly carrying passengers, cargo, and mail across the North Atlantic, a service dubbed “the Atlantic Ferry.”

Harnessing electricity

In the early 19th century, scientists in Europe and the United States explored the relationship between electricity and magnetism, and their research soon led to practical applications of electromagnetic phenomena.

Electric generators and electric motors. In the 1820s and ’30s British scientist Michael Faraday demonstrated experimentally that passing an electric current through a coil of wire between two poles of a magnet would cause the coil to turn, while turning a coil of wire between two poles of a magnet would generate an electric current in the coil ( electromagnetic induction ). The first phenomenon eventually became the basis of the electric motor , which converts electrical energy into mechanical energy, while the second eventually became the basis of the electric generator , or dynamo, which converts mechanical energy into electrical energy. Although both motors and generators underwent substantial improvements in the mid-19th century, their practical employment on a large scale depended on the later invention of other machines—namely, electrically powered trains and electric lighting.

Electric railways and tramways. The first electric railway, intended for use in urban mass transit, was demonstrated by German engineer Werner von Siemens in Berlin in 1879. By the early 20th century, electric railways were operating within and between several major cities in Europe and the United States. The first electrified section of London’s subway system, called the London Underground , began operation in 1890.

The incandescent lamp. In 1878–79 Joseph Swan in England and later Thomas Edison in the United States independently invented a practical electric incandescent lamp , which produces continuous light by heating a filament with an electric current in a vacuum (or near vacuum). Both inventors applied for patents, and their legal wrangling ended only after they agreed to form a joint company in 1883. Edison has since been given most of the credit for the invention, because he also devised the power lines and other equipment necessary for a practical lighting system. During the next 50 years, electric incandescent lamps gradually replaced gas and kerosene lamps as the major form of artificial light in urban areas, though gas-lit street lamps persisted in Britain until the mid-20th century.

Lewis Latimer, an American inventor, patented a carbon filament in 1881 that burned for many more hours than previous designs. The innovation allowed for the production of more efficient light bulbs, thus making electric lighting more affordable and accelerating its adoption.

Telegraph and telephone

Two inventions of the 19th century, the electric telegraph and the electric telephone , made reliable instantaneous communication over great distances possible for the first time. Their effects on commerce, diplomacy, military operations, journalism, and myriad aspects of everyday life were nearly immediate and proved to be long-lasting.

The telegraph. The first practical electric telegraph systems were created almost simultaneously in Britain and the United States in 1837. In the device developed by British inventors William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone , needles on a mounting plate at a receiver pointed to specific letters or numbers when electric current passed through attached wires.  Inventors Solomon G. Brown, Joseph Henry , Samuel F.B. Morse , and Alfred Vail created their own electric telegraph, Brown serving as one of the telegraph’s principal technicians, Henry having designed the necessary high intensity magnet, and Morse having conceived of the telegraph’s designs, with significant improvements by Vail. Morse created his own electric telegraph and, more famously, a universal code, since known as Morse Code , that could be used in any system of telegraphy. The code, consisting of a set of symbolic dots, dashes, and spaces, was soon adopted (in modified form to accommodate diacritics) throughout the world. A demonstration telegraph line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, was completed in 1844. The first message sent on it was, “What hath God wrought!” Telegraph cables were first laid across the English Channel in 1851 and across the Atlantic Ocean in 1858. In the United States the spread of telegraphic communication through the growth of private telegraph companies such as Western Union aided the maintenance of law and order in the Western territories and the control of traffic on the railroads. What’s more, it enabled the transmission of national and international news through wire services such as the Associated Press . In 1896 Italian physicist and inventor Guglielmo Marconi perfected a system of wireless telegraphy ( radiotelegraphy ) that had important military applications in the 20th century.

The telephone. In 1876 Scottish-born American scientist Alexander Graham Bell successfully demonstrated the telephone, which transmitted sound, including that of the human voice, by means of an electric current. While Bell is credited as the primary inventor of the telephone, Lewis Latimer, an American inventor and draftsman, contributed to its development through his work on patent drawings. Latimer was hired by Bell’s patent lawyers to draft high-quality patent drawings for the telephone patent application. Bell’s device consisted of two sets of metallic reeds (membranes) and electromagnetic coils. Sound waves produced near one membrane caused it to vibrate at certain frequencies, which induced corresponding currents in the electromagnetic coil connected to it, and those currents then flowed to the other coil, which in turn caused the other membrane to vibrate at the same frequencies, reproducing the original sound waves. The first “telephone call” (successful electric transmission of intelligible human speech) took place between two rooms of Bell’s Boston laboratory on March 10, 1876, when Bell summoned his assistant, Thomas Watson , with the famous words that Bell transcribed in his notes as “Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.” Initially the telephone was a curiosity or a toy for the rich, but by the mid-20th century it had become a common household instrument, billions of which were in use throughout the world.

Internal-combustion engine and automobile

Among the most consequential inventions of the late Industrial Revolution were the internal-combustion engine and, along with it, the gasoline-powered automobile . The automobile, which replaced the horse and carriage in Europe and the United States, offered greater freedom of travel for ordinary people, facilitated commercial links between urban and rural areas, influenced urban planning and the growth of large cities, and contributed to severe air-pollution problems in urban areas.

The internal-combustion engine. The internal-combustion engine generates work through the combustion inside the engine of a compressed mixture of oxidizer (air) and fuel, the hot gaseous products of combustion pushing against moving surfaces of the engine, such as a piston or a rotor. The first commercially successful internal-combustion engine, which used a mixture of coal gas and air, was constructed about 1859 by Belgian inventor Étienne Lenoir . Initially expensive to run and inefficient, it was significantly modified in 1878 by German engineer Nikolaus Otto , who introduced the four-stroke cycle of induction-compression-firing-exhaust. Because of their greater efficiency, durability, and ease of use, gas-powered engines based on Otto’s design soon replaced steam engines in small industrial applications. The first gasoline-powered internal-combustion engine, also based on Otto’s four-stroke design, was invented by German engineer Gottlieb Daimler in 1885. Soon afterward, in the early 1890s, another German engineer, Rudolf Diesel , constructed an internal-combustion engine (the diesel engine ) that used heavy oil instead of gasoline and was more efficient than the Otto engine. It was widely used to power locomotives, heavy machinery, and submarines.

The automobile. Because of its efficiency and light weight, the gasoline-powered engine was ideal for light vehicular locomotion. The first motorcycle and motorcar powered by an internal-combustion engine were constructed by Daimler and Karl Benz , respectively, in 1885. By the 1890s a nascent industry in continental Europe and the United States was producing increasingly sophisticated automobiles for mostly wealthy customers. Less than 20 years later American industrialist Henry Ford perfected assembly-line methods of manufacturing to produce millions of automobiles (especially the Model T ) and light trucks annually. The great economies of scale he achieved made automobile ownership affordable for Americans of average income, a major development in the history of transportation.

Growth in the agricultural sector

New farm machinery coupled with chemical and agronomic advances helped transform agriculture into a high-yield industrial enterprise. This boosted food production capacity during the Industrial Revolution which helped to feed the rising population.

The steel plow. Invented by John Deere in 1837, the steel plow was a major improvement over earlier iron and wooden plows, as it was lighter and stronger and able to break up dense prairie soil in the American Midwest. The plow’s sharp point and smooth surface reduced friction and enabled farmers to cultivate more acres per day with less draft power, contributing to increased crop yields and allowing farming to expand westward into new territories. Within two decades of its invention, over 10,000 steel plows were being produced annually by Deere’s company in the United States.

The mechanical reaper. Developed by Cyrus McCormick in 1831, the mechanical reaper greatly increased harvesting efficiency, compared with handheld scythes. McCormick's horse-drawn machine used a cutting bar to cut ripe grain, a platform to carry the cut stems, and a reel to pull them onto the platform for bundling. By automating the cutting and threshing processes, the reaper enabled farmers to quadruple the amount of grain harvested per day, displacing the handheld scythe which had been in use for over 5,000 years.

Multiple-effect evaporator. Chemist Norbert Rillieux invented the efficient multiple-effect evaporator, which used steam heat and vacuum chambers to boil sugar cane juice in stages. This removed water from the juice while retaining sugar crystals, and in doing so it revolutionized the sugar industry. Rillieux’s apparatus, patented in 1846, cut fuel consumption and boosted sugar yields compared to old open-kettle methods, enabling Louisiana sugar plantations to lower production costs and improve quality and profits. Rillieux’s pioneering work in industrial heat transfer and steam technology paved the way for many later developments, and his innovative refining process continues to be used in chemical processing, pharmaceutical manufacturing, food and beverage production, and wastewater purification.

Synthetic production. American agronomist George Washington Carver is best remembered for promoting crop-rotation methods to restore soil nutrients depleted by cotton monoculture and for his advances in synthetic production. Conducting research and trials focused on nitrogen-fixing plants like peanuts, soybeans, and sweet potatoes, Carver used synthetic production to develop hundreds of new uses for standard agricultural crops. With regard to peanuts, he created over 300 products, including milk and oil substitutes, paper, and wood stains. His work provided affordable food sources for poor farmers and helped reduce Southern agriculture’s reliance on cotton.

Cosmetics and wear

Mass production techniques coupled with expanded distribution networks allowed a huge range of consumer goods, from clothing to cosmetics, to be manufactured affordably and accessed by the general population.

The sewing machine. Elias Howe and Isaac Singer patented sewing machines in the 1840s and ’50s. Howe invented and patented the first practical sewing machine that used lock-stitching. This machine could produce 300 stitches per minute compared to a professional seamstress’s 40–50 stitches per minute but only in a straight line, a severe limitation. As sewing technology improved, garment factories were able to quickly and cheaply mass-produce fashionable clothing for the general population. The practical sewing machine was later available for home use, becoming a staple of self-reliance of the American family. In 1851 Singer designed an improved model that utilized Howe’s patented lock-stitch method and a new up-and-down motion mechanism. Howe was able to reestablish his rights in 1854 after a five-year legal battle against Singer and others, whereupon he received royalties on all U.S.-made sewing machines.

The shoe-lasting machine. The American inventor Jan Ernst Matzeliger created the shoe-lasting machine in 1883. Before then, shoes were individually lasted by skilled artisans, which limited their availability and affordability. Matzeliger’s machine could produce 150–700 pairs of shoes per day, compared with 50 per artisan, allowing inexpensive mass-produced shoes to become widely available.

Aniline dyes. The English chemist William Henry Perkin first patented aniline dyes in 1856. These artificial dyes allowed for vibrantly colored fabrics to be mass-produced in factories for the first time. Previously, dyes were derived from natural sources and limited in hue. Perkin accidentally created the synthesis of aniline purple , or mauve, in his experiment to produce quinine , a medical drug. The aniline dye process opened the door for affordable brightly colored clothing to reach mainstream consumers. Its immense popularity was dubbed “mauveine measles” and even reached the British royal family ; Queen Victoria appeared in a mauveine silk dress at the International Exhibition of 1862, otherwise known as the Great London Exhibition.

Hair products. In the early 1900s Madam C.J. Walker (born Sarah Breedlove) developed a line of cosmetics and hair products for African American women, specializing in pomades and shampoos. Through savvy marketing and the training of a national network of more than 25,000 sales agents, she built a business empire spanning from the United States to Central America to the Caribbean, thus contributing to cosmetics’ transition from small-scale production to mass availability as consumer goods.

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Promises and Pitfalls of Technology

Politics and privacy, private-sector influence and big tech, state competition and conflict, author biography, how is technology changing the world, and how should the world change technology.

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Josephine Wolff; How Is Technology Changing the World, and How Should the World Change Technology?. Global Perspectives 1 February 2021; 2 (1): 27353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.27353

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Technologies are becoming increasingly complicated and increasingly interconnected. Cars, airplanes, medical devices, financial transactions, and electricity systems all rely on more computer software than they ever have before, making them seem both harder to understand and, in some cases, harder to control. Government and corporate surveillance of individuals and information processing relies largely on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, and therefore involves less human-to-human contact than ever before and more opportunities for biases to be embedded and codified in our technological systems in ways we may not even be able to identify or recognize. Bioengineering advances are opening up new terrain for challenging philosophical, political, and economic questions regarding human-natural relations. Additionally, the management of these large and small devices and systems is increasingly done through the cloud, so that control over them is both very remote and removed from direct human or social control. The study of how to make technologies like artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things “explainable” has become its own area of research because it is so difficult to understand how they work or what is at fault when something goes wrong (Gunning and Aha 2019) .

This growing complexity makes it more difficult than ever—and more imperative than ever—for scholars to probe how technological advancements are altering life around the world in both positive and negative ways and what social, political, and legal tools are needed to help shape the development and design of technology in beneficial directions. This can seem like an impossible task in light of the rapid pace of technological change and the sense that its continued advancement is inevitable, but many countries around the world are only just beginning to take significant steps toward regulating computer technologies and are still in the process of radically rethinking the rules governing global data flows and exchange of technology across borders.

These are exciting times not just for technological development but also for technology policy—our technologies may be more advanced and complicated than ever but so, too, are our understandings of how they can best be leveraged, protected, and even constrained. The structures of technological systems as determined largely by government and institutional policies and those structures have tremendous implications for social organization and agency, ranging from open source, open systems that are highly distributed and decentralized, to those that are tightly controlled and closed, structured according to stricter and more hierarchical models. And just as our understanding of the governance of technology is developing in new and interesting ways, so, too, is our understanding of the social, cultural, environmental, and political dimensions of emerging technologies. We are realizing both the challenges and the importance of mapping out the full range of ways that technology is changing our society, what we want those changes to look like, and what tools we have to try to influence and guide those shifts.

Technology can be a source of tremendous optimism. It can help overcome some of the greatest challenges our society faces, including climate change, famine, and disease. For those who believe in the power of innovation and the promise of creative destruction to advance economic development and lead to better quality of life, technology is a vital economic driver (Schumpeter 1942) . But it can also be a tool of tremendous fear and oppression, embedding biases in automated decision-making processes and information-processing algorithms, exacerbating economic and social inequalities within and between countries to a staggering degree, or creating new weapons and avenues for attack unlike any we have had to face in the past. Scholars have even contended that the emergence of the term technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked a shift from viewing individual pieces of machinery as a means to achieving political and social progress to the more dangerous, or hazardous, view that larger-scale, more complex technological systems were a semiautonomous form of progress in and of themselves (Marx 2010) . More recently, technologists have sharply criticized what they view as a wave of new Luddites, people intent on slowing the development of technology and turning back the clock on innovation as a means of mitigating the societal impacts of technological change (Marlowe 1970) .

At the heart of fights over new technologies and their resulting global changes are often two conflicting visions of technology: a fundamentally optimistic one that believes humans use it as a tool to achieve greater goals, and a fundamentally pessimistic one that holds that technological systems have reached a point beyond our control. Technology philosophers have argued that neither of these views is wholly accurate and that a purely optimistic or pessimistic view of technology is insufficient to capture the nuances and complexity of our relationship to technology (Oberdiek and Tiles 1995) . Understanding technology and how we can make better decisions about designing, deploying, and refining it requires capturing that nuance and complexity through in-depth analysis of the impacts of different technological advancements and the ways they have played out in all their complicated and controversial messiness across the world.

These impacts are often unpredictable as technologies are adopted in new contexts and come to be used in ways that sometimes diverge significantly from the use cases envisioned by their designers. The internet, designed to help transmit information between computer networks, became a crucial vehicle for commerce, introducing unexpected avenues for crime and financial fraud. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, designed to connect friends and families through sharing photographs and life updates, became focal points of election controversies and political influence. Cryptocurrencies, originally intended as a means of decentralized digital cash, have become a significant environmental hazard as more and more computing resources are devoted to mining these forms of virtual money. One of the crucial challenges in this area is therefore recognizing, documenting, and even anticipating some of these unexpected consequences and providing mechanisms to technologists for how to think through the impacts of their work, as well as possible other paths to different outcomes (Verbeek 2006) . And just as technological innovations can cause unexpected harm, they can also bring about extraordinary benefits—new vaccines and medicines to address global pandemics and save thousands of lives, new sources of energy that can drastically reduce emissions and help combat climate change, new modes of education that can reach people who would otherwise have no access to schooling. Regulating technology therefore requires a careful balance of mitigating risks without overly restricting potentially beneficial innovations.

Nations around the world have taken very different approaches to governing emerging technologies and have adopted a range of different technologies themselves in pursuit of more modern governance structures and processes (Braman 2009) . In Europe, the precautionary principle has guided much more anticipatory regulation aimed at addressing the risks presented by technologies even before they are fully realized. For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation focuses on the responsibilities of data controllers and processors to provide individuals with access to their data and information about how that data is being used not just as a means of addressing existing security and privacy threats, such as data breaches, but also to protect against future developments and uses of that data for artificial intelligence and automated decision-making purposes. In Germany, Technische Überwachungsvereine, or TÜVs, perform regular tests and inspections of technological systems to assess and minimize risks over time, as the tech landscape evolves. In the United States, by contrast, there is much greater reliance on litigation and liability regimes to address safety and security failings after-the-fact. These different approaches reflect not just the different legal and regulatory mechanisms and philosophies of different nations but also the different ways those nations prioritize rapid development of the technology industry versus safety, security, and individual control. Typically, governance innovations move much more slowly than technological innovations, and regulations can lag years, or even decades, behind the technologies they aim to govern.

In addition to this varied set of national regulatory approaches, a variety of international and nongovernmental organizations also contribute to the process of developing standards, rules, and norms for new technologies, including the International Organization for Standardization­ and the International Telecommunication Union. These multilateral and NGO actors play an especially important role in trying to define appropriate boundaries for the use of new technologies by governments as instruments of control for the state.

At the same time that policymakers are under scrutiny both for their decisions about how to regulate technology as well as their decisions about how and when to adopt technologies like facial recognition themselves, technology firms and designers have also come under increasing criticism. Growing recognition that the design of technologies can have far-reaching social and political implications means that there is more pressure on technologists to take into consideration the consequences of their decisions early on in the design process (Vincenti 1993; Winner 1980) . The question of how technologists should incorporate these social dimensions into their design and development processes is an old one, and debate on these issues dates back to the 1970s, but it remains an urgent and often overlooked part of the puzzle because so many of the supposedly systematic mechanisms for assessing the impacts of new technologies in both the private and public sectors are primarily bureaucratic, symbolic processes rather than carrying any real weight or influence.

Technologists are often ill-equipped or unwilling to respond to the sorts of social problems that their creations have—often unwittingly—exacerbated, and instead point to governments and lawmakers to address those problems (Zuckerberg 2019) . But governments often have few incentives to engage in this area. This is because setting clear standards and rules for an ever-evolving technological landscape can be extremely challenging, because enforcement of those rules can be a significant undertaking requiring considerable expertise, and because the tech sector is a major source of jobs and revenue for many countries that may fear losing those benefits if they constrain companies too much. This indicates not just a need for clearer incentives and better policies for both private- and public-sector entities but also a need for new mechanisms whereby the technology development and design process can be influenced and assessed by people with a wider range of experiences and expertise. If we want technologies to be designed with an eye to their impacts, who is responsible for predicting, measuring, and mitigating those impacts throughout the design process? Involving policymakers in that process in a more meaningful way will also require training them to have the analytic and technical capacity to more fully engage with technologists and understand more fully the implications of their decisions.

At the same time that tech companies seem unwilling or unable to rein in their creations, many also fear they wield too much power, in some cases all but replacing governments and international organizations in their ability to make decisions that affect millions of people worldwide and control access to information, platforms, and audiences (Kilovaty 2020) . Regulators around the world have begun considering whether some of these companies have become so powerful that they violate the tenets of antitrust laws, but it can be difficult for governments to identify exactly what those violations are, especially in the context of an industry where the largest players often provide their customers with free services. And the platforms and services developed by tech companies are often wielded most powerfully and dangerously not directly by their private-sector creators and operators but instead by states themselves for widespread misinformation campaigns that serve political purposes (Nye 2018) .

Since the largest private entities in the tech sector operate in many countries, they are often better poised to implement global changes to the technological ecosystem than individual states or regulatory bodies, creating new challenges to existing governance structures and hierarchies. Just as it can be challenging to provide oversight for government use of technologies, so, too, oversight of the biggest tech companies, which have more resources, reach, and power than many nations, can prove to be a daunting task. The rise of network forms of organization and the growing gig economy have added to these challenges, making it even harder for regulators to fully address the breadth of these companies’ operations (Powell 1990) . The private-public partnerships that have emerged around energy, transportation, medical, and cyber technologies further complicate this picture, blurring the line between the public and private sectors and raising critical questions about the role of each in providing critical infrastructure, health care, and security. How can and should private tech companies operating in these different sectors be governed, and what types of influence do they exert over regulators? How feasible are different policy proposals aimed at technological innovation, and what potential unintended consequences might they have?

Conflict between countries has also spilled over significantly into the private sector in recent years, most notably in the case of tensions between the United States and China over which technologies developed in each country will be permitted by the other and which will be purchased by other customers, outside those two countries. Countries competing to develop the best technology is not a new phenomenon, but the current conflicts have major international ramifications and will influence the infrastructure that is installed and used around the world for years to come. Untangling the different factors that feed into these tussles as well as whom they benefit and whom they leave at a disadvantage is crucial for understanding how governments can most effectively foster technological innovation and invention domestically as well as the global consequences of those efforts. As much of the world is forced to choose between buying technology from the United States or from China, how should we understand the long-term impacts of those choices and the options available to people in countries without robust domestic tech industries? Does the global spread of technologies help fuel further innovation in countries with smaller tech markets, or does it reinforce the dominance of the states that are already most prominent in this sector? How can research universities maintain global collaborations and research communities in light of these national competitions, and what role does government research and development spending play in fostering innovation within its own borders and worldwide? How should intellectual property protections evolve to meet the demands of the technology industry, and how can those protections be enforced globally?

These conflicts between countries sometimes appear to challenge the feasibility of truly global technologies and networks that operate across all countries through standardized protocols and design features. Organizations like the International Organization for Standardization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and many others have tried to harmonize these policies and protocols across different countries for years, but have met with limited success when it comes to resolving the issues of greatest tension and disagreement among nations. For technology to operate in a global environment, there is a need for a much greater degree of coordination among countries and the development of common standards and norms, but governments continue to struggle to agree not just on those norms themselves but even the appropriate venue and processes for developing them. Without greater global cooperation, is it possible to maintain a global network like the internet or to promote the spread of new technologies around the world to address challenges of sustainability? What might help incentivize that cooperation moving forward, and what could new structures and process for governance of global technologies look like? Why has the tech industry’s self-regulation culture persisted? Do the same traditional drivers for public policy, such as politics of harmonization and path dependency in policy-making, still sufficiently explain policy outcomes in this space? As new technologies and their applications spread across the globe in uneven ways, how and when do they create forces of change from unexpected places?

These are some of the questions that we hope to address in the Technology and Global Change section through articles that tackle new dimensions of the global landscape of designing, developing, deploying, and assessing new technologies to address major challenges the world faces. Understanding these processes requires synthesizing knowledge from a range of different fields, including sociology, political science, economics, and history, as well as technical fields such as engineering, climate science, and computer science. A crucial part of understanding how technology has created global change and, in turn, how global changes have influenced the development of new technologies is understanding the technologies themselves in all their richness and complexity—how they work, the limits of what they can do, what they were designed to do, how they are actually used. Just as technologies themselves are becoming more complicated, so are their embeddings and relationships to the larger social, political, and legal contexts in which they exist. Scholars across all disciplines are encouraged to join us in untangling those complexities.

Josephine Wolff is an associate professor of cybersecurity policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her book You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches was published by MIT Press in 2018.

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Making the modern world: the industrial revolution in global perspective, course description.

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• > Journals
• > Modern Intellectual History
• > Volume 13 Issue 2
• > EMANCIPATION IN THE INDUSTRIAL AGE: TECHNOLOGY, RATIONALITY,...

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Emancipation in the industrial age: technology, rationality, and the cold war in habermas’s early epistemology and social theory *.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2014

In his 1968 essay “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’,” Jürgen Habermas deals more explicitly than in other works with phenomena related to modern technology and science. 1 He is well known for his social theory, legal theory, and theories of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and has been a major figure in the intellectual history of modern Europe due to the twin role he has played as both a voice and a representative of the political and philosophical movements of postwar and post-Holocaust West Germany. Exploring the role of technology in his thinking brings into focus technology's ambiguous status in critical social theory as well as the general relationship between intellectual history and the history of technology. The disturbingly open-ended question whether technology is modernity's blessing or its curse has mobilized critics and commentators at least since the Industrial Revolution and has divided them at political, epistemic, and moral levels. Habermas's project sits in the middle of such traditions, and his 1968 essay “updates” long-standing concerns about industrial modernity for the specific technological, philosophical, and political conditions of the early Cold War. Intersections between technology and his signature fields—intersections that he has both forged and contributed to—are found in political theories of technology and democracy (in the forms, for example, of technocracy and technological determinism), epistemologies of scientific knowledge and their relevance for theories of the reasonable subject and of knowledge communities, and theories of secularization and modern state-building. 2

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I am grateful to Uljana Feest, Judith Surkis, John Tresch, and the three anonymous reviewers for their generous and insightful comments.

1 Habermas , Jürgen , “ Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie ,” in Habermas , , Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie ( Frankfurt am Main , 1968 ), 48 – 103 Google Scholar ; Habermas , , “ Technology and Science as Ideology ,” in Habermas , , Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics ; trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro ( Boston , 1970 ), 81 – 122 Google Scholar .

2 Müller Doohm , Stefan , Das Interesse der Vernunft: Rückblicke auf das Werk von Jürgen Habermas seit “Erkenntnis und Interesse” ( Frankfurt am Main , 2000 ) Google Scholar ; and Habermas , Jürgen , Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion: Philosophische Aufsätze ( Frankfurt am Main , 2005 ) Google Scholar .

3 Habermas , Jürgen , Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Studien ( Neuwied am Rhein , 1963 ), 236 –7 Google Scholar . Habermas , , Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung: Philosophische Aufsätze ( Frankfurt am Main , 1999 ), 102 –37 Google Scholar . McCarthy , Thomas , The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas ( Cambridge , 1978 ), 75 – 91 Google Scholar . Heath , Joseph , “ System and LifeWorld ,” in Fultner , Barbara , ed., Jürgen Habermas: Key Concepts ( Durham , 2011), 74 – 90 , at 74 Google Scholar . Pinzani , Alessandro , Jürgen Habermas ( Munich , 2007 ), 8 and 49 Google Scholar . One more example of Habermas's commitment to emancipation, from that same era, is his debate with Hans-Georg Gadamer, which spanned four years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They negotiated the antagonism between Gadamer's claim for a universal hermeneutics that roots all understanding in tradition and history, and Habermas's , insistence on the powers of critical reflective thinking on the part of a universal, ahistorical subject . Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik ( Frankfurt am Main , 1971 ) Google Scholar .

4 Habermas , Jürgen , “ Die Moderne: Ein unvollendetes Projekt ,” in Habermas , Kleine politische Schriften, I–IV ( Frankfurt am Main , 1981 ), 444 –64 Google Scholar . Habermas , Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit: Kleine Politische Schriften V ( Frankfurt am Main , 1985 ), 202 Google Scholar .

5 Pinzani, Jürgen Habermas , 8.

6 Outhwaite , William , Habermas: A Critical Introduction ( Stanford, CA , 2009 ), 6 Google Scholar . Matthew Specter analyzes how Habermas's search for new understandings of the relationship between democracy and technology intersected at the time with the student movement and newly emerging forms of German conservatism (which, in their turn, developed theoretical ideas about technology). Specter counts Habermas's 1968 essay about technology, science, and ideology toward that. Specter , Matthew G. , Habermas: An Intellectual Biography ( Cambridge , 2010 ), 91 and 95 CrossRef Google Scholar . Dirk van Laak explains similarly how, in postwar West Germany, there was a renewed Christian current of conservatism that aimed to mobilize eternal values against modernity and secularization, but that against it another current won out, a pragmatic one that embraced modern technology and centralized planning; and that the latter “left much deeper imprints on German history since 1945 than any other derivation of conservatism.” van Laak , Dirk , “ From the Conservative Revolution to Technocratic Conservatism ,” in Müller , Jan-Werner , ed., German Ideologies since 1945: Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of the Bonn Republic ( New York , 2003 ), 147 –60, at 147–8 CrossRef Google Scholar .

7 Outhwaite, Habermas , 7. Kießling , Friedrich , Die undeutschen Deutschen: Eine ideengeschichtliche Archäologie der alten Bundesrepublik 1945–1972 ( Paderborn , 2012 ), 283 Google Scholar .

8 Kießling, Die undeutschen Deutschen , 7–8. See also Bock , Michael , “ Metamorphosen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung ,” in Albrecht , Clemens et al. , eds., Die intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik ( Frankfurt am Main , 1999 ), 556 –8 Google Scholar ; and Martin Beck Matuštík “ The Critical Theorist as Witness: Habermas and the Holocaust ,” in Hahn , Lewis E. , ed., Perspectives on Habermas ( Chicago , 2000 ), 339 – 366 Google Scholar .

9 Zammito , John H. , A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour ( Chicago , 2004 ) Google Scholar ; Feenberg , Andrew , “ Marcuse or Habermas: Two Critiques of Technology ,” Inquiry , 39/1 ( 1996 ), 45 – 70 Google Scholar ; Carson , Cathryn , “ Science as instrumental reason: Heidegger, Habermas, Heisenberg ,” Continental Philosophy Review , 42 ( 2010 ), 483 – 509 CrossRef Google Scholar .

10 “Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung der Lebensbedingungen der wissenschaftlich-technischen Welt.” Specter points out how the Max Planck Institute's “name itself illustrates the discourse under discussion” and also explains how the leading idea behind its founding was the danger to humanity posed by the atomic bomb and how “the mobilization of German and international atomic scientists in the public sphere became Habermas's model for how scientists could challenge technocracy.” Specter, Habermas , 98 and 98 n. 41.

11 Hoy , David Couzens and McCarthy , Thomas , Critical Theory ( Oxford , 1994 ), 52 and 60 Google Scholar .

12 Habermas says in the Preface to Erkenntnis und Interesse , “Daß wir Reflexion verleugnen, ist der Positivismus” (Habermas's emphasis). Habermas , Jürgen , Erkenntnis und Interesse ( Frankfurt am Main , 1968 ), 9 Google Scholar . Habermas insisted, against Popper, that even in the exact sciences there was not only an “instrumental” rationality operating but also an interpretive and intersubjective one (of the type that he would later call “communicative”). Habermas , , “ Analytische Wissenschaftstheorie und Dialektik: Ein Nachtrag zur Kontroverse zwischen Popper und Adorno ,” in Horkheimer , Max , ed., Zeugnisse, Theodor W. Adorno zum sechzigsten Geburtstag ( Frankfurt am Main , 1963 ), 473 – 501 , esp. 493) Google Scholar . See also Frisby , David , “ The Popper–Adorno Controversy: The Methodological Dispute in German Sociology ,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences , 2/1 ( 1972 ), 105 –19 CrossRef Google Scholar .

13 Pinzani, Jürgen Habermas , 21 and 53.

14 Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse , 9. This is an often-quoted claim. See, for example, Dryzek , John , “ Critical Theory as a Research Program ,” in White , Stephen K. , ed., The Cambridge Companion to Habermas ( Cambridge , 1995 ), 97 – 119 , at 100 CrossRef Google Scholar ; and Pinzani, Jürgen Habermas , 67. Inspired by analytical philosophy and the controversy on positivism, Habermas later took back this primacy of epistemology in attempts to develop a theory of society. Habermas , Jürgen , “ A Philosophico-Political Profile ” (interview), New Left Review , 151/1 ( 1985 ), 75 – 105 , esp. 77 Google Scholar . Another disclaimer is needed here: Habermas's idea about modern science was outdated by at least two generations already at the time that he wrote his 1968 essay. His work on science and technology was not written or received in debates closely related to the largely Anglo-American tradition of science and technology studies, and his essay was never in sustained conversation with the lively 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s philosophy, sociology, and history of science. Overlaps can be found, but the traditions unfolded independently and used different terminologies to come to terms with the phenomena of modern science and technology. Alford , C. Fred , Science and the Revenge of Nature: Marcuse & Habermas ( Gainesville, FL , 1985 ), 77 Google Scholar ; and Vogel , Steven , Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory ( Albany , 1996 ), 7 Google Scholar .

15 Pinzani, Jürgen Habermas , 67–8.

16 Habermas , Jürgen , “ Die Dialektik der Rationalisierung: Vom Pauperismus in Produktion und Konsum ,” Merkur , 8/8 ( 1954 ), 701 –24 Google Scholar .

17 Kießling, Die undeutschen Deutschen , 40–44.

18 Bohrer , Karl Heinz and Scheel , Kurt , eds., Die Botschaft des MERKUR: Eine Anthologie aus fünfzig Jahren der Zeitschrift ( Stuttgart , 1997 ), 7 Google Scholar .

19 Dews , Peter , ed., Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews ( London , 1986 ), 187 Google Scholar . I owe this reference to Outhwaite, Habermas , 6.

20 Habermas, “Dialektik,” 702, Habermas's emphasis.

21 Ibid ., 703.

22 Ibid ., 711.

23 Habermas , Jürgen , “ Marx in Perspektiven ,” Merkur , 9/12 ( 1955 ), 1180 –83, at 1183 Google Scholar . I owe this reference to Pinzani, Jürgen Habermas , 36.

24 Habermas, “Dialektik,” 701.

25 Ibid ., 702.

26 Ibid ., 703.

27 Ibid ., 704.

28 This progress, he claims, contains a self-limitation due to its inherent rationality, in its margins for regeneration. He calls this a “social” rationality. Ibid., 709.

29 In this context he also cites widely read literature of the late 1940s and early 1950s on mechanization, of which signature items were Anneliese Maier's Die Mechanisierung des Weltbildes im 17. Jahrhundert from 1938, Sigfried Giedion's Mechanization takes Command from 1948, and E. J. Dijksterhuis's The Mechanization of the World Picture from 1950, as well as mid-twentieth-century sociology of labor such as Georges Friedmann's Probleèmes humains du machinisme industriel from 1946 and Friedmann and Pierre Naville's Traité de sociologie du travail from 1964. Habermas, “Dialektik der Rationalisierung,” 704–9.

30 By “metaphysical” I do not refer to Heideggerian or Husserlian traditions of Lebensphilosophie or existentialism and instead mean accounts of, and claims about, technology's identity and causal efficacy. I certainly do not mean to interfere with Habermas's well-developed research agenda of “postmetaphysical thinking.” Habermas , Jürgen , Postmetaphysical Thinking ( Cambridge, MA , 1992 ), esp. 50 – 51 Google Scholar .

31 Steven Vogel, Against Nature , 106, makes a similar point.

32 This belief correlates with sentiments in North American countercultures in the same period. Langdon Winner describes in 1977 in a book tellingly subtitled “Technics-out-of-Control” how in the 1960s and early 1970s technology as a theme “became relevant” to political theory. Winner , Langdon , Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought ( Cambridge , 1977 ), x Google Scholar . Twelve years later Thomas Hughes discusses along similar lines authors who investigated during that period the “foundations of the technological society”—among them Jacques Ellul, Herbert Marcuse, Lewis Mumford, E. F. Schumacher, and Theodore Roszak. They had a lasting influence on an entire generation of protesting youth, who fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, and later began to consider modern technology as “the common cause” of the problems that they were protesting. Hughes , Thomas P. , American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 ( Chicago , 2004 ), 443 –4 Google Scholar . An important historical and intellectual hinge between European and North American discussions was Herbert Marcuse, who introduced American students and intellectuals to the key ideas and commitments of the Frankfurt school. His One-Dimensional Man from 1964 “brought to an audience of Americans the insights of the Frankfurt School of German philosophers and sociologists” (Hughes, American Genesis , 445–6), and through his “sudden popularity” in the 1960s United States, Critical Theory had a “significant influence on the New Left in this country.” Jay , Martin , The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 ( Boston , 1973 ), 5 Google Scholar .

33 Horkheimer , Max and Adorno , Theodor W. , Dialectic of Enlightenment ( New York , 1997 ), xi, xii, and 4 Google Scholar , among many other passages. In the large pool of commentary on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment , I have found particularly helpful Hohendahl , Peter Uwe , “ From the Eclipse of Reason to Communicative Rationality and Beyond ,” in Hohendahl , Peter Uwe and Fisher , Jaimey , eds., Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects ( New York , 2001 ), 3 – 28 Google Scholar ; and Hoy and McCarthy, Critical Theory , 103–43.

34 Habermas , Jürgen , “ Die Verschlingung von Mythos und Aufklärung ,” in Habermas , , Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen ( Frankfurt am Main , 1996 ), 130 –57, at 130 and 138 Google Scholar .

35 Ibid ., 141–4 and 153. Habermas also explains that the Critical Theory of the first generation explicitly claimed and developed a notion of reason for itself, which the authors started doubting in the 1930s, which then resulted in the Dialectic of Enlightenment . Jürgen Habermas, “Zur Tradition kritischer Theorie,” in Habermas, Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit , 167–173 and 171–2.

36 Habermas, “Zur Tradition,” 172–3.

37 McCarthy formulates this tension in this way: “Habermas is in general agreement on the need for a critique of instrumental reason . . . But he feels that the earlier attempts of the Frankfurt school often verged on a romantic rejection of science and technology as such.” Hoy and McCarthy, Critical Theory , 21.

38 Habermas, “Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie,” 84.

39 Alford, Science and the Revenge of Nature , 5, even calls it “the most dramatic” encounter.

40 Marcuse , Herbert , “ Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus im Werk Max Webers ,” in Marcuse , , Kultur und Gesellschaft II ( Frankfurt am Main , 1965 ), 107 –29 Google Scholar . Dominick LaCapra points out that Habermas's text thus starts out in an “oblique or indirect fashion as a ‘critique of a critique’.” LaCapra goes on to apply Derrida's notion of “supplementarity” to Habermas's critique-of-a-critique strategy. LaCapra , Dominick , “ Habermas and the Grounding of Critical Theory ,” in LaCapra , , Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language ( Ithaca, NY , 1983 ), 145 –83, at 154 Google Scholar .

41 Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als “Ideologie” , 169.

42 I am grateful to one of my reviewers who drew my attention to this. The question mark is easy to overlook: it is missing on the cover page of the July 1968 issue of Merkur , which contains the original essay's first part. One only notices it if one takes the trouble to go back to the original article, which few libraries own and, in its online version, is behind a paywall. Habermas says nothing, as far as I can tell, about the omitted question marks in the essay's later version in the edited volume.

43 The subheadings that disappear include the following: “Herbert Marcuse's critique of Max Weber,” “The idea of a new technology,” “Work and interaction,” “What distinguishes traditional and modern societies?”, “State-regulated capitalism,” “Science and universities as primary force of production,” “Class struggle and ideology today,” “Two notions of rationalization,” and “The new potential for protest: high school and college students.”

44 The collection includes, among others, the two essays with the foreshadowing titles “Work and Interaction” and “Knowledge and Human Interests.” Both his “quasi-transcendental” categories “work” and “interaction”, as well as his “cognitive interests” from the 1960s, became part of the foundation of the Theory of Communicative Action . Habermas, “Die Verschlingung von Mythos und Aufklärung,” 140; and Habermas , , Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns , vol. 1 ( Frankfurt am Main , 1981 ), 225 – 368 Google Scholar .

45 Habermas, “Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie,” 48.

46 Ibid ., 58–60.

47 Ibid ., 59.

48 See references in footnote 32 above, as well as Edgerton , David , “ Innovation, Technology, or History: What Is the Historiography of Technology About? ”, Technology and Culture , 51/3 ( 2010 ), 680 –97 CrossRef Google Scholar ; and Wyatt , Sally , “ Technological Determinism Is Dead: Long Live Technological Determinism ,” in Hackett , Edward J. et al. , eds., Handbook of Science and Technology Studies ( Cambridge, MA , 2008 ), 165 –80 Google Scholar .

49 Habermas, “Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie,” 62–3. In the 1970s, Habermas reworked the knowledge-constitutive interests into a new paradigm embedded in a theory of communicative action. Vogel, Against Nature , 112.

50 Habermas, “Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie,” 63.

51 My account of Habermas's quasi-transcendental exercise relies in crucial parts on these four authors’ analyses: Alford, Science and the Revenge of Nature , 1–21; LaCapra, “Habermas and the Grounding of Critical Theory”; Vogel, Against Nature , 101–44; and Whitebook , Joel , “ The Problem of Nature in Habermas ,” Telos , 40/2 ( 1979 ), 41 – 69 CrossRef Google Scholar . By “materialism” or “materialist,” I mean, in line with other authors, the material and causal reality of physical nature and technological artifacts, and I do not intend to confuse it with naive realism or epistemic objectivism. “Materialism” is certainly already charged with a range of meanings in Marxism and Critical Theory. McCarthy explains how Critical Theorists in the 1930s were revisiting flaws in Marx's and Lukács's theorizing and how that resulted in philosophical idealism being “replaced by positivist materialism as the chief enemy of critical thought.” McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas , 19–20.

52 Habermas himself admits that the term “quasi-transcendental” is “a product of an embarrassment which points to more problems than it solves.” Habermas , Jürgen , Theory and Practice ( Boston , 1973 ), 14 Google Scholar . Alford, Science and the Revenge of Nature , 6, quotes from the same passage.

53 “Practical” is here the literal translation of the German word praktisch . The use of “practical” is quite disparate in English and German. Shapiro writes in his “Translator's Preface” to Habermas, Toward a Rational Society , at vii, that, in current English usage, “practical” often means “down-to-earth” or “expedient,” and thus something very close to what Habermas means by “technical”—the opposite of praktisch . Shapiro explains that praktisch in Habermas's work always refers to “symbolic interaction within a normative order”: to ethics, politics, and questions about the nature of the good life (ibid., vii).

54 I rely here once again on Alford, Science and the Revenge of Nature , 80–81; LaCapra, “Habermas and the Grounding of Critical Theory,” 154–9; Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” 45–6; and Vogel, Against Nature , 111–14.

55 Vogel, Against Nature , 106–11, and Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” 48–9, explain how (quasi-)transcendental arguments can help bypass the idealism–materialism dichotomy. Alford provides details about the connections between Habermas's reflections on nature and twentieth-century history and philosophy of science. Alford, Science and the Revenge of Nature , 77.

56 Habermas, “Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie,” 58; Alford, Science and the Revenge of Nature , 99.

57 Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” 66.

58 Ibid ., 66.

59 Vogel, Against Nature , 106–24. Whitebook and LaCapra also point out problems arising from Habermas's quasi-transcendentalism.

60 Vogel, Against Nature , 112–13.

61 Ibid ., 113.

62 Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” 48–9; and Vogel, Against Nature , 113.

63 Vogel, Against Nature , 113.

64 Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” 46.

65 Vogel, Against Nature , 113. This is similar to a paradox that Deborah Coen identifies in the history of the environmental sciences. She explains how Kant himself, whose analysis of the modern knowing subject took the form of a transcendental exercise, founded a modern science of the earth by eliminating the human subject from it. Coen , Deborah , The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter ( Chicago , 2013 ), 8 Google Scholar .

66 Whitebook makes the incisive point about the regressive, pre-Kantian consequences of Habermas's assumption of a pre-human nature. Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” 49.

67 Vogel, Against Nature , 112, calls him a model of intellectual integrity in this regard.

68 Ibid ., 112.

69 Ibid ., 112.

70 Vogel, Against Nature , 6, makes this point about Critical Theory in general. It might be worthwhile to revisit here the difference between Traditional and Critical Theory as defined by Max Horkheimer in his eponymous 1937 essay. The difference is the former's lack of awareness of its entanglement in the social conditions in which it is being practiced. Horkheimer targeted, of course, the positivistic philosophies of the empirical sciences of the time. Horkheimer , Max , “ Traditionelle und kritische Theorie ,” in Horkheimer , , Gesammelte Schriften , vol. 4 ( Frankfurt am Main , 1988 ), 162 – 217 Google Scholar .

71 Vogel, Against Nature , 10.

72 Habermas, “Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie,” 68.

73 Ibid ., 66–7.

74 Ibid ., 68, Habermas's emphasis. Lynn White uses a similar argument—the invention of invention—as part of his study of medieval technology and a way of periodizing the history of technology and distinguishing “modern” technology from its earlier relatives. White , Lynn , “ The Medieval Roots of Modern Science and Technology ,” in White , , Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays ( Berkeley, CA , 1978 ), 75 – 92 , at 89 Google Scholar .

75 Habermas, “Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie,” 68–9.

76 Ibid ., 78.

77 Ibid ., 81, Habermas's emphasis.

78 The reference to the language of cybernetics is obvious here. Habermas picked it up from, among other places, the terminology of systems theory, which was one of the most influential theoretical frameworks in 1960s German sociology. Luhmann , Niklas , Soziologische Aufklaärung: Aufsätze zur Theorie sozialer Systeme ( Cologne , 1970 ), 78 –9 Google Scholar .

79 Habermas, “Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie,” 81. Habermas captures key aspects of the debate by citing works of Arnold Gehlen and Jacques Ellul.

80 The technocracy debate in West Germany was initiated by Schelsky , Helmut 's Der Mensch in der wissenschaftlichen Zivilisation ( Cologne , 1961 ) CrossRef Google Scholar . Schelsky's forty-six-page essay reiterates elements of the history of industrialization and rationalization that Habermas, Marcuse, and Weber also engage, and Schelsky merges them with skeptical and conservative arguments about modern culture and industrial culture altogether, from, among others, his teachers Arnold Gehlen and Hans Freyer. See also Specter, Habermas , 96–7; and Laak, “From the Conservative Revolution to Technocratic Conservatism,” 148.

81 Lenk , Hans , “ Vorwort des Herausgebers ,” in Lenk , , ed., Technokratie als Ideologie: Sozialphilosophische Beiträge zu einem politischen Dilemma ( Stuttgart , 1973 ), 7 – 8 , at 7 Google Scholar .

82 Koch , Claus and Senghaas , Dieter (eds.), Texte zur Technokratiediskussion ( Frankfurt am Main , 1970 ), 5 Google Scholar . Specter also emphasizes this history in his analysis of the relationship between Habermas's work and the student movements of the 1960s. Specter, Habermas , 110–11.

83 Habermas , Jürgen und Luhmann , Niklas , Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie: Was leistet d. Systemforschung? ( Frankfurt am Main , 1971 ) Google Scholar .

84 Lenk, “Vorwort,” 7; Koch and Senghaas, Texte zur Technokratiediskussion , 5. Matthew Specter describes in a similar vein that students applied the blanket label “technocratic” to the politics they rejected. Specter, Habermas , 90–91. See also Laak, “From the Conservative Revolution to Technocratic Conservatism.”

85 Habermas, “Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie,” 81.

86 Alford, Science and the Revenge of Nature , 134–5.

87 The most recent volume, from 2013, of Habermas's series Kleine politische Schriften is indeed entitled Im Sog der Technokratie . Habermas , Jürgen , Im Sog der Technokratie: Kleine politische Schriften XII ( Berlin 2013 ) Google Scholar .

88 Winner, Autonomous Technology , 6.

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• Volume 13, Issue 2
• ADELHEID VOSKUHL (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244314000717

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Why AI poses an existential danger to humanity

ILLUSTRATION: THE GLOBE AND MAIL. SOURCES: PUBLIC DOMAIN/GETTY IMAGES

Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book is Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI , from which this essay has been adapted.

Many experts warn that the rise of AI might result in the collapse of human civilization, or even in the extinction of the human species. In a 2023 survey of 2,778 AI researchers, more than a third gave at least a 10-per-cent chance to advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction. In 2023 close to 30 governments – including those of China, the United States, and the U.K. – signed the Bletchley Declaration on AI, which acknowledged that “there is potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these AI models.”

To some people, these warnings sound like over-the-top jeremiads. Every time a powerful new technology has emerged, anxieties arose that it might bring about the apocalypse. For example, as the Industrial Revolution unfolded many people feared that steam engines and telegraphs would destroy our societies and our well-being. But the machines ended up producing the most affluent societies in history. Most people today enjoy far better living conditions than their ancestors in the 18th century. AI enthusiasts such as Marc Andreessen and Ray Kurzweil promise that intelligent machines will prove even more beneficial than their industrial predecessors. They argue that thanks to AI, humans will enjoy much better health care, education and other services, and AI will even help save the ecosystem from collapse.

Unfortunately, a closer look at history reveals that humans actually have good reasons to fear powerful new technologies. Even if in the end the positives of these technologies outweigh their negatives, getting to that happy ending usually involves a lot of trials and tribulations. Novel technology often leads to historical disasters, not because the technology is inherently bad, but because it takes time for humans to learn how to use it wisely.

The Industrial Revolution is a prime example. When industrial technology began spreading globally in the 19th century, it upended traditional economic, social and political structures and opened the way to create entirely new societies, which were potentially more affluent and peaceful. However, learning how to build benign industrial societies was far from straightforward and involved many costly experiments and hundreds of millions of victims.

One costly experiment was modern imperialism. The Industrial Revolution originated in Britain in the late 18th century. During the 19th century industrial technologies and production methods were adopted in other European countries ranging from Belgium to Russia, as well as in the United States and Japan. Imperialist thinkers, politicians and parties in these industrial heartlands concluded that the only viable industrial society was an empire. The argument was that unlike traditional agrarian societies, the novel industrial societies relied much more on foreign markets and foreign raw materials, and only an empire could satisfy these unprecedented appetites. Imperialists feared that countries that industrialized but failed to conquer any colonies would be shut out from essential raw materials and markets by more ruthless competitors. Some imperialists argued that acquiring colonies was not just essential for the survival of their own state but beneficial for the rest of humanity, too. They claimed empires alone could spread the benefits of the new technologies to the so-called undeveloped world.

Consequently, industrial countries such as Britain and Russia that already had empires greatly expanded them, whereas countries like the United States, Japan, Italy and Belgium set out to build them. Equipped with mass-produced rifles and artillery, conveyed by steam power, and commanded by telegraph, the armies of industry swept the globe from New Zealand to Korea, and from Somalia to Turkmenistan. Millions of Indigenous people saw their traditional way of life trampled under the wheels of these industrial armies. It took more than a century of misery before most people realized that the industrial empires were a terrible idea and that there were better ways to build an industrial society and secure its necessary raw materials and markets.

Stalinism and Nazism were also extremely costly experiments in how to construct industrial societies. Leaders such as Stalin and Hitler argued that the Industrial Revolution had unleashed immense powers that only totalitarianism could rein in and exploit to the full. They pointed to the First World War – the first “total war” in history – as proof that survival in the industrial world demanded totalitarian control of all aspects of politics, society and the economy. On the positive side, they also claimed that the Industrial Revolution was like a furnace that melts all previous social structures with their human imperfections and weaknesses and provides the opportunity to forge perfect new societies inhabited by new unalloyed superhumans.

On the way to creating the perfect industrial society, Stalinists and Nazis learned how to industrially murder millions of people. Trains, barbed wires and telegraphed orders were linked to create an unprecedented killing machine. Looking back, most people today are horrified by what the Stalinists and Nazis perpetrated, but at the time their audacious visions mesmerized millions. In 1940 it was easy to believe that Stalin and Hitler were the model for harnessing industrial technology, whereas the dithering liberal democracies were on their way to the dustbin of history.

As the Industrial Revolution unfolded, many people feared that steam engines and telegraphs would destroy our societies and our well-being. GETTY IMAGES

The very existence of competing recipes for building industrial societies led to costly clashes. The two world wars and the Cold War can be seen as a debate about the proper way to go about it, in which all sides learned from each other, while experimenting with novel industrial methods to wage war. In the course of this debate, tens of millions died and humankind came perilously close to annihilating itself.

On top of all these other catastrophes, the Industrial Revolution also undermined the global ecological balance, causing a wave of extinctions. In the early 21st century up to 58,000 species are believed to go extinct every year, and total vertebrate populations have declined by 60 per cent between 1970 and 2014. The survival of human civilization, too, is under threat. Because we still seem unable to build an industrial society that is also ecologically sustainable, the vaunted prosperity of the present human generation comes at a terrible cost to other sentient beings and to future human generations. Maybe we’ll eventually find a way – perhaps with the help of AI – to create ecologically sustainable industrial societies, but until that day the jury on the Industrial Revolution is still out.

If we ignore for a moment the continuing damage to the ecosystem, we can nevertheless try to comfort ourselves with the thought that eventually humans did learn how to build more benevolent industrial societies. Imperial conquests, world wars, genocides and totalitarian regimes were woeful experiments that taught humans how not to do it. By the end of the 20th century, some might argue, humanity got it more or less right.

Yet even so the message to the 21st century is bleak. If it took humanity so many terrible lessons to learn how to manage steam power and telegraphs, what would it cost to learn to manage AI? AI is potentially far more powerful and unruly than steam engines, telegraphs and every previous technology, because it is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. AI isn’t a tool – it is an agent. Machine guns and atom bombs replaced human muscles in the act of killing, but they couldn’t replace human brains in deciding whom to kill. Little Boy – the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – exploded with a force of 12,500 tons of TNT, but when it came to brainpower, Little Boy was a dud. It couldn’t decide anything.

It is different with AI. In terms of intelligence, AIs far surpass not just atom bombs but also all previous information technology, such as clay tablets, printing presses and radio sets. Clay tablets stored information about taxes, but they couldn’t decide by themselves how much tax to levy, nor could they invent an entirely new tax. Printing presses copied information such as the Bible, but they couldn’t decide which texts to include in the Bible, nor could they write new commentaries on the holy book. Radio sets disseminated information such as political speeches and symphonies, but they couldn’t decide which speeches or symphonies to broadcast, nor could they compose them. AIs can do all these things, and it can even invent new weapons of mass destruction – from superpowerful nuclear bombs to superdeadly pandemics. While printing presses and radio sets were passive tools in human hands, AIs are already becoming active agents that might escape our control and understanding and that can take initiatives in shaping society, culture and history.

Perhaps we will eventually find ways to keep AIs under control and deploy them for the benefit of humanity. But would we need to go through another cycle of global empires, totalitarian regimes and world wars in order to figure out how to use AI benevolently? Since the technologies of the 21st century are far more powerful – and potentially far more destructive – than those of the 20th century, we have less room for error. In the 20th century, we can say that humanity got a C minus in the lesson on using industrial technology. Just enough to pass. In the 21st century, the bar is set much higher. We must do better this time.

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