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SEVEN FACES OF TECHNOLOGY


GAIN INSIGHT INTO TECHNOLOGY BY CONSIDERING IT FROM THESE SEVEN DIVERSE
PERSPECTIVES

Paul Siemers, PhD

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8 min read
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Mar 16, 2024

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Photo by Daniel Sealey on Unsplash

Technology is one of the greatest challenges we confront on a personal,
professional, and planetary level.

Technology forces us to make choices on each of these levels. At a personal
level we have to make choices regarding what technologies we, and our families,
use or do not use — for example, do we allow our children to access social
media? At a professional level, we experience dilemmas such as the increasing
automation of many jobs, and ethical questions around the replacement of humans
with machine intelligence. At a planetary level, we confront vast challenges
such as the imperative to replace fossil fuel technologies, and the
ever-increasing threat of automated warfare.

To make these choices, we need to understand what technology is, and the way it
behaves. It is easy to assume that this is well understood — by somebody, if not
by us. It may be alarming to learn that this is not the case.

In a previous article, I discussed just what technology really is. In that
article, I considered the common-sense answer that technology comprises
artefacts like iPhones and microwave ovens, and showed that this answer is too
narrow and simplistic to be of much use. I also explained that many centuries of
philosophical discussion have produced insights into the nature of technology,
but have yielded no conclusive answers.

Finally, I suggested that a good way to illuminate technology is by looking at
it from diverse perspectives — almost as though we were walking around a complex
object and inspecting it from different angles. I closed with the challenge of
finding the right set of perspectives. Or, if there is no right set, what at
least is a useful set of perspectives?

And that is where this article picks up the story.


THE FACES OF TECHNOLOGY

When looking at technology from a certain perspective, we see a particular
“face” of technology. For example, if we are building a financial business case
for a new software investment, will see the software mainly in terms of costs
and benefits, dollars and cents. But if we are looking at the same software
during a cybersecurity review, what we will see is hostile actors, threat
vectors and vulnerabilities.

This is a bit like looking at the human body using different instruments. We are
familiar with the picture of the body obtained using a camera. But consider how
different is the picture obtained with an x-ray machine. Or from an MRI. The
photo, the x-ray and the MRI are all showing us aspects (or “faces”) of the same
human body — but they look so different it is hard at first to reconcile them as
being images of the same thing.

We are all familiar with photos, and with x-rays. MRI images are also becoming
quite familiar to many of us. But there is no final list of the ways we can look
at the body. Medical advances will create new techniques, allowing the body to
be revealed to us in new ways.

In the same way, there is no ultimate list of the faces which technology can
reveal. But there are some well-known and useful faces. In my PhD research I
explored numerous theories about technology, and reflected on these through the
prism of my 30+ years of working in technology strategy. Based on this research,
I now offer seven faces to consider when thinking about technology.


(1) TECHNOLOGY AS ARTEFACT

The most obvious face of technology is “technology as artefact” — technology as
concrete object. When asked to visualise technology, a natural response is to
think of a technological artefact like an iPhone or a Tesla.

This face is so obvious that it is easy to mistake it for the whole thing, to
assume that technology is just made up of objects, that technology is iPhones,
cars and microwave ovens.

As I will now describe, this is not the case — or at least it is not the whole
story.


(2) TECHNOLOGY AS EXPERIENCE

A second face which is easy to see — when you think about it for a moment — is
“technology as experience”.

Think about the experience of wearing spectacles. If you are lucky (and young)
enough never to have had to wear corrective spectacles, think about sunglasses.
The most obvious feature of glasses is not the glasses themselves. In fact,
after a while, we are no longer really aware of the glasses, and we certainly
can’t see them as an object. When you are wearing glasses you cannot see the
shape of the frame, or the brand name. The important thing about glasses, when
you are wearing them, is the way they modify your experience of seeing. We can
say that one experiences glasses as a modification of vision — for example, as a
greater clarity in seeing distant objects.

This, then, is “technology as experience” — or, to be more exact, “technology as
modification of experience”. This face of technology is not unique to glasses
(or things like glasses). All technologies have this face, though it might be
less obvious for some than for others.

For example, we may usually see a hammer as a common household object, with a
wooden handle and a metal head. But when we are actually hammering a nail, we
can no longer see the hammer like that: our attention is focussed on the nail.
Instead we experience the hammer as part of the act of hammering — as though the
hammer is an extension of our own arm.


(3) TECHNOLOGY AS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION


Photo by Belle Hunt on Unsplash

Consider the humble chair. For most of us, “chair” is roughly synonymous with “a
place to sit”. When we enter a meeting room, we do not pause to decide whether
we should rather sit on the table or the floor or someone else’s lap. We just
take a chair.

But a chair is not a fact of nature. For example, in Japan, the chair was almost
completely absent before the Meiji restoration in 1868. People sat on cushions
on the floor — and indeed this is still a common practice in some settings in
Japan. The Japanese were aware of chairs long before 1868, they simply did not
adopt them. When they saw chairs, they were not immediately convinced that they
were better places to sit.

So the chair is not just an object, it is also a social construction — that is,
it is an idea that we hold in common. Familiar technologies are so well-framed
by our idea of them that this perspective can be hard to see. A chair just is a
chair, and we all know what it is, and what to do with it.

New technologies, however, provoke a feeling of anxiety. Think about the concern
surrounding ChatGPT and LLM’s (Large Language Models). We wonder what they will
and won’t be able to do, how they will affect social activities like work and
recreation. There is active discussion around what they mean for us. This is the
process by which a shared conception of the new technology is formed. To put it
another way, this is how the new technology is “socially constructed”. After a
while a consensus forms around the new technology, and it becomes familiar to
us. The new technology takes its assigned role within society, and it becomes
hard to imagine how we ever lived without it.

This then, is the third face of technology — technology viewed from the
perspective of its familiar role in society.


(4) TECHNOLOGY AS HISTORICAL FORCE

We like to think we are directing technology. At a personal level this seems
true. We choose which phone to buy and when to use it. We choose which car to
buy and when to drive it.

But at a wider level this is much less clear. Did we choose nuclear weapons?
Anti-personnel mines? Killer drones? Did we choose for industrial pollution to
put the planet at risk? Indeed, did we choose industrialisation at all?

Viewed from this perspective, technology shows the face of an impersonal force
which drives history. In the 19th century this was viewed as the “force of
progress”: a good thing for humankind in general. This faith in progress was
shattered during the 20th century, particularly by the industrialised killing of
the World Wars, and by the development of atomic weapons. In 2024, many more
people would see technology’s historic force as ambivalent or downright
sinister.

This, then, is the fourth face of technology — technology as a driver of
history.


(5) TECHNOLOGY AS BUSINESS

Related to the social and historical faces of technology is what we may call
“technology as business”. This is a familiar face of technology for many people.
No discussion of technology is complete without reference to the NASDAQ, the Big
Tech companies, and the motley assemblage of Superheroes and Super Villains with
which they are associated. We are also familiar with the everyday commerce of
technology in the form of the seductive new gadgets which assail us at every
turn.

This capitalist face of technology is also grounded in technology’s broader
economic aspect; its deeper role in structuring the economy and shaping the way
we live.


(6) TECHNOLOGY AS PRACTICE

Most of our daily livelihoods are closely entangled in technology — designing
it, building it, using it, fixing it. We see the face of technology as a
practice: something we do. Engineering is a long-established example of this: it
is an entire profession, indeed almost a way of life, built around engaging with
and mastering technology. When people work in close harmony with machines —
think of a Formula One pit crew repairing a car — the barriers between people
and machines becomes blurred. These moments show us clearly how “doing
technology” forms an integral aspect of technology itself.


(7) TECHNOLOGY AS ACTOR


Photo by mostafa meraji on Unsplash

The seventh face we will look at is “technology as actor”. This is one of
technology’s more subtle and profound aspects. It is when technology acts as
though it had its own intentions, as though it had a mind of its own.

We have all had this experience of technology. It is when we want to go one way,
but the shopping trolley wants to go another. It might be easy to dismiss this
simple example as a mere irritation. But as technology grows more complex, we
have an increasing sense that technology is a independent being which harbours
its own purposes. Consider the movie cliché of an air crew “coaxing” an
aeroplane to do more than we could expect of a mere machine. In this, there is
an acknowledgement that technology is not wholly at our command, that we need to
work with it and not against it.

As we move into the age of AI, the face of technology as an independent actor
looms ever larger. We can no longer completely understand the causality which
underlies a program’s behaviour, and programs can act in surprising and even
capricious ways. The sense that we are dealing with a lurking alien intelligence
becomes ever stronger.


CONCLUSION

In summary then, technology can be viewed from many perspectives, each of which
reveals another of its faces. In this article I have touched on seven of the
most interesting faces. In future articles, I will talk more about each of these
faces and explore the way they are related to each other. I will also explain
how, using the seven faces, we can gain greater insight into real technology
problems.

This essay forms part of the “Seven Faces of Technology” project.





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WRITTEN BY PAUL SIEMERS, PHD

5 Followers
·Writer for

Cubed

I am passionate about revealing how technology really works. I have 30+ years
experience in technology strategy, and a PhD in Philosophy of Technology.

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