Can technology save the world? Tonight at MIT, the Veritas Forum hosted a conversation of religious and nonreligious academics to discuss the question. I participate in a weekly Bible study organised by MIT's Graduate Christian Fellowship, one of the event's co-sponsors, so I was interested to see what people would say.
The Veritas Forum is an international network of university events run by evangelical Christians to discuss the major issues of our day, with the specific aim of relating them to "the person and story of Jesus Christ". Veritas Forum events are remarkable among Christian circles for their involvement of nonbelievers on stage.
Today's talk featured Rosalind Picard, George Barbastathis, Jose Gomez-Marquez, and Susan S. Silbey.
Susan Silbey says, "Technology cannot save the world because it is part of the problem." Technology is about methods of doing things independent of their purposes. It often serves unanticipated, unpredicable ends. Because technology cannot tell us what kind of world to have, it can't save the world.
From Bacon's New Atlantis to the present, we have seen a triumphant march of science until the current day. Science and technology have won nearly unanimous support among the public and intellectuals. In the 20th and 21st century, voices which oppose technology have grown in number. There are two arguments for the idea that technology is destroying the world. The first is an argument about the impact of technology on the environment and health, from the effects of mechanisation on mental health to environmental problems. The other objection to technology claims that technology is changing humanity in itself in harmful ways.
The visible effects of technology on the physical world are the most obvious problems. Susan cites a laundry list of problems from allergies to climate chage, citing Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan that technology could lead to a world which is "nasty, brutish, and short." She thinks that trying to solve these problems with technology is like stumbling forward in a path strewn with casualties of opportunism and greed.
Even if we could fix technology, Susan argues that we should worry even more about the influence of technology on the conduct of life and the nature of humanity. She argues that technology has changed our notions of the world and what it means to be human. When technology becomes a pervasive part of society, we will only be able to act and understand in areas that may be quantified and assessed in terms of risk and profit. Susan doesn't think computers will remove human autonomy, which is always already uncertain.
Susan's argument is much simpler. She believes that technology is fundamentally pragmatic, unable to make moral judgments, and therefore unable to save the world.
The next speaker was Jose Gomez-Marquez from MIT's D-Lab, an amazingly capable designer of health technologies for the developing world. Jose has won three MIT IDEAS challenges, started out by talking about an amazing range of DIY health technologies. He talked about just how much technology could achieve, and where religion comes in.
We typically tend to think that it takes great experts to save the world. Experts make amazing space robots or nanotechnology and give them to the world to make it better. Things like computers sometimes do work that way. But when we go to a developing country, we often end up in a place where there is no inspiration, no lab, and no capital equipment. In that world, people have no problem accepting their own limits, at which point they often turn to religion. Is this a limitation, Jose asks us, or is it a sign of their imaginative strength? Jose suggests that in prayer, those hopes are matched by the power of God to create change.
Jose encouraged us to think beyond the gadget, to care about people. He talked about how he is inspired by the example of Jesus in the gospels, someone who deliberately walked with the poor rather than just the intellectuals of his day.
Jose showed us the classic graphs of accelerating technologies that lead inevitably to jetpacks. He pointed out that while this might be happening more generally in society, that's not the shape of our individual lives. We often have ups and downs as we and our loved ones suffer loss and new experiences. Whether we're one of Jose's MIT students or one of his patients, what matters is hope-- a determined choice to rely on something larger than one's self. Especially as Jose interacts with patients and health workers, he responds with hard work as well as faith-- knowing full well that he will be unable to do enough fast enough.
Next up was George Barbastathis, an optical physicist who designed the famous "invisibility cloak." More generally, his group does "more useful work" in areas like microscopy and long distance imaging. Their overall purpose is to develop new instruments to measure the world and study diseases.
George started out with a paean to light. It's something you can't touch, it's used in communications technologies, it's a beautiful part of human experience.
George argued that technology can't make people better or worse, but that we as people have to choose how to use it. He talked about the benefits of open science, citing the importance of keeping open access to scientific publications even in cases where there are fears about the misuse of research. He hoped that we at MIT, "the good guys" could keep a step ahead the "bad guys" who would misuse technology.
George then argued that technology requires "informed use." Not everyone really understands the capabilities of our gadgets and the potential they have to shape our lives. We can't even read the manual.
George pointed out that much of MIT's research funds come from military funding. Some people value defense, but many deaths are caused by military technologies.
George argues that we don't need a divine being to draft ethical values for the use of technology. He thinks it's demeaning to say that a god might judge what we do. We should be able to make our own decisions. Nevertheless, he did argue that this only applies in cases where everyone has education about the ethics of technology, and where where we all are participants in a shared covenant around research and use of technology.
Overall, George thinks that technology can solve many human problems successfully if we can agree to behave decently towards one another.
Rosalind Picard spoke next. She's a Media Lab professor and co-founder of the company Affectiva. She started out by asking, "what are the world's hardest problems, and what can technology do to solve them?"
Roz told us the story of a person with an 8 year old son with autism. The boy moved from school to school, from test center to test center. His son was not self-aware about his emotions: when hungry, he became aggressive without being aware of needing food. Looking at Picard's website, the boy's father was hoping to access technologies the team developed. The boy was doing well academically but struggling emotionally. What contribution might he make in the world if he could learn to overcome these challenges? Roz then told us the story of her company Affectiva, whose products are enabling scientists to do new research in epilepsy, PTSD, helping people understand anxiety disorders, and understand drug cravings.
Roz asked us to imagine a technology which could wipe out autism. Would we want to do that? She urged us to re-think our assumptions about what is best. Many people in the autism spectrum don't want to be "cured" of autism. Many who can't speak will type, "I don't want to be cured. I just want tools which will help me adapt to the world." They resist genetic tests and don't want autism eugenics.
We like our macbooks, but they malfunction, and they end up in landfills. Vaccines make our world better, but they also kill people. Tech can save life, but it can't make us live forever. Could we create world peace by ridding the world of emotions which prompt wars?
Roz told a story about Lee Iococca's talk at the MIT Commencement. "You must get angry!" he said. Anger is a great motivator. It prompts us to make a better world.
Roz then asked us, what does it mean to save the world or to save one person. Do we use knowledge to make ourselves and our world better? She directed us to consider the great dictators of history, who often developed ideas for what they thought was best and used technologies to control and destroy.
Roz shared personal stories from her life, which she considers to be particularly blessed. Those blessings granted, she finds her greatest hope and saving influence to come from the love of God. We could experience this too, Roz claimed, but to do so, we have to be willing to consider Christianity, to set aside a self-centered idea of life to know and be known by the ultimate source of all knowledge, power, mercy, strength, and goodness.
Questions & Discussion:
The conversation that resulted was uncomfortably strange. The moderator was using a set of questions that all of the speakers clearly disliked. Susan was clearly upset that the questions were stacked in favour of simplistic religious answers. And she pushed back, trying to reframe the discussion as a debate on the ethical record of Christianity and political philosophy. The other speakers were put in the difficult situation of wanting to dodge resistance to positions they didn't hold, while as scientists being uncertain about engaging in detailed debate around participatory democracy or moral philosophy. Even worse, the moderator was clearly eager to create a debate. He chose inflammatory topics like the regulation of stem cell research, military funding, and religious utopias, the Holocaust, and sabbatarian laws. Dear me.
Overall, I felt sorry for the Christians on the panel, who clearly felt constrained by an expectation that they focus on religious answers to what were really framed as broader social questions. Sigh.
Addendum: I do really love the spirit and aim of Veritas events and think it's wonderful that people with diverse views were brought on stage. I think the talks were genuinely interesting. The discussion didn't go so well, but it's really hard to moderate across differences, especially when people are talking across disciplinary *and* religious boundaries, and when the most well known discourse is contentious. I hope they try it again.