Ethical Technology - Is That Even Possible?
Benjamin Abbott
2013-07-06 00:00:00

First it’s crucial to establish that everything is not okay. Laptops, smartphones, and sundry look cute and do charming things, but ugliness lurks behind the pristine oleophobic screens. These and numerous other high-tech devices issue out of a matrix of noxious mines, contested terrain, petroleum refineries, coal boilers, and dismal sweatshops. The many rare minerals used in electronics as well as the coal that generates so much electricity come from the inherently unsustainable, typically toxic, and famously exploitative practice of mining. The negative health effects involved are staggering. Perhaps most dramatically, the air pollution from burning coal leads to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year worldwide while simultaneously accelerating global warming. Most of the most contaminated places on Earth are communities affected by mining and mineral processing. These to two integral elements of the industrial economy – mining and fossil fuels – serve as the backbone for everything on the grid. Surfing the internet and enjoying an air-conditioned room go hand in hand with people dying from asthma, heart disease, and cancer.

This pattern hasn't changed so terribly much since the fabled dawn of industrialization in England. Back then coal smog blackened the land so completely and for so long that a species of moth changed from white to black to adapt. Factory labors lived short and arduous lives, beset by environmental hazards, poor sanitation, and poor diets. Industrialism continues to dig up fossil fuels and burn them for energy, to unearth minerals and process them into marketable products, damaging human bodies and psyches each step of the way. As with most nastiness, those the bottom of the social hierarchy experience the lion's share of the suffering involved in the modern technological economy: workers, people of color, colonized Indigenous peoples, etc.

The crude lethality of industrialism has diminished overall but the pain, tedium, and toil remain. As Alejandro Lugo writes in eir study of Ciudad Juárez, "working-class life, particularly as it was constituted in its everydayness during England's nineteenth century, has not improved for many of the rank and file carrying out the working day around the world, even at the turn of the twenty-first century" (5). Ey goes on to argue that "life and death have gotten worse" for many. I hesitate to claim deterioration, but living and working conditions are outrageous and unacceptable in ways that resemble the past. You might even get a letter inside something you buy telling you how bad the folks who made it have it. That's how the industrial economy works.

Transhumanists and technoprogressives need to keep this profoundly unpleasant and unsettling connection between comforts and misery in mind. It undermines narratives of progress and poses a foundational challenge to the dream of creating a radically better world through technology. The stubborn persistence of severe environmental contamination and dehumanizing labor exploitation alongside the catastrophic risk industrialism has spawned calls into question both utopian visions and strategies of incremental improvement through reform within the established system.

As Philippe Verdoux observes, primitivists make a compelling case that civilization - beginning with agriculture - has done more harm than good for the human species and the planet. If climate change, nuclear war, or one of the countless hypothetical disaster scenarios ends up wrecking the planet's ecosystem - which is plausible though not necessarily probable - technological civilization will seem colossal blunder in retrospect. Regardless of where it all leads - we don't know, as I discuss below - the fact that the civilized lifestyle historically and current requires oppression, pollution, and unsustainable extraction should inspire concern and careful contemplation.

Insisting that everything will be fine, as Ray Kurzweil does, ain't going to cut it. As Verdoux, James Hughes, and others convincingly argue, teleological narratives of progress and assertions of inevitability have no rational basis. The future stands radically open and uncertain. Triumphalist futurism - exemplified by Dick Pelletier - teeters atop a heap of speculation and social as well as technical assumptions. I regard such visions as within the reaches of possibility but politically dubious and nothing to plan on. The rhetoric of technological progress and development has long served as a means to deflect class animosities and encourage cooperation between workers and bosses, especially in the United States.

While we today - especially rich folks - hear whispers of the abundance and luxury promised by hypothetical developments like artificial intelligence and nanotech, the post-scarcity society of immortals beloved by transhumanists is so radically from what most of us experience daily as to appear alien and absurd. Transformational social impact at the foundational level constitutes insufficient cause to dismiss hypothetical innovations but it reasonably evokes skepticism. Unfortunately, we lack any guarantee we'll have dramatically more and superior tools to get out of this mess than we have now.

Moreover, the keep-working-you'll-go-to-heaven line advanced by Kurzweil and eir ilk resolves nothing. Even assuming techno-utopia within a few decades for every human being, cat, and nematode, the question of equity looms. Only people presently sitting pretty can blithely accept the perpetuation of status-quo suffering for future prosperity. Sacrificing today for tomorrow is great as long as somebody else is doing it for you! The relative comfort and ease some of the species enjoys in the twenty-first century comes directly from millions of past workers - both formally enslaved and nominally free but coerced - who personally gained little or nothing from their toil. The race to digital grace repeats this pattern. Few of us would volunteer to be consumed for the future and when pressed most would admit devouring lives to grow stronger conflicts with every popular ethical system. It's the behavior of vampires. Given the manifest harms surveyed above, staying the course of industrial capitalism is yet a moral crisis under the rosiest of scenarios.

So how do we overcome this quandary? I don't have any magical answers. My aim first and foremost is to encourage transhumanists and technoprogressives to think deeply and critically about the problem. Too often futurists ignore or gloss over the horrors that to date form essential elements of technological production. I want to see less of that. Whatever your political angle, if you value pleasure, freedom, dignity, and equality - as the majority of us claim to - changing the conditions of industrial economy must be a central part of your analysis and efforts. If you favor gradual reform, consider how that's going to prevent global warming from spiraling out of control, make life more liveable for workers on the bottom of the social hierarchy, and ever lead to anything like the ideal. If you're fond of markets and property rights, investigate whether and how companies can actually create egalitarian outcomes - and be sure to follow supply train back to extraction. Etc.

The grand scale of the world economy as well as the distributed and diffuse web of exploitation makes the dilemma tricky if not intractable. Most of us alternate between being oppressors and oppressed depending on the situation. Furthermore, the same factories that poison the land and brutalize workers produce the nice things that we rely on for convenience or survival. Life expectancy, for example, has increased notably in the era of automation. This matters too! Despite my sympathy for primitivism's critique, I'm no primitivist. I view Derrick Jensen's primitivism and Kurzweil's Singularitarianism as united in their demand for blood and pain based on a certain future.

Taking the opposite path, I privilege minimizing suffering in the here and now. The following lines from Argentine singer Atahualpa Yupanqui, also quoted by the aforementioned Lugo, poetically encapsulate my no-victims approach:




If there's one thing on earth

More important than God;

It's that nobody should cough up blood

So that somebody else can live better




I don't know whether it's possible to have technological mass society without human sacrifice but I want to give it an honest try. Although no such society has ever existed, certain evidence tentatively suggests this dream could materialize. Anticapitalist radicals of various stripes have wanted to wield machines for the common good since the nineteenth century. Practices of worker control and direct democracy, seen sporadically across the world in contexts such as the Spanish Revolution or early Russian Revolution, provide a hint of what ethical technology might look like. (The nightmare the Russian Revolution became under Joseph Stalin, on the other hand, warns us about the grave dangers of authoritarianism and industrial development at any cost.)

At the technical level, though pollution control and sustainability pose a significant challenge, the present degree of human suffering seems wildly gratuitous. As I've written for IEET in the past, actually existing technologies theoretically should enable us to craft a society of ease, pleasure, and plenty. The reductive materialist analysis of energy flows, resources, and consumption misses much but offers a handy counter to assertions of capitalism's efficiency. What gives me perhaps the greatest hope for the future is the prospect of autonomist, egalitarian political projects converging with smaller-scale production technologies like 3D printers and earth compressors. Open Source Ecology has the right idea: freely distribute the tools for a comfortable, sustainable life.

Moderate-sized autonomous regions strike me as plausible within a decade with enough struggle. Hypothetical developments such as nanofactories would exponentially decrease the community size needed for sufficiency at a decent standard of living, eventually down to the individual - but I ain't banking on genies and wishing for more wishes. Various supposedly self-sufficient communities already function across the planet - the Earthships here in New Mexico are one example - but they're limited to folks with the cash to buy in. Unless workers seize the means of production and fan their fires to forge new worlds, I suspect self-sufficiency will remain out of reach for the vast majority of the population. I say we organize, expropriate, and build for autonomy.

However, self-determination comes first. Because I don't want it done to me, I refuse to feed any more bodies to the pile of bones that holds up the limited comforts available to me. If the miners choose not to return to work come revolution, for instance, then anybody who desires minerals will either learn the trade or do without. If communities decide against some or all resource extraction, so be it. The cause of dignity, equality, and liberty may well slow or stop the technological innovation transhumanists adore via disruption of established flows of energy, resources, and labor. That's okay. In such scenario we'll figure out ways realize our dreams without victims or we'll just keep on dreaming them. I predict a flowering of diversity in the move toward self-determination that at least allows room for humbler transhumanist projects, but the future remains marvelously uncertain.

Love and blessings to everyone striving to live radically better!

Recommend Reading

"Condensed Critique of Transhumanism" by Dale Carrico

Health and the Rise of Civilization by Mark Nathan Cohen

Rethinking Environmental History edited by Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier

Sweatshop Warriors by Miriam Ching Yoon Louie

Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts by Alejandro Lugo

“Transhumanism, Progress and the Future” by Philippe Verdoux

The Whale and the Reactor by Langdon Winner