5 Easy Rules To Understand Technology
How Tech Shapes Lives—And Why Every Decision Matters More Than You Think
Hey friends,
Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day—hope you all had a lovely weekend.
I am excited to share this week’s dispatch with you all. When I came across Melvin Kranzberg’s Six Laws of Technology a few years ago, it completely changed the way I evaluate systems, media, and modern tech. The following is a brief adaptation of his work that I know you will find useful. If you have any feedback, I’d love to see you in the comments section—and don’t forget subscribe!
The Five Rules:
Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
Invention is the mother of necessity.
Technology comes in packages, big and small.
Policy regarding technology is rarely about technology.
The history of technology is, in fact, the history of mankind.
#1: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
“Technical developments always have environmental, social, and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the devices themselves.”
Arguments that make reductive statements about whether tech is good or bad or that it just depends on how people use it tend to end unfruitfully because these arguments ignore the importance of context when it comes to technology. The same tech that has a positive impact in one space can have massive “disbenefits” in another. Pesticides that preserve crops might boost the local economy of one region, but create chemically-induced health issues in another. Lifesaving medical breakthroughs might reduce infant mortality but then later lead to overpopulation, food insecurity, and other kinds of challenges in the same environment. It’s not about the technology being good or bad—it’s about the device’s effects.
In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the ineffable Niels Bohr has a great quote that expresses this idea: “We have to make the politicians understand, this isn’t a new weapon, it is a new world.” In other words, the mere existence of the atom bomb had major consequences, regardless of whether or not it was ever going to be used (and, unfortunately, we know it was). Ergo, tech is never neutral. Rather than rush to label an individual technology, it’s better to ask concrete questions: What does this tech actually do in the present? What are the short-term versus long-term results? What are the utopian hopes versus the spotted actuality? What are the trade-offs? This alone allows for sober and strategic evaluation.
#2: Invention is the mother of necessity.
“Every technical innovation seems to require additional technical advances in order to make it fully effective.”
Self-driving vehicles have been one of the many promises of science fiction for decades. Nonetheless, the reality of autonomous driving is only beginning to be fully realized in China, San Francisco, or Austin— and most people think it’s because of the recent advances in artificial intelligence. However, this is only partially true. Self-driving vehicles require more than just advanced machine vision and AI, but also ultra-sophisticated sensors like LIDAR, ubiquitous high-speed connectivity like 5G, and powerful edge computing processes that can only be conducted through recent NVIDIA accelerators or V2X communication systems. Without these parallel advances taking place alongside the leaps in AI, the fundamental promise of autonomy could never be achieved in a safe or efficient manner.
In other words, one advancement in a technology always requires other tech to also advance; and in order to fully evaluate the effects of a technology, we need to keep in mind the knock-on consequences of all new advancements. Before the car, people used the horse-drawn carriage, and that technological advancement required the creation of new horse collars, the first suspension system, wider roads, and much more. Luxury giant Louis Vuitton got its first big break from becoming the go-to luggage-maker for trunks that could be transported on carriages, rather than on trains or boats. Every solution creates new problems, which in turn requires more invention.
#3: Technology comes in packages, big and small.
When one component changes, other parts of the system must undergo transformations so that the system might continue to function. Hence the parts of a system cannot be viewed in isolation but must be studied in terms of their interrelations with the other parts.
One of the engineers I worked with once quipped that after we plugged a water leak at Grand Central Station, a new river sprang up near the United Nations building, about ¾ of a mile west. Although I won’t confirm or deny the veracity of his statement, his joke definitely contains a truth regarding complex systems. The more interrelated a network of overlapping technologies becomes, the more difficult it becomes to isolate the effect of each technology. Messing with a system, especially one operating at a large scale, will always produce unexpected results, especially when you consider that all modern tech works in a stack.
This is happening most clearly with the data centers attached to the other end of seemingly innocuous AI chatbots—and the public is understandably worried about the footprint of such massive infrastructure projects. However, most people don’t realize that this is not a new development. All technology has required mind-boggling levels of packaging— even the kinds of digital tech we use on the daily. The internet, for instance, is not nearly as wireless as we like to assume, but is actually supported globally by a massive network of submarine cables, as well as over 11,000 satellites currently in orbit. The high-speed communication tool you carry around in your pocket is not a self-contained device, but is just a single node in a package that encompasses the highest heights and lowest depths of our planet.
#4: Policy regarding technology is rarely about technology.
“Technologically ‘sweet’ solutions do not always triumph over political and social forces. Many complicated sociocultural factors, especially human elements, are involved, even in what might seem to be ‘purely technical’ decisions.”
The creation, use, and abuse of technologies are mostly influenced by non-technical factors. Politics, power, and short-term incentives all play a role, which is why the most efficient devices or processes aren’t always applied. This can sound inherently negative, but it’s important to note that in a democracy, this is a good feature, not a bug. It’s a safeguard against technocracy. However, it does mean that we are sometimes left with less-than-ideal scenarios even when technological solutions exist for relevant problems. The Biden administration’s AI Executive Order and the EU’s AI Act are premier examples that even as AI systems become more sophisticated, their deployment remains bounded by concerns regarding social, political, and economic forces far beyond the technical details themselves.
Another great example in the United States is our annual tax returns. I was shocked to discover that many countries in Europe don’t require their citizens to file taxes, but instead send an estimated tax filing for each citizen to simply approve. This makes sense because the U.S. government clearly has an idea of each person’s income that they fact check returns against. So why has this not been implemented already, considering the sophistication of the tech and control methods in the IRS? Well, not to be reductive, but lobbying from major tax filing companies like TurboTax and Intuit have a lot to do with it. While these financial service companies appear to offer the best solution to a time-consuming task, it is actually their financial and political incentives that are helping perpetuate the problem of needing to file taxes in the first place.
#5: The history of technology is, in fact, the history of mankind
“Our students know that they live in a technological age, but any history that ignores the technological factor in societal development does little to enable them to comprehend how their world came into being”
I am a massive advocate for increasing the technological literacy of the general population. I think that knowing the effects of tech and media should be as normal as understanding the nutrient labels on the food we consume. A major portion of this could be accomplished if we simply put a larger emphasis on the history of technology— good instruction that teaches how trends, demographics, and developments in society are shaped by our tools. As Marshall Mcluhan used to say, “we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.”
Ultimately, the history of humanity is, in fact, synonymous with the history of technology. The most pivotal periods of human civilization are organized by which tools defined the time—by the level of sophistication or crudeness which we were capable of amplifying our bodies with. When we study history, we realize that none of the benefits of technical society are accidental, but have been forged through a milleniums-long process of invention, innovation, iteration, and creation. This cultivates a real wonder and humility regarding the tool-making capacity of humanity. Ideally, it would also instill a sense of responsibility. Modern people are now in the extremely unnatural position of having the power to design the total world in which we live. By doing so, we are determining the next chapter of our own history. A history which should be informed not just by predictions of what might be, but also guided by the wisdom of what has been learned before. Don’t you agree?
Thanks for reading, friend. I am cooking up a special Halloween dispatch for Mercury’s Playbook that you won’t want to miss, so make sure to subscribe!
Feathers For The Footnotes (Bonus Links)
- , started a Substack and it’s brilliant. Subscribe for some awesome insight to the world of DoD, creativity, and universe-building.
Recovering the Tech Critical Canon (2017) from L.M. Sacasas of
which makes mention of Kranzberg’s Laws.
About the Author
Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing outside of Mercury’s Playbook by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that extend beyond the scope of this newsletter.