Defining technology and technological progress

It is primarily through the growth of science and technology that man has acquired those attributes which distinguish him from the animals, which have indeed made it possible for him to become human.

Arthur Holly Compton

This book is about technology injustice. It shows that the way we govern access to, development, and use of technology is unfair and, ultimately, unsustainable. It is also about how a principle of Technology Justice offers a different way of looking at technology and insight into how technology could be used to create a sustainable and equitable future for everyone. Before those ideas can be explored in depth, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by the term 'technology' in this book. It is also important to describe briefly some of the debates around the notion of what constitutes technological progress, how it occurs, and the social dimensions of technology, in order to understand how conventional views of technological progress as both inevitable and progressive may not be helpful.

Defining technology

The word 'technology' is open to wide interpretation. Today it seems to be most often used to refer to electronic gadgets, mobile phones, and the internet. A quick analysis of the topics of articles on the online technology pages of four major news agencies on the day of writing this chapter (Figure 1.1) supports this assertion.

This book takes the view that technology extends far beyond this limited field to include traditional indigenous technologies and knowledge as well as the vast array of technology and technical knowledge that underpins the high standard of living achieved in the developed world today.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica has the following to say about the origins of the word:

The term 'technology', a combination of the Greek techne ('art' or 'craft') with logos ('word' or 'speech'), meant in ancient Greece a discourse on the arts, both fine and applied. When it first appeared in English in the 17th century, it was used to mean a discussion of the applied arts only, and gradually these 'arts' themselves came to be the object of the designation. By the early 20th century, the term embraced a growing range of means, processes, and ideas in addition to tools and machines. By mid-century, technology was defined by such phrases as 'the means or activity by which man seeks to change or manipulate his environment'. (Buchanan, 2014)

As the encyclopaedia notes, such a broad definition fails to distinguish between technological activity and scientific inquiry. It also has the potential to incorporate forms of organization such as political systems and markets. This may be why there has been a narrowing in how the term is generally used, at least in common speech, in recent decades. Use of the term 'high technology' was first noted in English in the early 1960s to refer to the practical applications of modern science and, by the early 1970s, this had been shortened to 'high-tech' (Harper, 2015). It is probably as a result of the usage and connotations of 'high-tech' that the word 'technology' is today more likely to be associated with information and communication technologies – computers, telephones, applications of the internet, and so on – as Figure 1.1 confirms.

In this book, by contrast, the word 'technology' is taken to refer to the tools, machinery, artefacts, and systems of technical knowledge that humans use to interact with the natural environment and each other. This encompasses technology based on recent science and, equally, tools, practices, or techniques based on traditional knowledge, for example: a horse-drawn plough, an Archimedes screw, and traditional techniques for the selection and breeding of seeds or the control of soil erosion. To provide some practical limits to the subject, though, the definition used here does not extend to what could be described as non-technical systems of knowledge, such as political or managerial systems and practices.

The idea of technological progress

Technology is often presented in the media and everyday discussion in the abstract – the rational outcome of the application of the latest science to a real-world problem. A common view of the relationship between humans and technology is of a historical and linear progression with humanity constantly inventing and innovating to achieve ever higher levels of wellbeing. This idea that modernization comes about or is evolved through access to ever more sophisticated levels of technology has, together with the concept of economic growth, underpinned ideas of development for the last century.

Reality is a bit messier than this. Technology is a product of human interactions and the use and innovation of technology inevitably reflects the political, social, and cultural nature of the societies from which it emerges. Moreover, human beings shape and, in turn, are themselves shaped by technology. That 'messiness' means that, in reality, technological progress is not as linear or inevitable as we might like to believe and its social impact not as easy to predict as we would wish.

Questioning technological determinism and the inevitability of technological progress

In his book Science and Technology for Development the Edinburgh-based academic Professor James Smith traces how views of development through technological progress have changed over the years. In the 1960s, one school of thought saw development in terms of a linear process of modernization, whereby countries pass through a five-stage model from 'traditional society' via industrialization to an 'age of mass consumption' with 'widespread affluence, urbanisation and the consumption of consumer durables'. More recently, the alternative idea of 'technological catch-up', whereby countries can develop their skills base and use new technologies to leapfrog stages of the linear model to catch up or even overtake richer, 'leader' countries, has been...