How can digital technologies undermine agency we have over our businesses?
Most of us miss the regressional aspects of technologies, as philosopher Daniel Ross helps me see.
What’s that?
Digital tools can help us move on (“progress”). No doubt. However, sometimes, these same tools can annihilate our ability to imagine that the possibility to do our job otherwise exists.
Usage of these tools can undermine our ability to create what yet does not exist.
In other words, we adopt those tools to fulfill a task, but then, the further we rely on these tools, the further we come to think that using these tools is the only way there is.
Once we’ve lost the ability to imagine that other possibilities exist, we become further dependent on these tools. This becomes a vicious circle; a
regressional feedback loop.
hum, can you clarify?
I’ll use the fable of The Dog and The Wolf from the Greek fabulist Aesop (Αἴσωπος), to try to clarify that point.
The fable starts with an under-fed wolf meeting a well-fed dog.
The dog, seeing how skinny the wolf is, praises the security of domesticated life, and offers the wolf to join a secure domesticated life where he’ll no longer have to worry about the lack food.
Long story short, the wolf turns down the offer and walks away from the security of domestication.
(End of the fable.)
For centuries, most commentators have pointed to this fable as a eulogy to freedom (“the wolf chooses freedom”, they write), they go on and on about the wolf, but none of them seem to want to ask why the dog doesn’t also walk out.
What are these commentators missing?
The owner might be doing a better job at feeding the dog than the dog would do.
This delegation feels like a win from the perspective of the dog, but: what is the consequence of this delegation?1
Has this delegation annihilated the ability for the dog to imagine that life, or other possibilities, can exist beyond the walled-garden of a “secure”
domesticated life?
Has the “security” provided by the owner (an agent) made the dog blind to other possibilities?
Most commentators have interpreted this fable as a eulogy to freedom, while omitting the regressional effect “the security” of a domesticated life has had on the dog.
In a world where technological advancement has been associated with progress, have we been dazed and dazzled by the freedom these new tools can offer, while missing their hidden regressional effect?
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Now that we can see that agents, like the dog’s owner, can have a regressive effect, how shall we approach usage of the technological agents?
Technologies are agents to which we delegate the job of doing something in our stead.
We delegate to technologies because these agents are better than us at doing whatever it is that we use them for, as philosopher Daniel Ross writes in one of our correspondences, but, can we tell whether these delegations come with a regressional risk?
I am not saying that we should not use technologies, or that “technologies = regression” unequivocally. Not at all.
I am trying to highlight the idea that if technological usage can foster agency, technological usage can also trigger a recursive regressional effect.
And so if we can see that technologies are the intertwinement of both, “progress” and regression, how shall we approach technological adoption?
How shall we use technologies to foster the possibilities to create what yet does not exist?
You can see that this conversation also leads us to the question of security, if we ask: is this technology secure for my business? Or, will usage of this technology - be insecure, lead me to regression - and undermine my abilities?
Philosopher Daniel Ross brought this question to my attention.↩︎