Cultural Determinism and Artificial Intelligence

Whenever I begin to discuss the need to control technology or the ability of technological devices to move on their own, I begin to think of artificial intelligence. Currently, programs like Siri, and Cleverbot are available to the public for use and right now, and they’re probably some of the closest things that we have to the type of artificial intelligence that we might see in movies or on TV. But what happens when we begin to develop programs that are able to make accurate predictions about our safety or well-being? What happens when our military begins to create weapons that can act and make moral decisions autonomously? And what would happen if we didn’t agree with those decisions but become unable to control the technology that we create? Would we blame the technology or ourselves? Both technological and cultural determinism could provide some answers to these questions and looking at the assumptions we make about technology can be used to explain why we think what we think about the potential effects of technology. 

In Chapters three, four and nine and ten of Culture and Technology, Jennifer Slack and John Wise discuss a myriad of terms that relate to technology and the way we use it. Cultural determinism in contrast with technological determinism seems to me a more feasible explanation of why society advances the way that it does. According to technological determinists, technology drives the development of society. According to cultural determinists, the culture that created the technology is the driving force of the society. If a person created a robot that caused harm to another person, it would make more sense to me to blame the person who created the robot rather than the robot itself. If a person used a weapon to kill another person, we would blame the person not the weapon used because the weapon has no agency.

Although we might try to escape it, we are slaves to technology. In general, we use alarm clocks to wake us up in the morning. We use toothbrushes to brush our teeth. We use the sink to wash our hands and the stove to cook our breakfast. How would we brush our teeth without toothbrushes? Would we chew on leaves or bark to clean our teeth? Would people even feel the need to clean their teeth? Simple actions like this one would be more difficult without technology. Many people don’t know how they’d live without it for example as the authors reference a bumper sticker that said, “I’d never survive in the wild” (111). In this case the “wild” is any place without technology. Technology provides us with a sense of safety and distinguishes “civilization” from the “wild.”

One of the most important points made by the authors in the chapter is the idea of causality. Symptomatic causality according to the authors, “assumes that broad parameters of effects are inherent in the technology, that a range of effects is inevitable, and that various social forces are responsible for steering or choosing from among those effects” (105). To me when I think of this idea presented by the author, I automatically focus in on one type of technological innovation that we currently heavily rely on, medicine. Almost all medicines have side effects and the side effects cause people to have to take more medicine to deal with those side effects. But if for example, a person needs to take a medicine that causes an increase in anger for a short time, for example, although they might need to take the medicine they might choose to take it at a time when they won’t be near people.

Because we are reliant on it, and at the same time able to blame it, technology takes on a different persona. In this video, Jason Silva discusses the future of innovations and makes a very interesting point about technology. About artificial intelligence, he states that, “We will be creating sentience that can upgrade itself… The human era will have ended. We will have become our creations. They will be our children but they will really be us.” That's a pretty creepy thought to think about but is the technology that we have today simply an extension of ourselves?

This view is pretty bold, but is he right? According to cultural determinism, he just might be right if we do end up creating technology that we can’t control. Lastly, can the effects of technology really be called effects of technology or, because technology is created by humans, are the effects inherently caused by us?