Technology
The technology (from the Greek τέχνη téchnē, 'art', 'trade' and -λογία -logy, 'treaty', ' study') is the sum of techniques, skills, methods and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the achievement of objectives, such as scientific research. Technology may be knowledge of techniques, processes, and the like, or it may be embedded in machines to enable them to function without detailed knowledge of their operation. Systems (for example, machines) that apply technology by taking an input, changing it according to the use of the system, and then producing an output are called technological systems.
Technology has many effects. It has helped develop more advanced economies (including today's global economy). Many technological processes produce negative externalities such as pollution and deplete natural resources, to the detriment of planet Earth. However, technology can also be used to protect the environment, seeking solutions to sustainably meet the growing needs of society, without causing depletion or degradation of the planet's material and energy resources or increasing social inequalities.
Innovations influence the values of each society and ethical issues of technology. Examples include the rise of the notion of efficiency in terms of human productivity and the challenges of bioethics. The interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and society studies encompasses such cultural, ethical, and political effects.
Philosophical debates about technology have erupted, with disagreements over whether technology improves or worsens the human condition. Neo-Luddishism, anarcho-primitivism, and similar movements criticize the pervasiveness of technology, arguing that it harms the environment and alienates people. Proponents of ideologies such as transhumanism and techno-progressivism view continued technological progress as beneficial to society and the human condition.
History
The history of technology is the history of the invention of tools and techniques for a practical purpose. Technological artifacts are products of an economy, a force of economic growth and a good part of life. Technological innovations affect and are affected by the cultural traditions of society. They are also a means of obtaining military power.
The simplest form of technology is the development and use of basic tools. The prehistoric invention of stone tools, followed by the discovery of how to control the fire, increased the sources of food. The subsequent Neolithic Revolution quadrupled the available livelihood of a territory. The invention of the wheel helped humans travel and control their environment.
Modern history is intimately related to the history of science, as the number of the discovery of new knowledge has allowed to create new things and, reciprocally, new scientific discoveries have been made through the development of new technologies, which have extended the possibilities of experimentation and acquisition of knowledge.
Developments in historical times, including printing, telephone and Internet, have reduced physical barriers to communication and allowed humans to interact freely on a global scale.Functions
In prehistory, technologies have been used to satisfy essential needs (food, clothing, housing, personal protection, social relationships, understanding of the natural and social world), and in history also to obtain bodily and aesthetic pleasures (sports, music, hedonism in all its forms) and as means of satisfying desires (status symbolization, weapons manufacturing, and the full range of artificial means used to persuade and dominate people).
Technology brings great benefits to humanity, its main role is to create better useful tools to simplify saving time and work effort. Technology plays a major role in our social environment since thanks to it we can communicate immediately thanks to cell phones.
Non-technical functions
After a while, the new features of technology products are copied by other brands and stop being a good selling point. Then, the consumer's beliefs about other characteristics independent of their main function, such as aesthetic and symbolic, take on great importance.
Aesthetic function
Beyond the essential adaptation between form and technical function, beauty is sought through shapes, colors and textures. Between two products with the same technical features and prices, any user will surely choose the one they find more beautiful. Sometimes, in the case of clothing, beauty can take precedence over practical considerations. We often buy beautiful clothes even though we know that their hidden manufacturing details are not optimal, or that their duration will be short due to the materials used. Clothes are the top-selling technological item on the planet because they are the face we show to other people and they condition the way we relate to them.
Symbolic function
When the main function of technological objects is symbolic, they do not satisfy people's basic needs and become means to establish social status and power relations.
Jewelry made of precious metals and stones does not impress so much for its beauty (often comparable to that of a cheap imitation) as for being clear indicators of the wealth of its owners. Expensive clothes of first brand have traditionally been indicators of the social status of their wearers. In colonial America, for example, an African slave or freedman who wore Spanish clothes was punished with lashes for pretending to be something he is not.
The most prominent and frequent case of technological objects manufactured for their symbolic function is that of large buildings: cathedrals, palaces, giant skyscrapers. They are designed to dwarf those inside (in the case of the wide atriums and soaring ceilings of cathedrals), to dazzle with luxurious displays (in the case of palaces), and to instill wonder and humility (in the case of the great skyscrapers). It is no coincidence that the terrorists of September 11, 2001 chose the Twin Towers in New York, headquarters of the World Trade Organization and symbol of the main center of US economic power, as the main target of their attacks.
The Apollo Program was launched by President John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War, when the United States was seemingly losing the space race to the Russians, to demonstrate to the world intelligence, wealth, might, and technological capability. from United States. With the pyramids of Egypt, it is the most expensive example of the symbolic use of technologies.
Methods
Technologies use, in general, different scientific methods, although experimentation is also used by science. The methods differ depending on whether they are technologies for the artisanal or industrial production of artifacts, the provision of services, the realization or organization of tasks of any kind.
A method common to all manufacturing technologies is the use of tools and implements for the construction of artifacts. Service delivery technologies, such as the electricity supply system, make use of complex installations run by specialized personnel.
Tools and Instruments
The main means of making artifacts are energy and information. Energy allows materials to be given the shape, location, and composition that are described by the information. The first tools, such as stone hammers and bone needles, only facilitated and directed the application of force, by people, using the principles of simple machines. The use of fire, which modifies the composition of food making it more easily digestible, provides lighting making sociability possible beyond daylight hours, provides heating and keeps vermin and ferocious animals at bay, modified both human appearance and habits.
The most elaborate tools incorporate information into their operation, such as wire strippers that allow the sheath to be cut to the appropriate depth to remove it easily without damaging the metal core. The term «instrument», on the other hand, is more directly associated with precision tasks, such as surgical instruments, and information gathering, such as electronic instrumentation and measurement, nautical navigation and air navigation instruments.
Machine tools are complex combinations of various tools governed (currently many by computers) by information obtained from instruments, also incorporated into them.
Artifact Invention
Although with great variations in detail depending on the object, its operating principle and the materials used in its construction, the following are the common stages in the invention of a new device:
- Identification of the practical problem to be solved: During the problem, both the intrinsic characteristics of the problem and the external factors that determine or condition it must be well matched. The result should be expressed as a function whose minimum expression is the transition, carried out by the artifact, from an initial state to a final state. For example, in water desalination technology, the initial state is salt water, in its natural state, the end is that same water but already statified, and the artifact is a desalinizer. One of the critical features is the salt concentration of the water, very different, for example, in the oceanic water of open seas than in inner seas such as the Dead Sea. The external factors are, for example, the maximum and minimum temperatures of the water in the different stations and the energy sources available for the operation of the desalinizer.
- Specification of the requirements to be met by the artifact: Admissible materials; quantity and quality of the required workforce and its availability; maximum manufacturing, operation and maintenance costs; minimum required duration of the artifact (time of service), etc.
- Operating principle: There are often several different ways of solving the same problem, more or less appropriate to the natural or social environment. In the case of desalination, the freezing procedure is especially suitable for the Arctic regions, while the reverse osmosis is for cities in tropical regions with extensive availability of electricity. The invention of a new operating principle is one of the crucial features of technological innovation. The choice of the operating principle, whether known or specifically invented, is the indispensable requirement for the next stage, the design, which precedes the construction.
- Design of the artifact: While in artisanal manufacture the usual is to omit this stage and go directly to the next stage of construction of a prototype (rehearsal and error method), but design is a mandatory phase in all industrial manufacturing processes. The design is typically done using formalized knowledge such as those of some engineering branch, performing mathematical calculations, drawing planes of various types, using diagramming, choosing appropriate property materials or testing when they are not known, combining the form of materials with the function to fulfill, decomposeing the artifact in parts that facilitate both the performance of function and the manufacture and assembly, etc.
- Simulation or construction of a prototype: If the cost of manufacturing a prototype is not excessively high (where the top is probably the case of a new car model), its manufacturing allows detecting and solving problems not foreseen in the design stage. When the cost is prohibitive, for example, the development of a new type of plane, complex simulation and numerical modeling programs are used by computer or mathematical modeling, where a simple case is the determination of aerodynamic characteristics using a scale model in a wind tunnel.
According to science writer Asimov:
Inventing required hard work and firm thinking. Edison took out inventions on commission and taught people that were not a matter of fortune or a brain council. Because – although it is true that today we enjoy the phonograph, the cinema, the electric light, the phone and a thousand other things that he made possible or to which he gave a practical value – we must admit that, if he had not invented them, another would have done it sooner or later: they were things that "float in the air". Perhaps it is not the inventions themselves that must be highlighted among Edison's contributions to our lives. People believed before the inventions were lucky blows. The genius, Edison said, is one percent inspiration and nine percent perspiration. No, Edison did more than invent, and it was giving the invention process a character of mass production.
Guilford, a leading scholar of the psychology of intelligence, identifies as the main skills of an inventor those included in what he calls divergent production skills . Creativity, an intellectual faculty associated with all original productions, has been discussed by de Bono, who calls it lateral thinking. Although more oriented towards intellectual productions, the deepest study of problem solving is made by Newell and Simon, in the famous book Human problem solving.
Types of technologies
Hard and soft technologies
Many times the word technology is applied to computers, micro-electrics, lasers or special activities, which are hard. However, most of the definitions we have seen also allow and include others, often referred to as soft.
Soft technologies – in which their product is not a tangible object – aim to improve the functioning of institutions or organizations to meet their objectives. Such organizations may be industrial, commercial or institutional service companies, such as or not for profit, etc. Education (in terms of the teaching process), organization, administration, accounting and operations, logistics of production, management and management are among the branches of technology called soft. marketing and statistics, the psychology of human relations and work, and the development of software.
Hard technologies are usually called those that are based on knowledge of the hard sciences, such as physics or chemistry. While the others are based on soft sciences, such as sociology, economics, or administration.
Appropriate technologies
Appropriate technology (TA), also known as appropriate technology or intermediate technology, is the technology that is designed with special attention to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social and economic aspects of the community to which they are directed. In response to these considerations, TAs emerge from the local environment, and normally demand less resources, are easier to maintain, present a lower cost and a lower impact on the environment on other comparable technologies.
Those who propose the term use it to describe those technologies that they consider most appropriate for use in developing countries or in underdeveloped rural areas of industrialized countries, in which they think that high technologies could not operate and be maintained. La adequate technology It usually prefers intensive work solutions to other capital intensives, although it uses work-saving mechanisms when this does not involve high maintenance or capital costs. In practice it is often defined as the one that uses the easiest level of technology that can effectively achieve the intended purpose for that specific location.
E. F. Schumacher says this technology, described in the book The small is beautiful, tends to promote values such as health, beauty and permanence, in that order.
What constitutes adequate technology In each particular case it is a matter of debate, but the term is usually used when theorizing to question high technology or what they consider to be excessive mechanization, human displacement, depletion of natural resources or increased pollution associated with industrialization. The term has often been applied, but not always, to situations in developing countries or to underdeveloped rural areas in industrialized countries.
It could be argued that for a technologically advanced society a more expensive and complex technology, which requires specialized maintenance and high energy inputs, could be a "appropriate technology". In any case, this is not the usual meaning of the term.The concepts appropriate technologies and advanced technologies are completely different. Cutting-edge technologies, an advertising term that emphasizes innovation, are usually complex technologies that make use of many other, simpler technologies. The appropriate technologies frequently, although not always, use knowledge typical of the culture (generally artisanal) and raw materials easily obtainable in the natural environment where they are applied. Some authors coined the term intermediate technologies to designate the technologies that share characteristics of the appropriate and the industrial ones.
Examples of appropriate technologies
- The bioconstruction or construction of houses with local materials, such as adobe, with simple designs but that guarantee the stability of the construction, the hygiene of the facilities, the protection against the normal variations of the climate and a low maintenance cost, often neglected technological activity.
- Dry abonera latrine is a hygienic way of having human excrements and transforming them into fertilizer without water use. It is a suitable technology for environments where water is scarce or cannot be cleaned with ease and safety.
Impacts of technology
The choice, development and use of technologies can have very varied impacts on all aspects of human endeavor and on nature. One of the first researchers on the subject was McLuhan, who posed the following four questions to be answered about each particular technology:
- What does it generate, create or enable?
- What does it preserve or increase?
- What does it recover or revaluate?
- What replaces or leaves obsolete?
This questionnaire can be expanded to help better identify the impacts, positive or negative, of each technological activity both on people and on their culture, their society and the environment:
- Practical impact: What's it for? What makes it possible to make it impossible without her? What makes it easier?
- Symbolic impact: What symbolizes or represents? What note?
- Technological impact: Which pre-existing technical objects or knowledge make it possible? What replaces or leaves obsolete? What decreases or makes it less likely? What does it recover or revaluate? What obstacles to the development of other technologies eliminates?
- Environmental impact: The use of which resources increases, decreases or replaces? What residues or emanations does it produce? What effects does it have on animal and plant life?
- Ethical impact: What basic human need can best satisfy? What wishes does it generate or power? What reversible or irreversible damage causes? What more beneficial alternatives exist?
- Epistemological impact: What previous knowledge questions? What new fields of knowledge opens or power?
Economy
Technologies, although they are not specific objects of study in Economics, have been throughout history, and still are today, an essential part of economic processes, that is, of the production and exchange of any type of goods and services.
From the point of view of goods producers and service providers, technologies are an essential means of obtaining income.
From the point of view of consumers, technologies allow them to obtain better goods and services, usually (but not always) cheaper than the equivalents of the past. From the workers' point of view, technologies have diminished jobs by increasingly replacing operators with machines.
Most economic theories take the availability of technologies for granted. Schumpeter is one of the few economists who assigned technologies a central role in economic phenomena. In his works, he points out that classical economic models cannot explain periodic boom-and-bust cycles, like Kondratiev's, which are the rule rather than the exception. The origin of these cycles, according to Schumpeter, is the appearance of significant technological innovations (such as the introduction of electric home lighting by Edison or the economic car by Ford) that generate a phase of economic expansion. The subsequent saturation of the market and the appearance of competing entrepreneurs when the temporary monopoly provided by innovation disappears, lead to the next phase of depression. The term Schumpeterian entrepreneur is today commonly used to designate innovative entrepreneurs who make their industry grow thanks to their creativity, organizational capacity and improvements in efficiency.
Industry
The production of goods requires the collection, manufacture or generation of all their inputs. Obtaining the inorganic raw material requires mining technologies. The organic raw material (food, textile fibers...) requires agricultural and livestock technologies. To obtain the final products, the raw material must be processed in industrial facilities of a wide variety of sizes and types, where all kinds of technologies are brought into play, including the essential generation of energy.
Services
Even personal services require technology for their proper provision. The work clothes, the tools, the buildings where one works, the means of communication and the recording of information are technological products. Essential services such as the provision of drinking water, sanitary technologies, electricity, waste disposal, street sweeping and cleaning, road maintenance, telephones, natural gas, radio, television, etc. they could not be provided without the intensive and extensive use of multiple technologies.
Telecommunications technologies, in particular, have experienced tremendous progress since the development and launch of the first communications satellites; the increase in speed and memory, and the decrease in the size and cost of computers; of the miniaturization of electronic circuits (integrated circuits); of the invention of cell phones; etc. All this allows almost instantaneous communications between any two points on the planet, although the majority of the population still does not have access to them.
Trade
Modern trade, the main means of exchanging goods (technological products), could not be carried out without the technologies of river, sea, land and air transport. These technologies include both means of transport (ships, cars, planes, trains, etc.), as well as transport routes and all the facilities and services necessary for their effective implementation and efficient use: ports, loading and unloading cranes, roads, bridges, airfields, radars, fuels, etc. The value of freight, a direct consequence of the efficiency of the transport technologies used, has been since ancient times and continues to be today one of the main determining factors of trade.
Natural resources
A country with great natural resources will be poor if it does not have the necessary technologies for their advantageous exploitation, which requires a huge range of infrastructure technologies and essential services. Likewise, a country with large, well-exploited natural resources will have a poor population if the distribution of income does not allow them adequate access to the essential technologies to satisfy their basic needs. In the current capitalist economy, the only exchange good that most people have for the acquisition of the products and services necessary for their survival is their work. The availability of work, conditioned by technology, is today an essential human need.
Work
Although techniques and technologies are also an essential part of craft work, factory work introduced variants both from the point of view of the type and ownership of the means of production, as well as from the organization and performance of production work. The high cost of the machines used in mass manufacturing processes, the origin of capitalism, meant that the worker lost ownership, and therefore control, of the means of production of the products he manufactured. He also lost control of his way of working, of which Taylorism is the greatest exponent.
Taylorism
According to Frederick W. Taylor, the organization of factory work should eliminate both the useless movements of the workers —because they are an unnecessary consumption of energy and time— as well as idle times —those in which the worker was idle. This "scientific organization of work", as it was called at the time, reduced the incidence of labor in the cost of industrial manufactures, increasing their productivity. Although the idea seemed reasonable, it did not take into account the needs of the workers and was taken to extreme limits by the industrialists. The reduction of tasks to the simplest possible movements was used to decrease the skills necessary for work, transferred to machines, consequently reducing wages and increasing capital investment and what Karl Marx called surplus value. This excess of specialization caused the worker to lose the satisfaction of his work, since most of them never saw the finished product. Also, taken to the extreme, the monotonous repetition of movements generated distraction, accidents, greater absenteeism and loss of work quality. Contemporary trends, one of whose expressions is Toyotism, are to favor personal initiative and participation in stages of the production process (labor flexibility), with the consequent increase in satisfaction, performance and personal commitment to the task.
Fordism
Henry Ford, the first automobile manufacturer to put its prices within the reach of a skilled worker, managed to reduce its production costs thanks to a rigorous organization of industrial work. His main tool was the assembly line that replaced the movement of the worker in search of the parts to the movement of these to the worker's fixed position. The decrease in the cost of the product was made at the expense of the transformation of industrial work into a simple repetitive task, which was exhausting due to its indeclinable rhythm and its monotony. The methodology was satirized by the English actor and director Charles Chaplin in his classic film Modern Times and today these tasks are performed by industrial robots.
The technique of mass production of large quantities of identical products to lower their price, is gradually losing validity as industrial machinery is increasingly controlled by computers, which allow the characteristics of products to be varied at low cost in the chain of production. This is, for example, the case of cutting garments, although they are still mostly sewn by seamstresses with the help of individual sewing machines, in fixed work stations.
Toyotism
Toyotism, whose name comes from the Toyota automobile factory, its creator, modifies the negative characteristics of Fordism. It is based on labor flexibility, the promotion of teamwork and worker participation in productive decisions. From the point of view of inputs, the maintenance cost of idle inventories decreases through the just in time system, where the components are provided at the time they are needed for manufacturing. While maintaining production lines, it replaces the most burdensome repetitive tasks, such as chassis welding, with industrial robots.
Replacement of jobs
One of the instruments available to the Economy for the detection of jobs eliminated or generated by technological innovations is the input-output matrix (in English, input-output matrix) developed by the economist Wassily Leontief, whose use by governments is just beginning to spread. energy and construction) and its increase in the tertiary (transport, communications, services, commerce, tourism, education, finance, administration, health). This raises the need for rapid measures by governments in the relocation of labor, with the prior and essential job training.
Advertising
Most tech products are made for profit and their advertising is crucial to their successful marketing. Advertising—using technological resources such as print, radio, and television—is the primary means by which manufacturers of goods and service providers make their products known to potential consumers.
Ideally, the technical function of advertising is the description of the properties of the product, so that those interested can know how well it will satisfy their practical needs and whether or not its cost is within their reach. This practical function is clearly revealed only in the advertising of innovative products whose characteristics it is essential to make known in order to sell them. However, the user is usually not informed of the estimated duration of the devices or the maintenance time and the secondary costs of using the services, crucial factors for a rational choice between similar alternatives. In particular, advertisements for substances that provide some form of pleasure, such as cigarettes and wine, the prolonged or excessive consumption of which carry various risks, do not fulfill their technical function. In several countries, such as the United States and Uruguay, the high cost caused by medical technologies forced them to warn their containers about the risks involved in consuming the product. However, although they carry the warning in fine print, these products never mention their technical function of changing the perception of reality, focusing their messages on associating consumption only with pleasure, success and prestige.
Culture
Each culture distributes the performance of functions and the usufruct of their benefits in a different way. As the introduction of new technologies modifies and replaces human functions, when the changes are widespread enough, it can also modify human relations, generating a new social order. Technologies are not independent of culture, they integrate with it an inseparable socio-technical system. The technologies available in a culture condition its form of organization, just as the worldview of a culture conditions the technologies it is willing to use.
In his book The Origins of Civilization the historian Vere Gordon Childe has developed in detail the close link between the technological and social evolution of Western cultures, from their prehistoric origins. Marshall McLuhan has done the same for contemporary times in the more restricted field of telecommunications technologies.
Environment
Since prehistoric times, man has used his knowledge to make tools and machines to serve his purposes, from the wheel to the computer. Some now laud technology as the foundation of all prosperity, and believe that few restrictions should be placed on its development. Others condemn it as the cause of massive damage to the environment, and call for strict controls. But the truth is that it is both, and neither. Technology has helped bring wealth to much of the world, but it has also been the instrument of much of the damage done to the planet and to life on it. But in itself it is neutral: for better or for worse, its effects depend on the use we make of it.
In addition to the increasing replacement of natural environments (whose preservation in particularly desirable cases has forced the creation of parks and natural reserves), their extraction of materials or their contamination by human use, is generating problems that are difficult to reverse. When this extraction or contamination exceeds the natural capacity for replacement or regeneration, the consequences can be very serious. Are examples:
- Deforestation.
- Pollution of soils, waters and atmosphere.
- Global warming.
- The reduction of the ozone layer.
- The acid rains.
- The extinction of animal and plant species.
- Desertification for the use of bad agricultural and livestock practices.
The effects that technologies produce on the environment can be mitigated by studying the environmental impacts that a work will have before its execution, be it the construction of a small path on the side of a mountain or the installation of a large factory paper on the banks of a river. In many countries these studies are mandatory and precautions must be taken to minimize the negative impacts (rarely they can be completely eliminated) on the natural environment and maximize (if they exist) the positive impacts (in the case of works to prevent avalanches or floods).
To completely eliminate negative environmental impacts, it should not be taken from nature or incorporated into it more than it is capable of replenishing, or eliminating by itself. For example, if a tree is cut down, at least one must be planted; if organic waste is dumped into a river, the amount must not exceed its natural degradation capacity. This implies an additional cost that must be provided by society, transforming what are currently external costs of human activities (that is, costs that are not paid by the causer, for example, by industrialists, but by other people) into internal costs of activities. responsible for the negative impact. Otherwise, problems are generated that must be solved by our descendants, with the serious risk that over time they will become insoluble problems.
The concept of sustainable or sustainable development has more modest goals than the probably unattainable zero environmental impact. Their expectation is to make it possible to satisfy the basic, non-sumptuary needs of present generations without irreversibly affecting the ability of future generations to do the same. In addition to the moderate and rational use of natural resources, this requires the use of technologies specifically designed for the conservation and protection of the environment.
Ethics and technologies
Despite what the Luddites claimed, and as Marx himself pointed out referring specifically to industrial machinery, technologies are neither good nor bad. Ethical judgments do not apply to technology, but to the use that is made of it: technology can be used to build a rocket and bomb a country, or to send food to a famine-stricken area. When technology is under the domain of profit, it is used primarily for monetary gain, which can lead to subjective biases towards the technology itself and its function.
When profit is the main purpose of technological activities, which is the case in the vast majority, the inevitable result is to consider people as merchandise and prevent human and environmental benefit from being given priority, giving rise to high inefficiency and environmental negligence.
When there are living beings involved (laboratory animals and people), in the case of medical technologies, technological experimentation has non-existent ethical restrictions for inanimate matter.
Moral considerations rarely come into play for military technologies, and although there are international agreements limiting the admissible actions for war, such as the Geneva Convention, these agreements are frequently violated by countries with arguments of survival and even for mere security.
Emerging Technologies
Emerging technologies or convergent technologies are terms used to signal the emergence and convergence of new technologies, respectively, with potential to be proven as disruptive technologies. Among them, nanotechnology, biotechnology, information and communication technologies, cognitive science, robotics, and artificial intelligence must be cited.
Emerging technologies can also be defined “Scientific innovations that can create a new industry or transform an existing one. They include discontinuous technologies derived from radical innovations, as well as more evolved technologies formed from the convergence of previously separated research branches," Gregory Day and Paul Schoemaker (2011) Emerging technology management cited in Medina (2012).
Although the exact denotations of these expressions are vague, several writers, including the IT businessman Bill Joy, have identified groups of each of these technologies that consider critical for the future of humanity.
Those who advocate for the benefits of technological change usually see emerging and convergent technologies as a hope that will provide improvement in the human condition. However, some critics of the risks of technological change, and even some transhumanism activists such as Nick Bostrom, have warned that some of these technologies could mean a danger, even to the point of threatening the survival of humanity.Criticism of technology
From different ideological positions, there have been global or partial criticisms of technology. These critics consider that either certain technologies pose a threat, a risk or an evil of some kind, regardless of how they are put to use, or that all current technologies are inherently evil. Among the former, those critics who oppose nuclear technology, those who oppose the possession of firearms and the argument made by Francis Fukuyama in his book The End of Man” stand out. Consequences of the biotechnological revolution, which focuses on the negative aspects of biotechnology for humans. Among the latter, the works of Jacques Ellul dedicated to the study of "Technique" stand out, especially The Age of Technique, the manifesto Industrial society and its future and Jerry Mander's book In the absence of the sacred. The failure of technology and the survival of Indian nations. This last author states that "in the current climate of technological worship it is frowned upon to speak against technology. At the slightest criticism you risk being called a 'Luddite,' which is intended to equate opposition to technology and stupidity.
The idea of technology neutrality is also disputed by many of these critics. Thus, Nicolás Martín Sosa defended that "technology, let us say it once more, is not neutral; in any organized society it induces a set of concepts, models of relationships and powers that shape our way of living and thinking". Mander argued that "the idea that technology is neutral is not neutral in itself, since it prevents us from seeing where we are going and directly favors the promoters of the centralized technological track".
Technology and gender
The relationship between gender and technology was created in response to the long marginalization of women from technically oriented professions and jobs.
Science and technology are fundamental in the economic development of countries. This growing importance together with the persistent inequalities between women, men and non-binary identities in the technological field, makes urgent and inevitable questions arise from a gender perspective.
Although the formal barriers that prevented the participation of women in technological activity are disappearing over time, there are still difficulties in accessing positions of responsibility and power linked to the scarce professional presence in this area. Reasons may be work-life balance, gender-specific patterns and approaches to productivity, performance measurement and promotion criteria, motivation, social and institutional exclusion, and even identification of what is wrong. scientific and technological with 'the masculine'.
And if science and technology are neither free from nor above politics, then in a society characterized by gendered hierarchies, artifacts must be gendered as well. In other words, we have come to see technology as something that has been socially shaped, but this shape has been made by men to the exclusion of women. In general, technology has been portrayed as a negative force, reproducing rather than transforming the sexual division of labor and power.
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