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====== Langdon Winner – Tecnologia autônoma ======

One importance of the idea of autonomous technology is that it sets out to debunk the dream of mastery by showing that it has gone awry in practice. In modern speculation about technics, one thinker after another has found it necessary to question the fundamental conceptions and beliefs that anchor the way Western men think about their relationship to technological possibilities. In specific, one finds a set of notions, once thought altogether reliable, which have become targets of widespread doubt. They are:

—that men know best what they themselves have made;

—that the things men make are under their firm control;

—that technology is essentially neutral, a means to an end; the benefit or harm it brings depends on how men use it.

In the conventional perspective works of technology are more than certain; they are doubly certain. Since human beings are both the designers and makers of their creations, they have precise knowledge of their construction. They know exactly how things are put together and how they can be taken apart. In addition, works of technology are certain in the sense that their construction depends on the possession of valid knowledge, either from mundane experience or from an appropriate science. In his Metaphysics Aristotle explains that techne (“art” or “craft”) is superior to mere experience because it combines these two ways of knowing. “Art is born when out of the many bits of Information derived from experience there emerges a grasp of these similarities in view of which they are a unified whole.” “We believe that knowing and understanding characterize art rather than experience.... Men of experience discern the fact ‘that,’ but not the reason ‘why’; whereas experts know the reason why and explanation.” Aristotle conjectures that the first man to invent an art or craft was looked upon with wonder by his fellows, not only because there was something useful in his discoveries but also because the others thought him wise and superior. Master workers are presumably wiser not merely because they are practical but because they have reasons and can explain what they are doing.

That which men have made, they also control. This is common sense. Control, after all, is part of the very design of technical creations. Apparatus and techniques are devised with definite purposes in mind. Through conscious manipulation of such means, men are able to achieve ends established in advance. While it may require a period of time to find instruments that will be effective, once discovered they are no longer a source of difficulty. Technical means are, by their very nature, mere tools subject to the will of whomever employs them. The fortuitous combination of certainty and control in technical activity has held a great fascination for politics. Many historical forms of statecraft and almost all conceptions of utopia rest on an implicitly technological model. When conditions of the political world seem uncertain, unmanageable, or otherwise undesirable, technique and artifice offer a tantalizing solution. Through conscious resort to artificial means it is conceivably possible, in the ironic words of Oscar Wilde, to “shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.” If one could remake the world, if one could fashion the conditions of reality to suit a preconceived design, both certainty and control would be assured. This is the solution Thomas Hobbes offered: “For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE,” a political order that would be more perfect since it was built from the ground up on entirely rational principles. In one manifestation or another, this is also  the prescription presented us by Plato, Saint-Simon, Owen, Madison, and contemporary systems analysis.

Technology is essentially neutral. In the conventional way of thinking, the moral context appropriate to technical matters is entirely clear. Technology is nothing more than a tool. What men do with tools, of course, is to “use” them. The tool itself is completely neutral—a means to the desired end. Whether the end accomplished is wise or unwise, beautiful or hideous, beneficial or harmful, must be determined independently of the instrument employed. This judgment also holds true for the wonderful developments in modern technology. The new devices, regardless of their size and complexity, are still tools that may be used either well or poorly. In the words of H. L. Nieburg, “Science and technology are essentially amoral and their uses ambivalent. Their miracle has increased equally the scale of both good and evil.” The neutrality of technology and the tool-use ethic are truisms striving to become bromides. This has not been an obstacle to the dozens of authors in the last decade or so who have unearthed these ideas and presented them as startling insights into the modem condition. In an attempt to correct the position that technology is intrinsically benevolent, while avoiding the notion that it is intrinsically evil, these authors have rediscovered the obvious.

The three propositions I have outlined here are conspicuously reasonable. They are basic to any understanding of human mastery through technology. Yet the fact remains that much of modern discussion suggests that these ideas are no longer completely valid given the conditions of advanced technics.

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