🧵 White Collar AI as McCormick's Reaper?
> Langdon Winner’s research on agricultural mechanization, especially McCormick’s famous reaper. Winner concluded that various innovations in the manufacture of McCormick’s reapers at first made them more costly and less reliable, but they helped concentrate economic power more firmly in the hands of production plant managers.
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/on-technologys-past-and-future/
#WhiteCollarAI #OfficeAI #LangdonWinner
The success of corporate marketing strategies depends upon a rapid turnover of new products, model changes, and fashion contours. To be caught selling last year's model, even a perfectly good one, is taken to be a sign of weakness. The same is true of advancement within professional careers, including academic careers, which are predicated on a rapid turnover of shiny new intellectual products; scholars and scientists are rewarded for producing new knowledge rather than, for example, seeking the wisdom needed to make better use of knowledge that already exists.
-- Langdon Winner
"At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions to efficiency and productivity and their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority."
#LangdonWinner, 1980
https://backspace.com/notes/2008/06/do-artifacts-have-politics.php
"Technological politics is a way of framing technologies as neither 'good', 'bad', or 'neutral'. It suggests that, instead, technologies are the products of deeply political processes, knowledge, and systems."
#AGrowingCulture, 2024
https://substack.com/home/post/p-143200453
This piece links to a paper called 'Do Artifacts Have Politics?' by Langdon Winner. After searching with a few different search portals, I found the full text on the web;
https://backspace.com/notes/2008/06/do-artifacts-have-politics.php
> Utopian visions of earlier technological periods
> If you thought that computers were the first panacea for all our ills, how about steam, electrical power, and electronics?
Bertrand Russel on Science Arundhati Roy on power seems more helpful than #TechEuphoria writings.
Steam had hype like #LLM #SalamiAI #CyberneticAI ..
From #MythInformation by #LangdonWinner
https://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden/phil27/s24/papers/Mythinformation.pdf
Surveillance Capitalism foreseen in 1984
> .. It's surprising how accurately Winner's [1984] predictions describe modern [2011] society. Passivity and complacency, the illusion of connectedness in the face of isolation, real democracy collapsing under the weight of increased media exposure and ubiquitous monitoring of citizens.
https://darcynorman.net/notes/2011/2011-01-02-the-whale-and-the-reactor-mythinformation/
#DArcyNorman with
#LangdonWinner on #MythInformation
https://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden/phil27/s24/papers/Mythinformation.pdf
> .. today's technological society is based upon.. bad habits.. from a reckless industrial past.. habits [List]..
> To oppose these bad habits and the systems that embody them, as well as to suggest reasonable alternatives to them, is enough to get a person branded "anti-technology" and drummed out of town. Again and again, we are urged to celebrate the latest so-called "innovations" regardless of the deranged commitments and disastrous consequences
https://www.langdonwinner.com/about
#LangdonWinner
> Langdon Winner.. calls “#TechnologicalSomnambulism ” Our capacity and willingness to reflect on the significance of technology and to critically evaluate new technologies lags far behind our capacity for creating and disseminating technologies. As a result, we “willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.” .. reasons for this somnambulism.. beliefs about.. neutrality.. and technological determinism.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137349088_4
#LangdonWinner
2015
> ... when I teach #IntroductoryPolitics..I must explain.. how a bill does not become a law...
> ... the lovely conviction that #EconomicGrowth in itself will boost the fortunes[of all].. But since the middle 1970s real wages have flattened or even declined for roughly 60%.. Trends of this kind are intensifying. Since the economic crash of 2008, 95% of the #IncomeGains in the #USA during the so-called “recovery” have gone to the top 1%.
https://www.langdonwinner.com/other-writings/2015/02/facing-plague-economic-and-political.html
#LangdonWinner #Wealth
> One reason for stiff resistance to assertions about rights is that, if one’s claim is accepted, then someone, some person or institution, must recognize an obligation to recognize and act upon the right you demand. Any social movement that carries the label “rights” could just as well be labeled an “obligations movement.”
https://www.langdonwinner.com/technopolis/2017/8/27/is-there-a-right-to-shape-technology
#RIghts #HumanRights #Obligations #LangdonWinner
> Winner begins with a discussion on technical objects that serve a purpose, but.. also have political tendencies.. gives several examples.. [of] these political biases.. including the construction of overpasses in Long Island by the developer #RobertMoses, which were designed in a way such that buses could not pass underneath, keeping poorer classes who would frequently use such transport from accessing his public parks.
https://towardsdatascience.com/does-ai-have-politics-21145e5b5445
#LangdonWinner #NYC #LongIsland #RacistBypass
> Computers and the internet are among the most recent candidates in a very long list of information technologies that includes movies, radio, film stips, tape recorders, language labs, broadcast television, programmed learning machines, cable television, portable video cameras, VCRs, multi-media electronics, CD-ROMs, laptops, and large screen “SMART” boards. The #iClass network, Intelligent Distributed Cognitive-based Open Learning System for Schools..
https://www.langdonwinner.com/other-writings/2017/6/13/information-technology-and-educational-amnesia
#LangdonWInner
Read about the #AutomaticProfessorMachine !!
The #APM promises to do to professors what the ATM did to bank tellers: lay them off, probably to go live in a utopia of leisure, where the use their abilities for meaningful work...
There are two videos, I just watched the first one but it was worthwhile.
https://www.langdonwinner.com/videos-and-music/
#LangdonWinner on #EducationalAmnesia and #EdTech #GadgetEd #EdGadgets
> Education: The transfer of knowledge from point A to point B through the most efficient, low-cost link possible.
Satire in 2017. I wonder if anyone has gotten VC money or done a Yes Men style prank with the same #SlideDeck but with slightly edited brand names: #EduSham , #GlowBallUniveristy might not be subtle enough.. but the #YesMen might get away with it, not like business people pay much attention.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=-v0eTfkiQ3s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v0eTfkiQ3s
> I believe that education at all levels ought to be well equipped and readily available to everyone at low cost. Among the kinds of devices I’d place on the list would be books, maps, musical instruments, science lab apparatus, sports equipment of all kinds, stages and props for theatrical performance, computers as appropriate, etc. My problem comes when a particular genre of equipment – usually the latest gadget ...
https://www.langdonwinner.com/videos-and-music/
#LangdonWinner #ComputersInEducation #Schools
> Old Man Grayson, that stubborn old coot, refuses to use those new-fangled machines in his mill. “It just ain’t natch’rl.” “He’s a horse drawn man until his dying day.”
#LangdonWinner on #RodStewart and #CountryComforts which I think is a song on the album #GasolineAlley which I imagine is before #BlondesHaveMoreFun ? #OldManGrayson may have seen the end of their Country Comforts by spending on machines, like a #JohnBerger #PigEarth character saw a free tractor.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/gasoline-alley-188009/
As a teacher of budding scientific and technical professionals, I’m again and again struck by how little sense of personal autonomy is part of today’s education, our modern ›Paideia.‹ Students hope to master the fundamentals of, say, one of the branches of engineering, get a ›good job,‹ come up with some lucrative ›innovation‹ and live happily ever after. Very often they simply lack any sense that they might reflect upon, talk about, and seek to realize an independent, personal understanding of life’s possibilities. Thus, the autonomy of technology often comes to the fore when ascertaining people’s sense of basic priorities. But the intellectual and moral autonomy of today’s students, employees and citizens? Not so much.#LangdonWinner on #Technopoly reference #JaquesEllul and #KarlMarx "who always knew who was in charge..
... surprises and troubles attributed to technologies that seem to have become ›autonomous‹ can often be traced back to the persons and groups that are ›in charge.‹ Marx describes the kinds of mechanical apparatus that fully claimed the bodies and minds of factory workers in his day. As he explains such calamities in his h#TheoryOfCapital, it’s clear that the owners of the #MeansOfProduction bear full responsibility for what happens.#AgenticShift
> From this example, Winner inferred a larger “ongoing social process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns that bear the unmistakable stamp of political and economic power.”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-023-10493-9
#Technology
#SocialPolicyForTechnology #TechnologyPolitics #LangdonWinner
> #LangdonWinner published a[n] article on.. whether technologies have inherent politics. He.. illustrated technopolitics by... the #MechanicalTomatoHarvester... by the University of California... led to massive job losses and increasing profit for the few growers... to afford them... resulted in the breeding of sturdier, less tasty #tomatoes that were #HarvesterCompatible, while solidifying the land-grant university and #agribusinesses as authoritative actors in agriculture and research.
> ... a positive, forward looking, practical, democratic understanding of the moral and political possibilities that technologies – new and old – present for choices in public life. I hoped to suggest choices in the public realm and perhaps even new possibilities for citizenship – participation in technological design and deliberate choice about the configuration of limitations upon technological systems..
https://www.langdonwinner.com/other-writings/2020/11/21/interview-with-langdon-winner-autonomous-technology-then-and-still-now
#LangdonWinner #Technology #TechnologicalDesign
