A Field Guide to Being Afraid of Machines
Fear of new technology is usually treated as a malfunction in the person who feels it. What if it is a reading of the situation, and a fairly accurate one?
Specimen: sample text, to be replaced
Every new machine arrives with two pamphlets. The first is printed by the people who built it and explains, with diagrams, how it will make everything easier. The second is never printed at all. It is the one people write in their heads while they watch: what will this do to me?
This publication is an attempt to print the second pamphlet.
A word with a bad reputation
Technophobia is rarely used kindly. It describes the uncle who will not use online banking, the teacher who bans calculators, the crowd that once smashed looms. It suggests something irrational: a phobia, a misfire of the nervous system, a fear larger than its object.
But most fear of technology is not shaped like a phobia. It is shaped like a forecast. People are not afraid of the machine itself so much as of the arrangement it brings with it: who controls it, who is measured by it, who loses a living to it, and who is left to clean up when it is wrong.
A phobia is a fear larger than its object. Most fear of technology is a forecast.
Three kinds of fear
It helps to separate the fears, because they ask different things of us.
- The fear of being replaced. This is the oldest and most concrete. It is about wages, skills and the dignity of being needed. It deserves economic answers, not reassurance.
- The fear of being managed. Systems that sort, score and decide can make life smoother and also make it smaller. This fear asks about accountability: who can you appeal to when the system says no?
- The fear of being outmatched. The newest and the strangest. It is the fear that we are building minds we will not be able to understand or steer. It asks for patience, research and a willingness to plan for unlikely things.
None of these is silly. All of them can be exaggerated, and all of them can be sold.
Fear as an instrument
A fear can be a useful instrument if you calibrate it. Calibration means asking, each time: what exactly am I afraid of, what would make it more likely, and what would make it less likely? A calibrated fear points somewhere. An uncalibrated one only points at the person feeling it.
What this publication will do
It will read slowly. It will try to separate what a system can do from what is claimed for it. It will pay attention to the people on the receiving end, not only the people giving the demonstration. And it will take the long-range questions seriously without letting them swallow the near ones.
Keep this pamphlet somewhere you can find it.