What is Technology?

This paper, a personal view rather than an official HP view, questions what counts as technology given that it has played a significant role throughout human history. It uses a non-technological ‘human’ situation as a datum point from which technology is explored in terms of how people become subservient to it. It briefly surveys the literature before differentiating between particular instances of technology, such as an airplane, and the collective effect of all technologies. These are termed a “Technology-Instance” and the “Technology-Collective”. The collective effect of all Technology-Instances produces emergent properties at the Technology-Collective layer, leading technology to create needs in the form of feedback loops that stimulate the development of more technology. Interdependencies between technological needs create choices available to humans and brings in to question whether notions of being free thinkers is constrained. Technology controls people because people do not acknowledge a systemic effect at the Technology-Collective level of abstract. People’s attention focuses on the control of a Technology-Instance but not on the Technology-Collective and the biases that influence people’s ways of characterising options. The author concludes by arguing people can, and need to, control the Technology-Collective.