I view technology as know-how that changes our relationship to the world, rather than as merely tools or human-made artefacts. This perspective is influenced by Heidegger, who claimed that modern technology makes us see everything as resources to be optimized and exploited. I’ve been wondering whether other technologies also change our perspectives, but not in that specific way.
Heidegger’s enframing
Heidegger posits that technology’s essence is to position people in a special way with respect to the world, something he calls Ge-stell, translated as enframing or positionality. Technology shapes our perceptions and interactions with everything and everyone. So-called modern technology turns everything into a so-called standing reserve (Bestand). It supposedly reduces everything, including nature and human beings, to resources to be optimized. That perspective obscures other ways of understanding and relating to our environment. His examples include a river, seen as a source of hydropower, and a tract of land, seen as a source of minerals. His viewpoint seems rooted in a nineteenth century Romantic revulsion against quantification, and a twentieth century view of technology as energy consumption and manufacturing.
Fire
Fire was a transformative technology. Australian Aborigines have used it for at least 65,000 to manage the landscape, such as promoting grassland over forests (Sydney Morning Herald). Evidence suggests that Stone Age people used fire to intentionally transform the landscape around Lake Malawi some 85,000 years ago (Smithsonian). Ash found in a South African cave hints that hominins were cooking with fire one million years ago (PNAS).
The use of fire must have affected how hominins, such as Homo erectus and later Homo sapiens, saw the world. Fire embodies mutability: it transforms a landscape from scrubland to grassland, meat from raw to cooked, and rock from ore into metal. It would predispose hominins to see the world around them as fluid, where the substance of things could be changed by their actions.
Hand Tools
Before learning to control fire, Hominins were already changing things, like turning cobbles into hand axes at least 3.3 million years ago, three million years before our species emerged (Discover). However, the essence of objects wasn’t changed, just their shape and use. The hand tool was still stone, and the structure it made was still wood.
Hand tools perhaps made hominins see things as raw materials. It was a step along the path of seeing the world as something we can change, not something that’s a given. (It was also a step along the way to seeing things as standing reserve.) It’s worth noting that many animals, from earthworms to beavers, change their environment for their benefit. I imagine that at least some of them, like beavers, see a landscape in terms of its potential to change. Hominins’ ability to see the world amplified an ability already present in other animals.
AI Authorship
I’ve been wondering how AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E might change how we see the world. It’s still early days, but here are some guesses.
Susan Tonkin notes that with AI, she no longer knows what she’s confronted with when she comes across an authored object. It used to be that a book was written by some person(s), or that a photograph—though they’ve been suspect for a century—at some point involved a person in its creation. Objects in the Age of AI have become enigmatic. Is it a communication from someone, or the output of a mindless algorithm?
To me, AI has caused authorship to evaporate. When I come across an expressive artefact, I don’t know who’s speaking—if anyone is speaking at all. This uncertainty drains meaning, trust, and connection from all signifiers. We’re in labyrinth hung with flimsy theater flats onto which ephemeral images are projected. The world becomes a meaningless play of noise.
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