Dr Tom Chatfield argues that the tools we use are defined by our own preferences and assumptions.

“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Winston Churchill is well attested to have said in a speech he gave in the House of Lords on the twenty-eight of October 1943 — as thanks to German incendiary bombs, the Commons Chamber was a devastated shell. The great question, in Churchill’s terse summary, was thus “whether we should build it up again, and how, and when.” 

His answer was that it should be restored just as it had been before. Unlike the horseshoe or semi-circle shapes of many other parliaments, the oblong of the Commons enshrined Britain’s two-party system. Adversarial yet intimate, its compactness ensured it never felt too empty and that crucial votes attracted a sense of crowding and urgency. As Churchill put it, “giving each member a desk to sit at and a lid to bang” might breed complacency. The building’s form at once embodied and enacted the values it was supposed to serve.

Churchill’s phrase was adapted, in 1967, into an elegant summary of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s work: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” As McLuhan argued in his prophetic writings about the rise of new media, technology is no more a neutral backdrop to social change than a debating chamber is to democracy. In each case, how something is designed embodies purposes and possibilities that – sometimes unintentionally – profoundly affect those who work with it.

For example, a nation whose parliamentary proceedings are open to the press and the public offers a different model of civic life to one where decision-making takes place behind closed doors. A city designed around car ownership is different from one designed around trains, trams or pedestrians. A school that constantly monitors its pupils’ attentiveness and performance via surveillance cameras and AI is different from one that trusts them to take responsibility for completing their own work. 

These scenarios are not just interchangeable options on a menu. They embody divergent assumptions about accountability, citizenship and education and what a society ought to permit and aspire towards. The values, preferences and assumptions embedded in the technologies and systems surrounding us are of pressing importance. There are no neutral tools. 

A useful way of engaging with this is to ask what any technology wants you to do and how this relates to your own needs and desires. 

Take something as simple as email. Among other things, my inbox wants me to spend every single minute of every single day emptying it, all the while filling up the inboxes of everybody else I know. For many people, an email inbox is, in effect, a to-do list written for them by other people – a vital aspect of work and life that can also become an unending and resented source of labour. This is because sending emails is instantaneous and costs nothing but time; because it serves as proof that you are working and attending to certain tasks; because it is useful; and because many people have access to their inboxes every waking moment of every single day. 

Most importantly, an email wants you to send another email rather than to pick up the phone or write a letter, just as an always-on mobile device wants you to attend to it rather than to your environment or the people beside you. These are not desires in the human sense. But that does not make them less powerful, or the prize of a meaningful negotiation with them any less precious. 

More seriously, consider social media’s mission to make users respond rapidly, frequently and publicly to others’ content, with brevity and emotional impact as their guides. Meaningfully debating such technologies means weighing up not only individuals’ actions but also the incentives engineered around these, namely the expectations of transparency, fairness and accountability that are both reasonable and feasible to enforce.

All of this finally brings us to perhaps the most consequential and controversial technology of the twenty-first century as of yet, AI. What values are bound up with different AI systems and the data that they are trained upon? What do they – and their makers and maintainers – want from us? What do we want and need from them in turn? Such questions lie beyond the scope of this article. But none of them can begin to be asked rigorously, let alone answered, if we succumb to hand-waving generalisations about the impartiality of tools or the wisdom of laissez faire.

Critical engagement with any technology demands precision: an interrogation of its particular properties and propensities, alongside some sense of the human purposes it ought to serve. Faced by automated systems of ever-increasing speed and power, the last thing we can afford is to indulge delusions of their neutrality or of them representing inevitable progress.

Dr Tom Chatfield is a British author and philosopher of technology. His latest book, ‘Wise Animals,’ was published by Picador in February 2024.

This article was published in the latest edition of Centre Write. Views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue. 

Read more from our June 2024 Centre Write magazine, ‘Generation AI?’ here.