For the SJC									Keith Douglas

Sociotechnology
In the last instalment of this series, I introduced the notion of “sociotechnology”. In the current paper I will discuss this notion further. My goal is relatively modest – to simply sketch out the concept and its scope and limits. Applications of the idea will come in future work. 

I divide the following discussion up into five parts:
(a)	Recap of what sociotechnology is
(b)	Relationship between sociotechnology and science and between sociotechnology and crafts
(c)	Ethics and technology in general
(d)	Ethics and technology in specific – the case of sociotechnology
(e)	Why this matters

What is sociotechnology?
Loosely speaking, a sociotechnology is a field of study that makes use of scientific findings about social behaviour in order to modify this behaviour or prevent such. (From the scientific perspective these are the same sorts of problems. Those of the readers who may remember Newtonian mechanics know that one can accelerate a body to a greater velocity by applying a force to it, but also know that we can stop or slow down a body the same way by applying a force in the opposite direction.)

Examples that exist currently are some parts of so-called management science, criminology, action theory, and normative economics. The latter deserves a special comment: I shall return to the question of what economics is about in the next section.

There are many disciplines that are protosociotechologies. This weird word means they are fields of endeavour and research that ought to (in my view) make use of scientific findings to inform action, but are underdeveloped in this respect. The law is the biggest one. Forensic psychologists tell us that our legal systems do not adequately reflect what is known about the unreliability of eyewitnesses, how the so-called “lie detector” is nothing of the kind, and many other interesting findings. Another protosociotechnology is normative international relations, diplomacy, and foreign policy. It is a truism that we should study how power arrangements work in a country before planning any sort of intervention there, whether be opening trade agreements or invading them. That this is not done adequately, and that ideology trumps research is why this field is still underdeveloped. Of course, political science (properly understood) is itself in many respects underdeveloped so it is not surprising that the corresponding technology does not amount to much as yet.

Enough examples. Let us examine sociotechnology in more detail.

Relationship between sociotechnology and science
As stated above, science is used by sociotechnologists to form plans or artefacts. In this case, many of the artefacts are social systems or pieces thereof rather than machines, drugs, or buildings, but they are artefacts all the same. (Mario Bunge attributes a saying to Ravel: “I am artificial by nature” – a description of humans that seems to work well enough.)

Sociotechnology differs from what one might call social crafts. A craft, on this understanding, is a nonscientific source of artefacts. For example, canoes traditionally built by the natives of North America are wonderfully made artefacts, but they were not made informed by scientific knowledge. (A characterization of what science is found in the first of these papers.) By contrast, a canoe made with an understanding of the strengths of materials garnered in materials science, or made to minimize the devastation of birch trees that was obtained by studying their growth cycles is a product of technology. 

It is of course not sufficient (but by definition it is necessary) that science be used to form a sociotechnology. Let us take a look at why this is so. Consider any finding of scientific research. Last time I used repeatedly the example of the linear relationship between unemployment and criminality. We saw that this could be written as an equation of the form C=a+bU. Now what? What intervention is desirable, assuming this relationship to be approximately true? Many of us may suggest that criminality be lowered by lowering unemployment. But notice that the relationship we have found does not tell us anything about which way to manipulate. (Strictly, one should have a few more well established relationships on hand before intervening at all, but let us keep the simple case for the time being.) If for some reason we wanted to increase criminality – for example, maybe we own one of those private prisons in the US – we could try to work for an increased unemployment. This moral neutrality – that a law statement can support two distinct (at least – sometimes more, depending on the degrees of freedom of the relationship) proposals for manipulation – is universal to the findings of scientific research. The moral neutrality of science is its greatest strength, as it can be used to skewer the illusions of anyone, regardless of her viewpoints. Or it can be used to simply describe and explain the way the world is. 

This is why there are two main branches to economics. Above I mentioned that normative economics is a sociotechnology. Normative economics is to be contrasted with positive economics, a social science like sociology, history, political science, culturology, and others. Positive economics is just the study of existing (or historical) means of exchange. (One need not limit economics to a discussion of societies that have used fiat money. Barter, reciprocity agreements, the potlatch, and other arrangements are also economic – at least in part – in character.) By contrast, normative economics is a sociotechnology because it attempts to create economic arrangements of various kinds. (That this is sometimes attempted by leaving things as they are as in the case of right-libertarian economics is beside the point.) Moreover, it is not a criticism of this view to point out that the economics textbooks and popularizations merrily conflate these two notions. The reason for introducing the strange vocabulary of these papers is so that we have increased categorization to better understand the differences between various things and processes. 
 
Ethics and technology: a primer
The principle that one can ground rules for action based on law statements found by scientific research is called the “rule based on law principle”. The rule based on law principle, as we saw, leads to at least two possible rules based on each law statement. One or more of these might be desirable from the perspective of someone. (Or any other domain of ethical evaluation. It is not my place in this paper to evaluate who should make ethical decisions and what sorts of things: people, other animals, other living things in general, the biosphere, societies, etc. That in itself is a sociotechnological problem, and suffers from a rather annoying bootstrapping problem.) 

Because technology is rational action, it necessarily involves plans. (Planning is not however sufficient for technology – a traditional canoe of the sort I mentioned earlier can be sketched or described in a oral tradition that details its construction.) These plans are where the moral commitment is clearly in place. “We propose to do this, with these means, and towards these ends in view.” This sketch of what plans contain shows that all three components are morally sensitive – we might select an inappropriate task, means, or ends. Plans in technology have to be detailed but not stifling – not all intended outcomes may occur, nor all outcomes intended. One can of course plan for failure – in fact, one should, morally speaking. For example, in medical research, it is vital that we know what drugs a patient is taking when testing a new one, in order to better avoid synergistic effects and so on. But not all outcomes can ever be foreseen, and so it is also vital that “failure modes” be graceful and minimally damaging as possible. A computer program, which runs out of disk space suddenly, should not erase itself from memory silently and announce nothing to the user.

It is my view that many of the ethical problems of technology can be partially mitigated by requiring technological proposals be public to some extent. Ethical review committees in hospitals, engineering firms, etc. are part of this process, albeit imperfect at the moment. (Technological literacy is vital for participating in these: one could be bamboozled either way on an issue if one does not understand the basis of what is being debated. But this is a problem for public education, of which more later.) 

It is also important to realize that technology need not always replace crafts; it is again a public issue to decide where technology is needed and where it is not. However, when debating such matters one must remember that by leaving matters to non-scientific approaches one fails to gain the benefits of knowing a bit more about the world that they afford. This makes interventions more likely to succeed, and failure handled with more ease and sensitivity. If we know how a system operates, we are better able to fix it in case of failure. It is my view that this is part of the reason why non-scientific approaches to, e.g., health care, can be dangerous – not when they happen to work (e.g. by placebo, chance, careful observation and winnowing, keeping the patient occupied during spontaneous remission, etc.), but when they fail to, as then there is little ground to “clean up the mess”. See the fourth paper in this series on indigenous knowledge for more on this and related matters.

Of course, not all ethical problems raised by technology are handled by these sorts of approaches. A broad technology ethics is not my intention here, only to sketch out some issues for further discussion. I believe what I have sketched applies to the three main strands of ethical thought. (It does not of course apply to ethical nihilism, but that was never the intention anyway.)

Finally, it should also be noted that I am not advocating technology as “big machinery”, or anything of the sort. Even the smallest proposal to act informed by scientific research is technological in character, and so we must decide ourselves what sorts of technology we must have. The world is not in steady state, so it seems likely that new inventions will be needed to handle new circumstances. Keith Laidler (a physical chemist) has suggested that the time for what he calls empirical inventions – or what I have called crafts – is nearly over, as we have largely explored the part of the world that is accessible to us without scientific research. (I suspect that crafts will never quite disappear, just that new artefacts produced by craft alone will diminish – as has been already happening for at least the past 4 centuries.) Technology begins where crafts end just as science begins where common sense ends.

Ethics and technology: applied to the case of sociotechnology
When it comes to sociotechnology, there are two special features that make the ethical dimensions particularly problematic. One is that the social sciences being used are often underdeveloped. This results in technology being itself sketchy. It is not merely that the hypotheses used are more false than they could be, but also that they are less grounded and systematic. (See the first paper in the series for the virtues of scientific research as it pertains to social matters.) There is also some taint of ideology – which must be removed by careful research and “idea surgery” – in many of the social sciences, particularly economics. This leads to the second of the two features. Namely, that humans, being social animals, are “close to” social matters in a way they are not to atoms, galaxies and abstract algebra, and so may not be able to take one’s proper distance from the matter they are studying. 

That said, objectivity is compatible with partiality. If I really want to know what is wrong with my friend Raven, I’d better study neck anatomy (for that is where she is injured) objectively – I want to know what the neck is really like, not how it makes me feel or may appear to me. But I am being partial, in that I have selected a problem that is near and dear to me. This balancing act is especially difficult in social matters. Attempting to manipulate social systems is thus even more difficult. 

Some people would argue that “scientific management” and such are intrinsically harmful and that we should steer clear of them altogether. A reason given for this is that planning people’s lives is intrinsically authoritarian, authoritarianism is intrinsically bad, whence we should not plan. This is a bit too hasty. For one, it ignores the quite reasonable view that ethics itself is sociotechnological in character. If we postulate that human (or whatever else) flourishing is the subject matter of ethics, then sociology and other fields can be used to tell us what arrangements meet that goal the best. Ethics becomes then a technology. This does not escape the value judgements completely, but it at least shows how to ground them. All this is to say that planning, whether of economic arrangements, labour arrangements, power arrangements (i.e. politics), etc. that I am advocating need not be done from the “top down”. (Nor necessarily from the bottom up, either. Studying the matter is what I am advocating.) Moreover, it does not follow that any particular arrangement ought to be universal. Perhaps we should arrange our buyers cooperative from the bottom, and also have universal direct participatory democracy in federal government – or the converse.

Why this matters
All this matters a great deal, because a social proposal to have a minimum of social planning is itself a plan. (Computer scientists find it handy to regard the empty case of a particular data structure to be a structure of the relevant sort. By analogy, the null plan of extreme right libertarianism should be regarded as a plan.) 

It also matters because “[w]e have to create the future, or others will do it for us.” (Susan Ivanova, Babylon 5: “Sleeping in Light”.)

It is also important because it is my firm opinion that extreme technophobia (fear of technology) is as dangerous as extreme technophilia (love of technology). Why should we turn off our brains to the most effective ways we have discovered to get along in the world, especially as it doesn’t mean losing our empathy and human concern in the process? Aristotle’s dictum to seek the mean applies here too – and not globally, but on a case-by-case basis. 

I mentioned above that deciding on technological proposals required technological (and hence scientific) literacy on the part of citizens. (It also requires some degree of economic and political democracy, of course, but that’s another story for another time.) I suggested that this is partially a matter of education. I regard the study of education itself as partially a protosociotechology (and psychotechnology, more correctly, as it makes use of individual psychology as well as social psychology). Be that as it may, science and technology education is also a matter of the broad topic of science and technology policy. This topic I will address in the next paper in this series.