<aside> đź“– What kind of technology is good for people, or for populations?
What's good for people in terms of technological infrastructure? What kind of operating systems? What kind of social networks? What physical computing setups?
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A humane technologist engages experimentally with this question, taking it to be a substantial question—not one with an obvious answer (about decentralization, end-user programing, local-first data, cryptographically secured privacy, etc). (The humane technologist may explore such a principle, to find out if it’s good for people, but they take the question seriously.) The field builds on many other fields—like ergonomics, political theory, and the parts of philosophy that ask what's good (like ethics, meta-ethics, aesthetics, and axiology), etc.
The best analogy for humane tech is livable cities. It took a generation of investigators like Jane Jacobs and William Whyte to understand what makes a good city, and to find principles and approaches (about green space, access to schools and hospitals, sidewalks, public parks, levels of neighborhood involvement in decisions, etc). It took another generation for these methods to become well-known in urbanism.
Critique & pure theory. Humane tech focuses on things that can be prototyped, tested, or studied in the field. It's an experimental or design science, not a purely theoretical endeavor.
Ideology. Humane tech is not you, if you think it's already obvious what's good. Whoever believes “everything just needs to be more x” (more decentralized, more market-driven, more inclusive, more regulated, more privatized, more anonymous, etc) is not a humane technologist.
Remediation. Also excluded are “downside reduction” fields — field that work to make things slightly less bad, rather than discovering what’s good. For instance: fields that make language models slightly less offensive, or make social networks have slightly less bad content. Fields like cybersecurity, trust and safety, integrity teams, or AI safety.
These fields are very important! In the analogy with cities, they’re the police, the waste management, the park rangers, etc. In some cases, they’re exactly what’s needed. But humane technologists focus on upside extension, more than downside reduction. They search for the most beautiful and healthy ways that apps, social networks, etc, can be: not the police, but the sidewalks, the parks, the public spaces, the neighborhoods.
<aside> 👉 Note: This is a hard line to draw. It’s even unclear where police belong, in cities. What about restorative justice initiatives? Neighborhood watch? We will include things as humane tech when it’s hard to draw the line.
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