Louis Hyman – The New York Times
This is a good reminder that the development and, even more, the application of technology are always driven by their social. economic and political context. There is a tendency to see technological change as somehow natural and unstoppable, which is dangerous not because it is wholly wrong, but because it is partly right and so can easily be confused with being wholly right.
New technologies cannot be uninvented (usually) or ignored, but how they are developed and deployed is always a matter of choice, even if that choice isn’t always self-evident. This article focuses on the implications for employment, where too often the destruction of jobs is assumed to be both inevitable and undesirable (leaving only the numbers up for debate). But the nature of the change, the accrual of the benefits of greater efficiency and of the costs of disruption and transition are all social choices. That’s a very helpful reframing – which creates the space to ask how we might retain the benefits of traditional employment structures, while adding (rather than substituting) the advantages which come from new ways of working.