In the wonderland of new technology, let’s be curiouser and curiouser
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
What can Aristotle, a philosopher from the 4th century BCE, teach us about technology that was released in 2022?
Well, he wrote about techne, practical skill, the term that gives technology its name. However, I think that we can learn more today from what he wrote about arete, or virtue.
Aristotle’s conception of virtue experienced a renaissance in the 20th and 21st centuries, and many better people than me have written many words on the topic. For our purposes, though, we can understand virtue simply as a habit of thought and behaviour of which we approve, which forms part of a flourishing life, and which is self-reinforcing: the practice of virtue makes us virtuous. Virtues include attributes such as courage, honesty and generosity, and are opposed by vices such as cowardice, dishonesty and miserliness. Aristotle also suggested that vices are extremes, and that virtues are the mean that navigates between them. For example, generosity is the mean between being a miser and being a spendthrift.
I don’t agree with everything Aristotle had to say about virtue, but I do prefer virtue ethics over other, more rule based conceptions of ethics. It is often called a ‘thick’ understanding of ethics, which reflects the complexity and experience of our moral lives. I believe that this ‘thickness’ is especially helpful when attempting to get to grips with the impact of new technology on people and on the world. This is particularly the case because, when we ask questions about virtue, we do not just ask questions about a particular type of technology, but about ourselves. (For a great exploration of this topic, I highly recommend Shannon Vallor's book Technology and the Virtues, which also considers virtue traditions beyond that inspired by Aristotle.)
One of the habits of virtue ethicists (we can argue about whether it is a virtue or a vice) is to invent new virtues. I can’t resist indulging this habit, prompted by my attempts over the last few weeks to learn in public about generative AI. So let’s invent the virtue of curiosity (I am sure that we are not the first people to have done so).
We can define curiosity as the urge to discover new things, think critically about them and understand how they work. We can oppose it at one extreme to cynicism: the tendency to dismiss anything new as worthless, or as just another variant of something we have seen before. And at the other extreme we can oppose it to credulity, the tendency to greet each new development with eager, wide-eyed amazement, and never to ask how it actually works.
One of the important characteristics of virtues is that they are active and practical, rather than passive and theoretical. To be honest does not just mean to tell the truth when asked: the honest person cares about the truth and attempts to discover it. Similarly, the curious person does not simply wait to be told about new things and how they work: they actively seek them out. The curious person will be the person asking ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ and all the other good questions.
If we look at the public and media responses to new technologies such as quantum computing and generative AI, I think that we find vast amounts of credulity, mixed with quite a bit of cynicism, and, thankfully, some true curiosity.
I also believe (although this thinking requires much more development) that some virtues are contextual to circumstances, particularly to the work that we choose to do. And I think that the virtue of curiosity is especially relevant to those of us who work as professional technologists. We meet the new every day, and are trusted to make expert decisions on behalf of people who are not specialists. If we are to deserve this trust, then we must be actively curious, and avoid cynicism and credulity.
If I am right, how do we acquire and strengthen the virtue of curiosity? Aristotle’s understanding of virtue ethics is sometimes characterised as a ‘fake it till you make it’ philosophy: the best way to acquire the virtues is by practising them. We can become honest by continually checking that we are seeking and telling the truth, until honest is an integral part of our character. Similarly, I believe that we can become curious by approaching new technologies with an active, open and inquiring mind, and by continuously asking ourselves many questions. How does it work? Why does it really work that way? What is it good for? What could go wrong? Why is this person so enthusiastic about it? Which of my preconceptions do I need to change?
If we understand it as a virtue, curiosity is essential not just to answering questions about the current wave of new technology, but framing our response to all future waves. For those of who design, build and run technology for a living, it is more than just a desirable trait: it is a responsibility.
Navigating the world of new technology sometimes feels like a journey through Wonderland. Small things get bigger and big things get smaller, time gets stretched and inanimate objects learn to speak. Let's appropriate Alice's famously ungrammatical exclamation and turn it into an instruction: let's be curiouser and curiouser.
