Abstract
Individuals and institutions can adopt either a collective technophobia and attempt to ignore or to minimize their use of technology, or they can adopt a technophilia and enthusiastically maximize their dependence on and support of technology without any concern for important risk factors.1 Between these two extreme responses to technology there is a third possibility that attempts to achieve some equilibrium, accounting for the problems associated with technology without thereby condemning technology as a whole. The third option expects to optimize the advantages technology has to offer, while keeping under control most of the potential drawbacks associated with technology.2
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References
I wish to thank Gayle L. Ormiston, Charla Ogaz, and two anonymous referees for their critical suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. The terms “technophilia” and “technophobia” are discussed in Alan R. Drengson, “Four Philosophies of Technol¬ogy,” in L. Hickman, ed., Philosophy, Technology, and Human Affairs ( College Station, Tex.: Ibis Press, 1985 ).
Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 ).
Max Weber, Economy and Society ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978 ).
Thorstein Veblen ’s Articles in the Dial (1919) were published as a book in 1921: The Engineers and the Price System ( New York: Huebsch, 1921 ).
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), in David Farrell Krell’s edition of Martin Heidegger’s Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 289, 308–309, 314–315.
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1964 ).
Ibid., p. 133. See also Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out- of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought ( Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977 ).
See Mulford Q. Sibley, Technology and Utopian Thought ( Minneapolis: Burgess, 1971 ).
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Sassower, R. (1990). The Alarmist View of Technology. In: Durbin, P.T. (eds) Broad and Narrow Interpretations of Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy and Technology, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0557-3_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0557-3_12
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