A Golden Rule of Technology: Humans are more technologically clever than wise.
Originally published on Medium.com 28 July 2019
I am a historian of technology. I like technology. I designed and taught history-of-technology courses for undergraduate engineering students, and my first book is about the history of radiation therapy. But my work has made me something of a pessimist. Most of us systematically underestimate the risks of the technologies that we interact with on a daily basis.
Depending on how you feel about chimpanzee termite-fishing sticks, technology might serve as the dividing line between humans and other animals; certainly it is the easiest thing to point to as the basis of our civilization, particularly if you count “language” as a technology. Most of our ethical or belief systems, however, focus on the acts of individuals with little attention paid to the moral significance of tools. Christianity, for example, has a lot of ideas about how people should behave with respect to one another, but the Bible says relatively little about the relationship between people and their tools.
Golden Rules
The “Golden Rule” (“do unto others as you have them do unto you,” “love your neighbor as yourself,” etc.) is a good example of a strong, generalizable ethical principle with a simple formulation that limits the worst human behaviors and transfers across everyday situations. I can explain it to my child: you would not want to be pushed or have your toy taken away, so you should not do these things to other people. The Golden Rule has a lot of exceptions, of course, but you can usually rely on it as a starting place.
An interesting thing about the Golden Rule is that it puts the focus on other people: the “others” or the “neighbor,” in the two formulations above. One thing you notice as a parent is that young children really struggle with the concept of other people’s well-being— if having that toy would obviously make you happier, the logical thing to do is to grab the toy from that other kid. You teach kids some version of the Golden Rule because humans have a natural tendency to commit acts of harm out of obliviousness.
The Golden Rule does not, however, ignore the self. Instead, it describes a relationship between self and others — you know something is bad because you would not want it done to you. You should care about other people the way you care about your own self.
With those principles in mind, my golden rule for technology states, “Technology creates problems, but you probably will not recognize them until it is too late.”
A cast-iron case study
The case study of cast iron stoves can illustrate the value of the rule.
The cast-iron cooking stove, according to historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan, began to appear and proliferate in American homes in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although they burned solid fuel — mostly coal or wood — and required more practice to efficiently operate, those old stoves would be recognizable to modern users: firebox at the bottom, boxy internal baking chambers, round stovetop heating areas for pots, pans, and kettles.
The cooking stove represented a tremendous technological upgrade. Pre-stove, cooking was mostly done either over an open fire or on banked coals. In the home, this usually meant some version of a hearth — a larger version of today’s fireplaces. You have probably seen the classic version of this arrangement in Halloween illustrations of a witch’s home; picture the giant cauldron, suspended over a fire by a bar stretched across two forks.
To cook under such circumstances, you have to keep it simple. Temperature regulation is difficult. Managing a fire requires a lot of patience and practice. Cooking vessels have to be made of heavy and durable materials (mostly cast iron) both to withstand the flame and to help regulate temperatures. Space is severely limited, so you can only cook a couple of things at once. As a result, most American homes relied on “one-pot” meals as the cooking staple in the pre-stove era. Picture that cauldron bubbling with a thick stew of vegetables, protein in the form of meat or beans, and some cornmeal or course-ground flour as a thickening agent. Bread and baked goods appeared on the table much less often, and breads usually came in the form of cornbread, griddle cakes, and other quick-breads — simple enough to be made in single cast-iron skillet and rapidly cooked over the fire with minimal need for temperature regulation.
The arrival of the cooking stove changed that calculus. Stoves offered significantly more capacity for temperature regulation, and the division of the cook area into internal chambers (the oven) and flat surfaces (the round burners on top) made it possible for the cook to manage multiple dishes at once. A pie could bake in the oven while vegetables simmered and bacon fried.
“And no matter the meat, it always tasted like Uncle Charlie’s stew.”
In The Hateful Eight, Samuel L. Jackson’s bounty hunter deduces the identity of a murderer through a long monologue about the monotony of eating the same stew day after day in the pre-stove era. For families tired of eating the same one-pot meals five or six days a week, the arrival of the cast iron stove represented a real quality-of-life upgrade. Meals began to contain significantly more variety, with separate vegetable and protein dishes. Dessert became a staple part of the meal. Stoves also burned fuel more efficiently and allowed users to replace wood with coal. With an enclosed firebox, cooking stoves reduced particulate air pollution in the home.
But all of those technological benefits came with costs. One-pot cooking might be monotonous, but it is also tasty and relatively easy. The cooking tasks can happen at an easy pace: you chop the vegetables, throw everything into the pot, and leave it to do its own thing with relatively little monitoring.
Multi-dish stovetop meals, by contrast, involve a number of processes happening simultaneously. The meat cooks at a different rate than the vegetables. Things cooking at high temperatures on a stovetop require monitoring, lest they burn. “Sauce” or “gravy” becomes a thing that you create separately, rather than just the leftover cooking liquid from the pot. And meal production happens on a more constrained schedule, close to eating time, rather than just taking place at whatever point in the day happens to be convenient.
Stove technology also created other kinds of work. Cooking coats the inside of the stove with a fine layer of baked-on soot that someone had to scour off each day, and cast-iron stoves required regular polishing to prevent rust. Additional dishes for dinner meant additional pots and pans used in meal prep, and all of those extra dishes also required cleaning.
The problem that no one saw
As Ruth Schwartz Cowan points out in the title of her book, More Work for Mother, all of that extra housework did not get evenly spread around the nineteenth-century household. Mealtime in the pre-stove household was a family production. Women usually tended the fire and prepped the meal, but men chopped and hauled the firewood and ground the corn or grain. Both genders contributed heavily to the original food production tasks of growing and harvesting plants and managing and processing livestock.
For men, the stove represented a dramatic reduction in labor. The increased efficiency of the stove reduced wood consumption, and families that switched to burning coal eliminated men’s fuel-production tasks altogether. The stove thus did not so much save work as shift it around in a way that benefited men and hurt women. And as Cowan points out, the shift in fuel consumption also helped to drive more complicated social changes in household workloads.
Families that purchased coal needed cash. Given that they no longer needed to chop wood and had some extra time, it makes sense that men began to work for cash wages outside the home. But whereas a father chopping wood close to home might take his son along to help, men working for cash wages tended to leave the kids behind. More childcare thus fell onto the partner whose labor still took place in the home.
This is not to say that stoves were all bad for women. Women, just like everyone else in the family, enjoyed better diets as a result of the cast-iron stove. They significantly reduced their exposure to indoor air pollution. The family budget improved as fuel prices dropped.
But along with those changes, the stove also raised women’s workloads and created new expectations for mealtime. Absent male partners could offer less support around the house, particularly in the form of childcare. And the changing division of labor between men and women coincided with other changes: a rising “cult of domesticity” in American culture that confined women to particular roles and devalued their labor. In an economy where people increasingly kept score with cash, the labor-intensive stovetop meal had the same value — zero — as the simplest stew. Two hundred years later, women are still living with the detrimental effects of this set of technologically-driven changes.
The Golden Rule and the cast-iron stove
The cast-iron stove created problems, but people mostly did not recognize the problems until it was far too late, in part because the stove was a great technology that made people’s lives better. I sincerely doubt that most men looked upon the cast-iron stove as an opportunity to reduce their own workloads at the expense of their partners, nor do I believe that women saw the cast-iron stove as an engine of oppression. The cast-iron stove only became those things when it interacted with existing customs, such as the division of labor between meal preparation and fuel production, in a way that was probably not even that obvious to the users.
Not obvious, but also not necessary.
Imagine a world in which everyone agreed that new technologies usually create problems that are hard to recognize. Americans did not have to accept the outcomes created by the cast-iron stove. Husbands, freed of the chore of chopping firewood, could have opted to take over more of the kitchen work. But to see that the stove might be changing lifestyles in negative ways would have required people to be vigilant for such a thing in the first place. It would have required the public in general (as opposed to a group of prescient iconoclasts) to adopt a combination of cranky skepticism toward technology and big-picture analysis of human life.
Technology creates problems, but you probably will not recognize them until it is too late.
There are definitely people in the world who have decried email (and now Slack) as a nefarious way to expand working hours to include all waking hours. Insightful individuals have been complaining for fifty years about the possibility of climate change caused by fossil fuel technologies. The problem is not that no one sees the dangers of new technologies. Rather, the problem with technology is that most people do not think that way.
To put it differently, our society has some great technological ethicists (Ian Bogost, Jessica Baron, Cathy O’Neil, Jaron Lanier), but what we lack is a society-level technological ethics. As a result, most of us fail to develop the kind of healthy skepticism that might make us more alert to how our tools are subtly changing our lives and our world.
This is why we need a golden rule for technology. As a society, we understand that it helps to have a few moral rules so simple and universal that we can begin learning them as children. Do you have a new device or program or toy? Your technology is probably creating problems that you do not see. But knowing that empowers you to stop and figure out what you are missing.