EA - The "technology" bucket error by Holly Elmore

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The "technology" bucket error, published by Holly Elmore on September 21, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I wrote this post July 8, 2023, but it seemed relevant to share here based on some comments that my entry in the AI Pause Debate got.As AI x-risk goes mainstream, lines are being drawn in the broader AI safety debate. One through-line is the disposition toward technology in general. Some people are wary even of AI-gone-right because they are suspicious of societal change, and they fear that greater levels of convenience and artificiality will further alienate us from our humanity. People closer to my own camp often believe that it is bad to interfere with technological progress and that Ludditism has been proven wrong because of all of the positive technological developments of the past. "Everyone thinks this time is different", I have been told with a pitying smile, as if it were long ago proven that technology=good and the matter is closed. But technology is not one thing, and therefore "all tech" is not a valid reference class from which to forecast the future. This use of "technology" is a bucket error.What is a bucket error?A bucket error is when multiple different concepts or variables are incorrectly lumped together in one's mind as a single concept/variable, potentially leading to distortions of one's thinking.(Source)The term was coined as part of a longer post by Anna Salamon that included an example of a little girl who thinks that being a writer entails spelling words correctly. To her, there's only one bucket for "being a writer" and "being good at spelling"."I did not!" says the kid, whereupon she bursts into tears, and runs away and hides in the closet, repeating again and again: "I did not misspell the word! I can too be a writer!".When in fact the different considerations in the little girl's bucket are separable. A writer can misspell words.Why is "technology" a false bucket?Broadly, there are two versions of the false technology bucket out there: tech=bad and tech=good. Both are wrong.Why? Simply put: "technology" is not one kind of thing.The common thread across the set of all technology is highly abstract ("scientific knowledge", "applied sciences" - in other worlds, pertaining to our knowledge of the entire natural world), whereas concrete technologies themselves do all manner of things and can have effects that counteract each other. A personal computer is technology. Controlled fire is technology. A butterfly hair clip is technology. A USB-charging vape is technology. A plow is technology. "Tech" today is often shorthand for electronics and software. Some of this kind of technology, like computer viruses, are made to cause harm and violate people's boundaries. But continuous glucose monitors are made to keep people with diabetes alive and improve their quality of life. It's not that there are no broad commonalities across technologies - for example, they tend to increase our abilities - but that there aren't very useful trends in whether "technology" as a whole is good or bad.People who fear technological development often see technological progress as a whole as a move toward convenience and away from human self-reliance (and possibly into the hands of fickle new regimes or overlords). And I don't think they are wrong - new tech can screw up our attention spans or disperse communities or exacerbate concentrated power. I just think they aren't appreciating or are taking for granted how older technologies that they are used to having enhanced our lives, so much, so far, on balance, that I think the false bucket of "tech progress as a whole" has been worth the costs. But that doesn't mean that new tech will always be worth the costs.In fact, we have plenty of examples of successfully banned or restricted technologies like ...