Slave Or Master Of Technology: The Choice Is Ours

The agencies promoting the hegemony of digital technology – which is also what makes AI possible today – would like nothing better than to neutralise your ability to think independently. This is even more true today than when Stiegler wrote his texts. But by using this technology anyway, for your own critical purposes, you would be defusing their attempts at undermining human intelligence.

After writing the post on what Martin Heidegger can teach us about technology, I realised that some readers might come to the conclusion that everything about technology is 'bad' - after all, Heidegger's conception does strike one as being a very pessimistic one.

There is another way of 'correcting' the impression that technology is irredeemably 'bad,' which is to turn to one of Heidegger's successors in the philosophy of technology.

Rather than do the same sort of thing here, I shall concentrate on a specific aspect of Stiegler's thinking about technology.

At the outset I should state that he believed that all technology alters human consciousness and behaviour, from the earliest stone age technology to the most sophisticated digital technology of the present age.

Digital technology, in particular, he argued, had the potential of robbing humans of their own ability to think critically and creatively, but this should be seen in conjunction with his notion of technology as a pharmakon.

Stiegler is no technophobe, as may readily be gauged from his books and the various groups that he founded to steer technology in a different direction, away from the kind of hegemonic digital technology that discourages people to think, through what he called 'psychopower,' and encourages them to rely on technical devices instead. Hence, 'critical intensification' simply means engaging with technology as a means to enhance and promote critical thinking and action.

The agencies promoting the hegemony of digital technology - which is also what makes AI possible today - would like nothing better than to neutralise your ability to think independently. 

https://brownstone.org/articles/slave-or-master-of-technology-the-choice-is-ours/