Langdon Winner

To make this AI, the people involved had to inflict these harms upon us.

The important questions are, to what extent are these the necessary technopolitics of AI, and can those technopolitics change? Langdon Winner's 1980 article, Do Artifacts Have Politics?, is the urtext for questions like these.

In this seminal essay, the rock critic turned tech scholar Winner demands that we move beyond the simple framing of tech having intended and unintended consequences, and instead insists that politics come baked into some technologies.

Winner divides the politics of technology into two broad categories.

What stood out to you?

Yeah, so I think maybe this is recency bias, right? Because we just did the Langdon Winner episode last, episode 10, but I think that is such a good paper because a lot of the discussion now about LLMs, about AI, also in education, like are they good or are they bad? Are they helping learning, or are they hindering learning? And then you get people on both sides, and they do research, and then they say, "Oh, look, students with AI, they learned X more or less or..." But then Langdon Winner explains so well that this is not a question at the right level, that the existence of technology shapes society in a certain way.

So if we say AI is something you can learn from, you are making statements about the society that you want.

And as he nicely explains with his example of solar cells and nuclear reactors, different technologies lead to differently organized societies, and I think this is something we don't really talk about this much.

"The computer will smash the pyramid of wealth and render all people equal," one giddy forecaster promised in 1984.

Yet the metaphor of revolution was ill-considered, the political theorist Langdon Winner argued, because revolutionaries have answers to questions such as whether their movement seeks to uphold a valid ideal of human freedom, and does it aspire to a system of democratic rule, and will there be frequent open elections? By contrast, the computer revolution is conspicuously silent about its own ends.

And as Winner saw it, little evidence supported any of these computopian predictions.

So far, current developments in the information age suggest an increase in power by those who already had a great deal of power, an enhanced centralization of control by those already prepared for control, an augmentation of wealth by the already wealthy.

I do think all technology has politics.

And that's the paper that we're going to discuss is called Do Artifacts Have Politics? By a political scientist named Langdon Winner.

That's a yes, no question as a paper title.

I love it.