We fear that artificial intelligence will escape our control, pursue purposes of its own, displace human judgment, and ultimately reduce its creators to servants of the systems they built. These anxieties are often presented as unprecedented responses to an unprecedented technology. They are not. Long before computers, industrial machinery, or even the modern concept of “technology,” human beings have told stories about inventions that rebelled against their makers, knowledge that brought catastrophe, and craftsmen destroyed by their own creations. Technological power has always appeared as both gift and danger. The waxen wings with which Icarus soars free from imprisonment fail him at his apex; the same Golem that safeguards the Jews of Prague almost proves the cause of their destruction. These stories, which are shockingly consistent across time and culture, cover technological themes like loss of control and double-edged swords in a strikingly modern fashion.
This ambivalence is one of humanity’s oldest and most consistent intuitions. Technology enlarges the range of what we can do, but in doing so changes the conditions under which we choose. It gives us power over nature while threatening to subject us to systems, incentives, and purposes that no individual intended. The recurring, deep fear that permeates the history of human consciousness is therefore not simply that a machine will malfunction. It is that, by building machines powerful enough to transform the world, we will transform ourselves and lose control over what we become.
As in all things, probably the best articulation of ancient fears was the Greeks. Unlike most cultures, the Greeks had a god of technology who invented: Hephaestus, the blacksmith of Mount Olympus who created everything the Olympian gods needed. He was not merely a handyman, but also an inventor. In Greek mythology, nearly every technology, whether fire or Pandora’s box, comes from his workshop by conveyance or pilfering, and all come with a loss of control for humanity. Hephaestus himself also suffered a consequence as a result of his blacksmithing—he was lame, unable to leave his workshop. Although his loss of leg function was related to being thrown off of Mount Olympus, this was a common affliction of blacksmiths at the time because of arsenic exposure, still making it a powerful metaphor: embrace technology too much, and you will suffer the consequences, just as a blacksmith who spends too much time in his workshop loses the ability to leave.
The Greek fear of technology was not limited to merely Olympian myths; human inventors also suffered from their own creations in classical mythology. Probably the most famous tale of peripeteia is that of Icarus flying too close to the sun and melting his waxen wings. As such, although technology myths are often moral parables, there are Greek myths of explicit punishment for inventing. In the ancient story of the Sicilian Bull, an inventor created a new torture device wherein a person was boiled alive in a bronze bull. When the inventor proudly demonstrated his invention to the king Phalaris, he became the first person on whom the device was demonstrated. Invent at your own peril. Similarly, Prometheus is punished for acquiring fire, as in nearly every other culture with a “man stealing fire” tradition.
This theme was not unique to the Greeks. Generally, the main fear surrounding technology throughout time and across various historical cultures is unintended consequences. Usually, the invention itself is what goes awry. Perhaps the most famous example is the ancient Jewish legend of the Golem, wherein an artificial being is magically animated out of mud, but escapes human control and embarks on a Yudkowsky-style non-aligned rampage. This theme repeats over and over across traditions. For example, Ilmarinen, a Finnish craftsman, creates a bride made out of gold who is beautiful but still and lifeless, leaving him unhappy, while the Egyptian god Thoth produced books with knowledge that would cause misfortunes like insanity or divine punishment. In Hindu culture, the inventor Maya Dānava builds a mirror funhouse, the Māyā Sabhā, that is so convincing that it tricks a king and triggers a war. In Petronius’s Satyricon, an inventor of flexible glass is killed by Tiberius Caesar for fear that the invention would be too valuable and put glassmakers out of work.
When technology—depicted in Clarkeian fashion as magic or crafts— is personified in a god, they are often associated with unpredictability but also creation: they are both fathers of civilization and tricksters. The Mesopotamian god of crafts and magic Enki, creates humans out of clay but also sometimes manipulates them. In Native American cultures, the Coyote spirit both steals fire for humanity from the sun and teaches them to fish. In Micronesia, Analup is the god of magic and crafts and creator of the world, but also the grandfather of the trickster god Olofat, who, like Prometheus, is credited with bringing fire down from the heavens to mankind. In a darker turn, Odin obtains his magic or crafts through painful sacrifice involving deception and even unwilling third parties. Other times, these deities are associated with unpredictable and destructive events. In Ancient Egypt, the god Ptah was the powerful god of craftsmen worshiped by blacksmiths but also feared as the cause of earthquakes, which destroyed several Egyptian cities, like Thonis and Canopus. Similarly, the Roman god Vulcan, the metalworking craftsman, was strongly associated with fire, which was the uncontrollable catastrophe of choice for Roman fears. Ogun, the Yoruba god of craftsmen, is married to Oya, the goddess of winds and storms.
Modern Fears: Technological Determinism
Comparative mythology demonstrates that these are primal emotions and recurring thoughts known by human beings across very different societies possessing very different levels of technology. It is hardly surprising then that these ancient fears were recapitulated in the work of modern philosophers of technology in the 20th century. Writing in the early 1960s, the philosopher Jacques Ellul believed that technology unfolded in a deterministic path towards decreasing human agency, comparing modern man to Esau, selling his freedom for goods and services; that is, a slave. Our material desires, he wrote, betray and distract us; “it is a matter of no real importance whether man succeeds in reaching the Moon, or curing disease with antibiotics, or upping steel production.” Instead, the “search for truth and freedom are the higher goals.” Ellul’s views are extreme enough to make one mad; this is one reason, perhaps, that his most famous intellectual progeny was the mathematician and terrorist Ted Kaczynski, also known as the “Unabomber.”
For the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the risk of technology is that it has a power all its own, of which we become a mere part. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger writes of the logger who is reduced by technology into a mere cog in the industrial machine, “ordered by the industry that produces commercial woods, whether he knows it or not.” The technological logging industry itself is “never a human handiwork,” and the logger becomes subservient “as a subject relates to an object.” This should look very familiar—it is the same fears we have been facing throughout our history but told in a more mechanical, industrial fashion.
Such observations were made earlier in the Industrial Revolution as well. In 1829, Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle wrote about the “mechanical age” in his essay “Signs of the Times,” noting moral panic, millenarianism, and increasing inequality as social disruptions caused by fear surrounding industrial progress. He himself praised the mechanical wonders but feared that Scotland was being consumed by a belief in the “all-importance of physical things” and losing its humanity.
As in the ancient world, fears about technology broke into popular culture. Contemporary concerns tend to focus on machines that have their own ends and pursue them to the detriment of humans. Sometimes, like the supercomputer HAL 9000 from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is a misapplication of a rule followed too literally; sometimes, as in Terminator, the artificial intelligence Skynet determines on its own a deadly prime directive. Humans have had a fascination with robots for a long time as well—it is perhaps the only modern technology to have been prophesied in mythology across cultures for thousands of years. The term “robot” comes from a 1920s Czech play, R.U.R., where the robots are abused so badly that they rise up to annihilate humanity.
What is notable about modern stories of technological fear is that they disregard the traditional intuition that risk comes from loss of control. Instead, they adopt the James Cameron view of the world: rather than being neither good nor bad, technology is inherently corrupting and broadly destructive. Compare the story of the Golem with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Frankenstein’s monster is a purely tragic figure: he is created for no real reason, does not do anything good, overpowers humanity, and dies in as much misery as he created. By playing god, Frankenstein creates pure malevolence in the world. The Golem loses control, but it is created as a protector against blood libels and does accomplish that job and is able to be stopped. The fear is the same, but the ancient nuance is lost where technology is to be feared but also to be appreciated.
Even optimistic contemporary stories are not immune from this affliction. In “Machines of Loving Grace,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei paints two possible futures: one where AI spins out of control, and one where machines care for us. Though meant to depict a dystopia/utopia dichotomy, these are fundamentally the same future with different interpretations. In both worlds, the machines supersede us, and we lose control. It is no wonder we fear AI: what machine is more likely to seize control than one that has its own desires?
Giving Telos to Techne
These fears are not entirely baseless. There is a determinism to technology that must be reckoned with. Arguably, we have been going down this path for a long time. Since Carlyle’s 1836 novel Sartor Resartus promulgated the idea that what defines man is making tools, we have increasingly defined ourselves in reference to technics. American historian Lewis Mumford called the totality of human technical systems the Megamachine: a societal ordering that uses humans as parts without individuality.
Even the most strident techno-optimist cannot deny that technology has an internal logic. Technologists often call this the “tech tree,” for the way in which technologies seem to branch outwards as they build on prior technical achievement. Sometimes these dependencies can be surprising, but a tech tree is often the answer to the question of why we had to wait so long. Furthermore, because technologies are built on other technologies, at places where the tree branches, the entire direction of civilization can be altered, creating a path dependency.
Technologies, however, are not just enabling but also revealing, showing us what can be next. Furthermore, we rarely leave technologies unused. Samo Burja has called these co-evolving technologies “social technologies” because they involve our frequent need to socially determine what further inventions we will need to build to use big, important technologies. The lightbulb was co-created alongside the electric utility and many of the first electrical appliances.
Melvin Kranzberg, an American historian, formulated his First Law of the history of technology as “technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.” That third part is usually skipped over, but in fact it is the most important clause. Technologies often create new possibilities, but in doing so change what we can even choose to create in the world. When media theorist Marshall McLuhan said that “the medium is the message,” he meant that certain things can only be communicated with certain technologies and thus become the communication itself, but also implied that certain messages are only possible once certain media are invented. Many technologies change the relative costs of certain choices, thus changing what economists call the production frontier.
This is almost enough to make one a technological determinist. In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly argues that technology forms a technium, a collective organism that has its own evolution akin to biological evolution. If that is so, as author Paul Kingsnorth has argued, we stop being able to see the world beyond logical terms and get subsumed by the logic of the machines themselves—historian Charles A. Beard quipped that “technology marches in seven-league boots from one ruthless, revolutionary conquest to another, tearing down old factories and industries, flinging up new processes with terrifying rapidity.”
Yet, the contingency of technology also makes it the most freeing force in human affairs. In the same essay discussed above, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger ends with a line from Hölderlin: “but where danger is, grows / the saving power also.” Perhaps the only way out of our technological predicament is through.
The problem with the determinist argument, as biologist Jerry Coyne pointed out in a review of Kelly’s book, is that actual evolution is not deterministic but dependent on contingencies and chance. Evolutionary processes possess emergent properties, but that does not mean that they are themselves organisms, just as we are not a single organism with the Earth, even though we emerge out of it and take part in terrestrial planetary processes. In biology and in most human affairs, the conditions of evolution are largely out of our control. They are geography, the distribution of natural resources, disease, natural disasters, differences in climate and the environment, and other aspects of our natural world that were set in motion long before we were even born as a species. The contingent characteristic of technology, and our views on it, depend entirely on framing. You could view the tech tree as unlocking possibilities, or as closing them off. In truth, the process is one and the same.
Not every philosopher was pessimistic about this situation. Aristotle is the ancient philosopher with the most developed theory of technology, and despite coming from the otherwise techno-pessimistic Greek culture, he is himself optimistic about the prospects of man and his relation to his technics. To Aristotle, technology was techne, not just scientific machinic engineering but any kind of craft or artifice. Aristotle argued that techne was distinct from physis, the forces governing the physical world, because it has no internal logic guiding its ends. The statelessness of techne means that it follows its outward purpose, or telos, which comes from us. In a way, Aristotle embraces Kranzberg’s Sixth (and final) Law of Technology: “Technology is a very human activity—and so is the history of technology.”
Aristotle was a utopian, speculating that robots would bring the end of slavery and thus anticipating, on a theoretical level, arguments that would be made thousands of years later. Nick Szabo, the computer scientist and intellectual, argued that the clock led to the end of serfdom by making it possible to calculate an hourly wage. It is no surprise that slavery ended around the time of mechanical farming or that women’s suffrage coincided with the rise of electrical appliances.
One does not require techno-utopianism to see the human element that separates techne and physis, nor to see how this puts us in control of our fate. We may not be able to control the distribution of natural resources at our disposal, but we can invent new ways to make that irrelevant. We may not be able to change our culture and our subjection to the madness of crowds, but we can invent new ways of communicating to subdue that madness. We may not be able to stop an asteroid from approaching Earth, but we can invent a way to save ourselves from the impact.
While Heidegger feared that we would become overwhelmed by the enframing technological industrial society, we could choose, like Aristotle, to see things the other way: that technology comes from us and is thus of us. Or, as philosopher Ernst Kapp put it, that technology represents a “tool so fundamentally and intimately affiliated with the human being that he finds himself beholding something of his own being in the creation of his hand, his world of representation embodied in matter.” This capacity to project our very being into the material world gives us power over our fate.
The ancient wisdom on technology emphasizes our choice to build technology around us. In the 13th century, Masamune, considered the greatest historical Japanese swordsmith, was challenged to a contest by his top student, Muramasa. They both created their greatest swords, but while Muramasa’s sword became bloodthirsty, Masamune’s only cut leaves. The ability to create, and to determine the purpose of their technology, was in their hands. The student, who forgot this lesson, created a weapon that was, ultimately, a failure. The lesson behind the legend is that the craftsman who exercises restraint and choice, and remembers that he can make even a sword peaceful, is remembered as the master of his craft.
If we feel uneasy, perhaps that is our way of telling ourselves that something may be awry inside us and how we fear that we would use the technology. After all, absorbing new technology is a change, and the impact of changes is in the future. What is unavoidable is that changing our technology will change us in ways we cannot anticipate, and that change will, ultimately, be governed by characteristics of the technology itself. That is why we are so fundamentally fearful toward technology: it is not that we fear losing control over it, but that we fear that it will cause us to lose control of ourselves.
The beauty of technology is precisely that it puts our fate back in our own hands because we can always build new technology. We are a factor—the factor—in determining which technologies we develop and how far we take them, because it is our energies and ingenuity that get applied to the development process. If we become cogs in the machine, we can build cogs to replace ourselves or build a new machine. What determines the character and nature of our technology is us. The process of creating technology, and therefore our future, is one of us choosing our own future, over and over again.