Reading Pleasants et al. (2023, 2024) on technoskepticism

Our experience with how students argue in the Climate Fresk serious game is that they often jump to technical solutions to climate change right away and are unwilling to even entertain the thought of any other approach. Someone will invent something, and that will fix everything (false hope that does not lead to action, as I wrote about earlier today). We therefore ultimately decided to switch over to the Biodiversity Collage to expose students to the more complex system of that game before working on climate change, because in the Biodiversity Collage it becomes obvious very quickly that no one technology will be able to fix everything and that the problem needs to be addressed considering also societal and other factors. But the problem of false hope is a bigger one than just jumping to solutions to climate change, and that is that students generally seem to believe that technological solutions can help them out of whatever mess they might be in, without considering what mess technologies themselves might create if adopted without critical thought. So, enter technoskepticism!

Pleasants et al. (2023) call for people to pause and consider “What relationships do we want with technology?” This is increasingly difficult seeing the speed at which technologies are developed and pushed out into the market (main example I am struggling with right now is GenAI, but also algorithm-controlled social media). They state that educators need to ask themselves “How are students being prepared to discuss and make decisions about technologies that could have lasting impacts on their collective lives?”

Pleasants et al. (2023) see “the purpose of technology education to be the development of a technoskeptical stance“, which is, as they stress not antitechnology, “just as an art critic is not antiart“.

Questions they suggest everybody should be asking themselves include (in my interpretation)

• What are the costs, and who pays the costs? Costs are not just monetary, but also in terms of material
• Who had a say in how the technology would be designed, and what were the values going into the design?
• Who is the technology helping, who is benefitting from it, who is being harmed?
• Will the technology make people act or think differently, or both? Thinking about phone addictions here, or even just walking into traffic because we are looking on tiny screens and not the world
• How is it changing our lives in terms of pace, pattern, scales? For example, being so directly connected to so many people across the whole world sped up communication and expanded the reach beyond anything imaginable just a few decades ago

Pleasants (2024) studies how students can train a wider perspective in “Engineering for Whom? Investigating How Engineering Students Develop and Apply Technoskeptical Thinking”. They describe technoskepticism as “a way of thinking through the unintended, collateral, and disproportionate effects of technology on individuals and communities“. Technoskepticism is based on considering that

• “Technologies typically ‘do’ much more than was originally expected or intended by their designers and their users.” Availability of a technology influences not only how we use it, but also how we think and act beyond using it. For example, even the availability of GenAI, without knowing for sure that students are using it, makes teachers suspect more cheating
• Technology can have positive and negative effects, but “costs and benefits are rarely distributed equally or equitably“
• Technologies are not neutral, they are “components of interconnected social, technical, economic, and political systems and values“
• As such, the effects that they will have are complex and difficult (or impossible, I would say) to predict
• And “Technologies are products of historical circumstances, so the course of technological change is not pre-determined and can be oriented toward multiple futures“

They address these questions in a model called the “technoskepticism iceberg” (see my featured image). The model consists of three layers: Tools (e.g. a traffic light), systems (e.g. how transportation is organised with pedestrian crossing, highways, …), and values (e.g. mobility, safety, …). Then, there are three cross-cutting dimensions: technical (how something works), psycho-social (how people interact with it) and political (who gets to make the decisions about development and use, and how decisions are made).

In a summer program, they try to teach working with technoskepticism and the “unintended, unanticipated, and differential effects of technologies on people“, for example really obvious in the “racist soap dispenser”, that can only recognize, and dispense soap on, hands of a certain skin color. They make the point that “there are no ‘zero impact’ technologies, and there are always value-laden choices to make about which impacts are of greater or lesser significance (e.g. carbon emissions versus the harms of lithium and cobalt mining)“. However, when they evaluate the program, they find that students report that it was interesting and engaging, but a pre- and post test on the topic of street lights don’t show any more technocriticism after the program, but rather an overwhelming focus on the positive impacts of the technology so that harm seems not imaginable. This might be because transfer is generally difficult, so they might no tbe able to apply what they did learn on a different topic, but then transfer is kinda the most important point here. Technoskepticism does need to be applied to new situations all the time.

So how do we teach that? Or maybe even before, how do we practice that ourselves, consistently?

Pleasants, J., Krutka, D. G., & Nichols, T. P. (2023). What relationships do we want with technology? Toward technoskepticism in schools. Harvard Educational Review, 93(4), 486-515.

Pleasants, J. (2024). Engineering for Whom? Investigating How Engineering Students Develop and Apply Technoskeptical Thinking. Engineering Studies, 1-25. DOI: 10.1080/19378629.2024.2333242