The Characteristics of the Technical World in the Pre-Modern Era According to Jacques Ellul.

As a preliminary note. – I presented, in another article on this blog, the six characteristics of the technical world as masterfully theorized in one of the most important works in the philosophy of technology of the twentieth century: The Technological Society (La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle, Economica, 2008). The reading of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), an author today largely underestimated, seems to me indispensable for anyone who wishes to understand — to borrow an expression from another major author in the philosophy of technology, Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) — the mode of existence of technical objects and systems in the contemporary era, and more particularly the mode of existence of artificial intelligence systems. The latter would moreover benefit from being described as socio-technical systems, so as no longer to present them under an appearance of illusory neutrality, and to emphasize instead the social reconfigurations and transformations they inevitably produce.

In order to present more exhaustively the characteristics of the technical world as described by Jacques Ellul in the modern and contemporary era, as well as its role in the transformation of societies, it would have been necessary to present it in relation to that from which it breaks, namely the pre-modern era. It is by highlighting the characteristics of the technical world as they existed before the advent of our modernity that it becomes possible, by contrast, to bring to light the singularity and originality of the functioning of the technical world today.

The Technological Society was written in the early 1950s and first published in 1954, at a time when France and Europe were gradually emerging from the post-war period and modernizing their systems of production and industry on the basis of methods of work organization and industrial production largely inherited from the Taylorist-Fordist model that had emerged in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The equipment rates of French and European households (automobiles, household appliances, refrigerators, washing machines, etc.) were thus catching up with those of the United States, while what was already being called the consumer society was becoming widespread.

Although we were then only at the very beginnings of the computer revolution, companies were already beginning, from the early 1950s onward, to glimpse the full potential that the use of computers might bring them, even though these machines had not yet fully left the world of laboratories and universities. It was in this context that the first manufacturers of electronic calculators (UNIVAC) and punched-card machines (IBM, Bull, BCR) appeared, and that the first commercial computers — such as the Ferranti Mk1, the UNIVAC I and the first IBM computers — were marketed in 1951. The objective was to reproduce, in the world of services and administration, what had been achieved in the industrial world through the development of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s (1856-1915) scientific organization of labor and Henry Ford’s (1863-1947) production model: improving the productivity of white-collar work.

A few years earlier (1942), Asimov had introduced his three laws of robotics — the first attempt to formalize fundamental ethical principles, already anticipating the famous problem of alignment in AI ethics as it arises today; Vannevar Bush had published his famous article As We May Think (1945), in which he imagined a system, the Memex, functioning as an extension of human memory, capable of storing large volumes of interconnected information according to a principle close to that of hypertext, the foundation of the contemporary Web; von Neumann laid the foundations of modern computer architecture in a report that would become famous, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC; while the 1950s saw the replacement of vacuum tubes by the first transistors, initiating a process of reducing component size and simultaneously increasing computing power, associated with a continuous decrease in costs, heralding the widespread use of computing that would truly begin only with the microcomputer revolution of the 1980s. Only two years after the publication of The Technological Society (1954), the first volume of a trilogy that would be followed by The Technological System (1977) and The Technological Bluff (1988), the famous Dartmouth conference (1956) would take place, bringing together the principal pioneers of artificial intelligence: Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001), Claude Shannon (1916-2001), Marvin Minsky (1927-1996), John McCarthy (1927-2011) and Nathaniel Rochester (1919-2001).

Best known for his work in the philosophy of technology, Jacques Ellul was a professor of legal history. His philosophical reflections on the evolution of the characteristics of the technical world are therefore largely nourished by the reading of the historians of his time — particularly historians of technology (one need only glance at the bibliography of The Technological Society) — and one may thus suppose that he was very well aware of what was taking place in the field of computing at the moment when he was writing. A reading of his works shows that he very early sensed the fundamental role that computers and information systems would play in the transformation of the technological system and of social organization. Ellul was indeed writing two years before the very invention of the term Artificial Intelligence, and in some sense anticipating current debates on the possible advent of a superintelligence:

"Statistics have been accurate since they are no longer carried out by men but by punched-card machines. The machine no longer serves today for a few massive and crude tasks but for a whole set of subtle operations, and will soon attain, with the electronic brain, an intellectual power that man cannot possess."

It would nevertheless be mistaken to read a work such as The Technological Society as a history of techniques. Nor is it a matter of drawing up a detailed assessment of the positive and negative effects of various techniques on societies — such an assessment, Ellul warns, would inevitably be fragmentary and superficial given the colossal scale of the task — nor of passing an ethical judgment on the merits or harms of technical progress, but rather of proposing a fundamental analysis of the technical phenomenon taken in its totality, independently of the types of technical objects that compose it. For Ellul, technology is the most important social, human and spiritual fact of our modern world. And in this respect the diagnosis he offers remains profoundly illuminating and, in my view, has not aged at all.

Technology is nothing but a means and a set of means. – Technology, according to Ellul, cannot be reduced to the machine nor to the mechanization of productive activity. The latter constitutes only one of the modes of deployment of the technical phenomenon in the broad sense of the term, one of whose fundamental characteristics is precisely to encompass the totality of human activities and to subordinate them to an imperative of efficiency. In other words, our modernity is above all characterized by the universality of the technical phenomenon, which takes shape in a multiplicity of activities and methods whose common point is the search for the most adequate means in relation to given ends. Technology in general may thus be defined as a set of means, and contemporary civilization (Ellul writes in 1954, yet his analyses remain largely valid today) as a civilization of means that has relegated ends to a secondary position. All human activities, whatever their level of complexity (Ellul gives as examples the splitting of a flint and the development of an electronic brain), share as a fundamental common characteristic the implementation of a set of means or methods in order to achieve a certain result.

It is within this minimal definition — namely technology as a set of means — that Ellul distinguishes the technical operation, defined as “any work done with a certain method” by a technical operator in order to achieve a result (whether the primitive hunter in the Paleolithic era or today’s skilled worker), from the technical phenomenon, understood as the concern “to seek in all things the absolutely most efficient method” (“the one best way”). It is this second point that above all characterizes, according to Ellul, contemporary technological civilization, made possible in particular by the historical rapprochement that occurred between scientific activity, on the one hand, and technical activity, on the other, such that “almost no disinterested research can any longer take place.” And Ellul adds: “Of course, it is not a question of minimizing scientific activity, but only of noting that, in present historical facts, it is surpassed by technical activity. So that one no longer conceives of science without its technical outcome.”

Once these premises are established, it becomes possible to call “technical progress” the use of ever more refined technical operations and methods, made possible by the advances achieved, particularly since the industrial revolution, in the field of science, so that the two phenomena are now intimately correlated. In this sense, the nineteenth century constitutes, for our theme, a decisive turning point according to Ellul. Drawing largely on the analyses of Lewis Mumford, author of Technics and Civilization, Ellul emphasizes that scientific labor and research would henceforth be deliberately oriented toward technical applications, so that this same period prepared another decisive development in the history of the relations between “science” and “technology”: no longer a simple rapprochement, but a relation of subordination of science to technology that would occur in the twentieth century. In other words, it is now the principles of “utility” and “interest” that guide the work of researchers, so that science no longer has any other reason to exist than to lead to concrete applications serving primarily the economic and material development of humanity. We thus find ourselves at the opposite extreme, recalls the author of The Technological System, from the almost total separation between science and technology in ancient Greek civilization, which nevertheless opened the path to rational and scientific thought (philosophy), but in an exclusively disinterested and speculative (contemplative) sense, that is to say without practical or utilitarian aim.

Over the last two centuries, we have thus witnessed a kind of progressive hyper-rationalization of all human and social activities in the form of a new rationality known as “instrumental,” which systematically seeks the most efficient possible means to achieve a given goal without questioning the value or legitimacy of that goal. In other words, instrumental rationality and the technological civilization it engenders are exclusively driven by a logic of operational efficiency consisting in the methodically organized search for the best means in every domain (the “one best way”). “This,” writes Ellul, “is the clearest face of reason in its technical aspect.”

The characteristic phenomenon of our modernity, according to Ellul, thus consists in the extension of the technological and calculative paradigm, embodied in the figure of the specialist, to all domains of human activity, “from the act of shaving” to the organization of a sporting event such as the Olympic Games, or even the military invasion of a country (these examples are mine). Ellul even proposes three major sectors of action of modern technology: 1) economic technology, the sphere of technical processes applied to production, distribution and consumption (machine tools, automation of production chains, statistical models, optimization of logistical flows, etc.); 2) organizational technology, or the technology of the State, the sphere of application of techniques in the organization of work within companies, administrations, the State, the army or society in general (division of labor, Taylorism, Fordism, human resources management, management techniques, etc.); and finally 3) the technology of man, the sphere bringing together all techniques aimed at modifying, training, controlling and influencing the human being physically, psychologically and socially (advertising, marketing, propaganda, surgery, genetics, pedagogical techniques, etc.). Although Ellul devotes extensive analyses to these three domains in chapters III (economic technology), IV (organizational technology) and V (the technology of man), it would be mistaken to consider them separately, since they constitute as many ramifications and extensions of the technical world and mutually support one another. In other words, they form a system.

Characteristics of technology in societies before the eighteenth century. – Now that we possess a definition and an overall vision of the technical phenomenon as it emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Ellul seeks to construct its ideal-type, both as it manifested itself until the eighteenth century and, by contrast, as it manifests itself in the modern and contemporary era. In other words, what are the essential characteristics of modern technology — of which we remain contemporaries — as opposed to traditional techniques before the eighteenth century? More precisely still, since we must determine what is to be characterized here: what are the features of the relationship between technology, society and the individual, yesterday and today? The six characteristics of traditional techniques that Ellul identifies serve above all to highlight the unprecedented and original situation that characterizes technology in the modern sense of the term. These six characteristics are as follows:

• Technology applied only to limited domains: Societies prior to the eighteenth century granted far less importance to technology than modern societies. Religious considerations occupied a predominant place. Activities relating to production or consumption (clothing, housing, etc.) held a much smaller role, while work itself did not occupy the central place it has today, since the aim was to work as little as possible, even at the cost of restricting consumption. Consequently, the time devoted to the use of techniques was small compared with other activities such as sleep, informal conversation (long unstructured discussions without a specific aim), games or meditation. For us moderns, by contrast, it seems impossible to imagine our comfort and our existence outside an order structured by work and technology.

• Technical means were limited: To the limitation of the domains of application of technology must be added the limitation of the technical means employed to achieve a result, so that the skill of the worker or artisan compensated for the deficiencies of the tools at his disposal. In other words, pre-eighteenth-century civilizations were oriented more toward the perfection of usage (skill, know-how) than toward the perfection of tools themselves.

• The technical phenomenon was always local: A third characteristic of the technical world before the eighteenth century is its local character. It is a world prior to globalization and the development of communication networks, in which social groups still lived largely in isolation. Consequently, there was no widespread diffusion of techniques, which were not considered anonymous commodities exchangeable on a market, but rather cultural markers specific to a given civilization — something that could itself constitute a barrier to exchange. Moreover, the diversity of techniques, varying from place to place, was not subject to comparative evaluation (what we today call “benchmarking”). They therefore could not give rise to a system of competition. This point is crucial, for it allows Ellul to highlight one of the fundamental aspects of the contemporary technical phenomenon, namely the search for the most efficient method possible (“the one best way in the world”). The world of yesterday was still characterized by the “best way” within a given country.

• Techniques evolved very slowly: The fourth characteristic of the pre-modern technical world is the slowness of change. This is explained in particular by the nature of research, based primarily on empirical and pragmatic discoveries without a true theoretical or scientific foundation. Moreover, systems of transmission were slow, weak and localized. It would not be until the eighteenth century that one would witness both a rapprochement between science and technology and a significant development of the means for implementing inventions that had previously struggled to be manufactured and rapidly extended across society.

• This evolution was disordered and diversified: This slowness of evolution was accompanied by a great diversity of models for a single technical object (weapons, tools, instruments, etc.). In other words, the evolution of techniques depended entirely on individual initiatives and lacked any framework capable of organizing research and production (standardization). This diversified, artisanal mode of fabrication partly explains the slowness of technical progress. Moreover, economic or political research was intertwined with ethical considerations, so that technology was never considered for its own sake. It is precisely the elimination of these factors of evolution and diversification that, according to Ellul, “led to a transformation of the process of this evolution. Technical progress is now conditioned only by calculation and efficiency. Research is no longer of an individual, experimental, artisanal order, but of an abstract, mathematical and industrial order.”

• Different possibilities of choice: From the five characteristics of the technical phenomenon already mentioned — typical of pre-modern civilizations, that is, those prior to the eighteenth century — there follows a sixth characteristic: the possibility of choice left to human beings depending on the group to which they belonged. According to Ellul, two great types of civilizations coexisted at that time, which he calls, drawing on a distinction already well known in his era, “active civilization” and “passive civilization.” The former were characteristic of human groups oriented toward the exploitation of land, expansion and conquest, and were therefore more subject to the influence of technology, whereas the latter were, by contrast, turned inward and concerned primarily with satisfying their fundamental needs without a desire for material expansion. Within this framework, human beings could thus withdraw from the influence of technology and live in a form of relative independence from it.

The six characteristics of techniques as they existed in civilizations prior to the eighteenth century would entirely disappear at the moment of the first phase of industrialization, which began in England and inaugurated what most historians now call the first industrial revolution. In our so-called “modern” civilization, by contrast with the old world, technology is no longer limited by anything: it extends to all domains and encompasses all our activities; it produces an infinity of ever more perfected means; it is global; it evolves at a dizzying pace and has finally led to a form of unity and uniformization of civilizations.

Yet, according to Ellul, the disappearance of these six characteristics is not sufficient to characterize the technical world as it exists today, as though it were enough, to define our modernity, simply to negate the previous characteristics. In other words, the modern world possesses its own specific features. It has given rise to an entirely unprecedented form of relationship linking human beings and society to the technical world. These characteristics are also six in number and are all logically connected to describe a single phenomenon, the technical phenomenon: 1) automatism of technical choice; 2) self-augmentation; 3) unity (or indivisibility); 4) the necessary interlinking of techniques; 5) technical universalism; 6) autonomy of technology. These six characteristics are analyzed in another article on this blog: The six characteristics of the technical world according to Jacques Ellul.