Taavi Hallimäe: How should we define philosophy and ethics in the context of technology? How related are they to each other?

Ariel Guersenzvaig: The difference between the two lies in that that while the first tries to engage with technology and technologies as phenomena, the second thinks about the entailments or the effects of the technologies, and the design thereof, in the context of our lives, as well as how we relate to these technologies. Especially about how they mediate our perception of the world, how they mediate our actions and how they influence our values. Yeah, so they are related, but they are not exactly the same.

TH: That was something I was interested in as well. Because there is this saying that technology is also the expansion of the human body or human mind. And in that case it seems interesting to know how one would really become aware of this kind of tautological perception of technology because every tool to understand technology is also technical in the end.

AG: In my book “The Goods of Design”, I discuss the views of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who is an important figure in the philosophy of technology. According to his view, technology is inherently human, it’s part of who we are – being human is being technological. He argues that we develop or conceive technology in order to make up time to pursue other endeavours, to do other things that seem to be more relevant to us, and technology simplifies the process for us. Thus, releasing time that we can devote to the task of becoming ourselves. For example, we develop houses, shelters, and dwelling spaces, so we don’t have to think about where we are going to sleep every day. So, in a way, we are solving the problems of staying warm and safe preemptively before they occur. We know that we are going to have to sleep. We know that we’re going to have to have a safe place to rest. We know we’re going to have to eat and that’s why we have a fridge. And of course, the fridge has consequences for our behaviour. I am not saying that it doesn’t. Some of these consequences are undesirable and negative, but the idea that Ortega puts forward is that technology is the way that we have to pursue the task of being human, and being human is not so much about seeking shelter or seeking food because that will be part of our animal behaviour. He is not contrasting humans with animals, but he says that’s part of our animal side. Keeping yourself warm and stomach full is something that all animals have to do. But he says that there’s some things that only we humans do. He is not fully clear about what these things are. He doesn’t talk in detail about these things, but technology is part of his philosophical anthropology, at least in my reading of Ortega.

TH: So, we use technology to have more time for more meaningful activities, but even these meaningful activities are based on technology. To enjoy music, we have to log in to Spotify or to play vinyls we have to know how the record player works.

TH: As soon as someone starts talking about technology, someone else interrupts to ask if it’s good or not. On one hand, I think about the German cultural critic Theodor Adorno, who diagnosed the relationship between fascism and the amount of force one has to apply to close a car door. On the other hand, there’s a lot of people who are seeing technology as something which is going to solve the crisis we are having or are going to have. How can we balance ourselves between these viewpoints?

TH: The same is true for computers, which have their historical background in the military. This is often the way we have developed new technologies. But this brings us to the question of the code of ethics for designers, which is also one of the focal points in your book. What is your point of view in the context of codes and regulations concerning designers, as well as companies or technicians?

AG: This is a crucial point that has many sides. I am in favour of regulation, but first we have to clarify some terms. Some professions are certified. For example, if you are going to be a doctor, you need to be certified. But you can also call yourself a healer or a shaman, and then you don’t need to be certified. Nevertheless, you will still claim to heal people. Yes, you cannot prescribe drugs, but you can prescribe herbs, crystals or Reiki. But the professions which are very important are controlled by the state. We cannot call ourselves lawyers just like that. First, you have to study law, but knowing the law is not enough. You need to be certified by the state and you need to have some type of licence. In engineering, in some cases, you need it too, you also need it as an architect. But I don’t see that happening in design. I mean, it could happen, but I don’t think that it will happen anytime soon, because there are even types of engineering – for example computer engineering – that don’t require licensing. The paradox is that if you need to remove asbestos from a floor or a wall, you need a certified professional. You need to have a certified company to remove asbestos because it’s highly toxic. But if you are a programmer, you can develop a program that is used for harassing people, and you can do it without any kind of certification. For me this is highly paradoxical. Despite its impact, design is not a certified profession. Journalism is not a certified profession either, anyone can call themselves a journalist. You could study journalism, but you could study law or history or nothing at all and you could still work as a journalist and call yourself one. Still, I’m not sure mandatory licensing for designers is the way to go, possibly not. But this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have regulation at all either.

TH: In Estonia, we have the official press council formed by the public newspapers themselves whose main function is to discuss the ethical questions raised from publishing controversial articles written by the journalists of the newspapers who are part of the council. Could designers have something similar to that?

AG: Yeah, we could have that, we could have a regulatory agency.

TH: But it won’t be regulated by the law itself. It will be based on ethics.

AG: Not necessarily. This usually depends on the broad sense of liability. For example, if you design toys for children, then they need some special kind of stickers, or there are some materials you cannot use or sizes in which you cannot produce. Or if you are manufacturing pencils, then there are paints you cannot use... So, there are already a lot of laws in relation to product liability.

TH: Would you say that in some sense the rules and bureaucracy are giving agency to the technology or the products themselves?

AG: You mean agency in the sense of capacity to act?

TH: No, more like becoming a responsible object.

AG: Oh okay. That’s a good question. I think that in this case nobody will ever be responsible for anything. That’s a super dangerous idea. Because when you are able to allocate responsibility to a thing – then it is an illusionary responsibility. People also allocate responsibility to a company, and we know the consequences of that. At least you could claim that if a company is responsible for something then they have to pay a fine, and there are also people behind it who will eventually get affected by it and may be sent to prison. Whereas taking a chair or a robot – what are we able to do? Are we going to destroy the chair, dismantle the robot? There are many different definitions for responsibility. But to me one thing is clear when talking about responsibility as blame or praise: it only makes sense when applied to humans. Yet, for me the most important part of responsibility is feeling responsible for others, caring for others. Of course, objects are important and they have a role. In an article I wrote with Ramon Sangüesa – who is an artificial intelligence expert in Spain – we made a differentiation between strong and weak agency. Strong agency is something we do, and some non-human animals have as well. This means this agency is about making plans, executing these plans, but also about coming up with the plans in the first place and thinking about its potential consequences. But weak agency is when we have things do something for us. So, for example, a robot vacuum cleaner or even a table, they do things for us – the table is supporting the plates and the cups and the robot is cleaning the room. But this happens because we instructed the robot to do so, but the robot did not decide to do that. And when the robot kills a baby playing in the room, it would be silly to blame the robot. You could blame me for using the robot in a dangerous situation or you could blame the designers or the programmers, right? But it still won’t be sensical to place blame on the robot because – besides blame – responsibility is also about praise. It would also be silly to say “good Roomba, you cleaned the room very well”, because it doesn’t have any appreciation of that praise. Related to responsibility, there’s also the problem of many hands, which is a known problem with large projects in engineering. When things go south and we have a problem, then it is very difficult to attribute responsibility because there are so many people involved in the project and often they don’t have access to the big picture. It is very difficult to blame somebody in particular – when a plane falls down, should we blame the maintenance staff, the designers or the pilot? It is called the problem of many hands because you have many hands working on a project. It might be initially difficult to find one person that is particularly responsible. Thanks to regulation focused on accountability we can greatly mitigate this problem in highly regulated sectors like aeronautics or the automotive industry.

TH: For me it is also related to what Hannah Arendt wrote about the repressive society where we should question putting responsibility on people who are just trying to do a ‘good job’ regardless of the consequences.

AG: Yes, but Arendt also made a claim which is very important to me. If we are talking about Eichmann in this case, then his problem was very basic – it was his thoughtlessness. This is the most despicable part of his whole behaviour.

TH: And in this case it would be also irrational to blame trains the logistics for which Eichmann was responsible during the holocaust.

AG: Yes, exactly. Tragically, his identity and ethics worked in a very operative manner. At least you should contemplate what you are doing! The problem with the banality of evil is that it’s banal because Eichmann didn’t think about it. Perhaps the evil had happened anyway, but this is one important blame one can place on Eichmann – he was thoughtless, he didn’t consider what he was doing other than saying that he was following rules.

TH: Yes, following rules is something I was also thinking about. We can picture a perfect world where the designer is always ethical and caring, always concerned about accessibility, equality, sustainability, etc. But in this case, what would be the ethical responsibility of the technicians at the assembly line?

TH: I recently read an interview with Kirsti Metusala who was an Estonian lamp designer during the Soviet period and whose works were exported all around the Soviet Union. Her name wasn’t well known, but in Estonia products designed by her were part of every home. In her interview she says that even though she and her co-designers worked on lamps, the design of the switches – how far from the lamp the switch is positioned on the wire – was decided by the technicians at the factory. Designers didn’t have any say about this. But like Metusala is arguing, the switches were directly related to the question of usability – they were also an issue of design.

AG: Yeah, I agree. I think this could feed into my framework in the sense that the technician’s obligation isn’t about usability but about implementing or developing the design specifications. Usability is surely within the designer’s purview. I want to clarify the dichotomy I’m envisioning between technical and professional design. Technical design is mainly concerned with technical issues. I am not saying anything about how beautiful it is, I am not saying anything about the quality of the materials. Social or ethical concerns are not part of technical design. And then we will have professional design. The difference will have to do with how much the role of caring for others will occupy a particular activity. So, the technical part of the practice will be similar, and the skills will necessarily be very similar. Perhaps the same people can work as a technician one day, and as a professional designer the next. You were right, if I decided to design a car I need to think about the person’s safety, but my main goal is also to make money for the company. It is not to contribute to the sustainability of the city. As a technical designer I would think in this way. But if I want to engage in professional design, then perhaps I will not be able to design cars the way we are designing cars now, because that will be against the welfare of society. You see what I mean?

TH: Do we need some kind of certification for the products that are designed according to these or those values?

TH: Refusing to design guns is a very distinctive, but relatively easy example. A lot of design today is not necessarily visible, and therefore we tend not to acknowledge where – or even if – there’s a designer with some ethical responsibility. For example, in the service sector a customer may realise that some processes are not working as they should and because of the unpleasantness the customer will start blaming the service worker who is standing behind the counter.

AG: Yes, you’re right. But that doesn’t change the point in the sense that if you, for example, think about banking. I don’t know how it is in Estonia – you are a highly digitised society – but in Spain senior citizens have a lot of trouble accessing their bank accounts. The offices are closing down, but they were used to going to the office to talk to a clerk, to get help from a real person. Now they are all of a sudden told to do it online, but they don’t know how to. It’s not only a matter of the will they have, they are unable to do it, they are digitally illiterate.

TH: This is actually the case in Estonia as well.

TH: In your work, Alasdair MacIntyre is a very important author who you constantly refer to. He writes about internal and external goods. How are these concepts related to technology as well as the separation between technicians and designers – or even social designers – as we have been discussing here?

AG: Yeah, absolutely, I didn’t mention him. The idea of a technician is that he or she will be engaged mainly with external goods. And the external goods in this case will be money or getting paid for your job. But a professional designer will also be engaged with internal goods. And these goods have to do necessarily with the idea of promoting the flourishing of other’s well-being. So that’s why the internal and external goods are important for the professional and the field itself. The technical work of different designers may be very similar, but the idea is that some designers will be primarily engaged with internal goods, whereas technical designers will care first about external goods. They might still care about the quality of the design, as well as about beauty or even usability and accessibility. But this will be secondary to achieving the external goods.

TH: I am wondering how technology helps us to achieve the internal goods. For example, should the social designer be more engaged with technology?

AG: Like I said at the beginning, we can’t avoid technology, right? Not only for our daily functioning, but we also need technology to become the person we want to be. And a very good example of this is that in order to be a designer, you need a computer. In order to be a samurai, you need a special type of sword, made from a special type of metal. 

TH: We also need technology to define and understand ourselves, to construct our identities.

AG: Exactly, that’s why it makes you, it constitutes you. The idea of technology is not only instrumental, it’s also constitutional, for becoming who you are. If you play soccer, you need a ball, but the ball is not only an instrument – without the ball, there’s no football.

TH: It’s part of meaning making – to write a poem, you need a pen.