Contain Technology Lest It Contain You
To contain technology successfully, we've got to have a proper understanding of human nature, technology, and our weakness
We often only realize it in the quiet moments early in the morning or at the end of the day when the world around us goes silent. In these precious moments of silence, we become aware of the incessant pull on our attention. In our hyper-connected world, we’re constantly hearing the siren call of our devices, wooing us to come and feast our senses on digital delights. The invitation is to step away from what our technology implies are the painful, dull, boring activities that might otherwise occupy our lives. To turn our eyes upon something that will satisfy us.
At first, you might think that this is a modern problem that originated with the invention of the Internet, the smartphone, and social media. The truth is that the story is much bigger than our modern devices. It’s a story about technology and human nature. We shape our tools. Then they shape us.
As much as technology contributes to the problem, the real problem is not our technology. It’s what our technology reflects and amplifies. The problem is in us.
If we want to address it, we first need to realize our own vulnerability and approach technology with wisdom and caution, doing our best to contain it lest it contain us.
The connection between vaping and AI
Two weeks ago I wrote about the electronic cigarette company Juul and how they found themselves mired in a public relations nightmare. A poorly considered launch campaign twisted what the founders envisioned as a device for adults to find a less harmful outlet for their smoking habit into a firestorm of teenage nicotine addiction and sickness.
Last week I wrote about what I learned from Mustafa Suleyman’s book The Coming Wave. In it, he argues for the importance of designing containment strategies for the technologies currently powering a revolution in artificial intelligence and synthetic biology.
As I’ve been sitting with these two stories, I’ve noticed the ways they connect and overlap. The way that technology affects both individuals and communities. Together they teach us that containment strategies must be a foundational part of technology development. Mapping out, to the best of our ability, the impacts on society of the things we are designing is critical and must happen from the beginning and repeatedly throughout the design process.
Our modern era is filled with powerful digital technologies. These tools have brought us many good things like the ability to maintain community across great distances, have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, and help make our lives more convenient in countless ways. That’s not even to mention the advances in fields like agriculture and medicine that have helped us to live healthier lives.
And yet, technologies always have a downside. For every relationship that the Internet creates or sustains, there are others that it destroys or warps. For every beautiful moment that I capture in crystal clear detail with the camera on my iPhone, there’s another moment where it pulls me away from being fully present with my family.
What we often don’t fully realize is that our relationships with our technology are complex and dynamic. Every device we use shapes us, whether it is something that we carry close to us like a smartphone or smartwatch, or a tool that exists further from us like a dishwasher or a lawnmower. These devices say something about what the meaning of life and work is. All too often, we don’t realize what that message is. Even when we do, it has already created habits that have worn deep grooves into our daily patterns of life.
The comfort of technology dulls our senses and shapes us and our communities
At some level, we understand that introducing a new technology into our lives will change us. Pay attention and you’ll see it at the heart of every marketing campaign and commercial. That new iPhone? It’s faster than ever and will allow you to context switch between all your apps at even greater speeds. Its new camera will allow you to document your life with ever-increasing clarity. And hold on to your hats if you think the smartphone is the endgame. The future that Apple envisions is one where their Vision Pro goggles will literally filter our entire visual experience of the world.
Even technologies that might seem more benign cast a certain vision of the world and what it means to flourish in it. The dishwasher saves you time and replaces the pain of washing dishes by hand. It could be used to spend more time with your family, but more often than not, it frees you up to mindlessly scroll an infinite feed on your phone. A central heating and cooling system offers the ability to control our environment. But with it comes the underlying expectation that we can tune our surroundings according to our desires.
Our tools don’t just impact us as individuals, but they also shape our communal patterns. Ursula Franklin understood this. She writes in The Real World of Technology:
It should be evident by now that there is no such thing as “just introducing” a new gadget to do one particular task. It is foolish to assume that everything else in such a situation will remain the same; all things change when one thing changes. Even the introduction of a dishwasher into a family’s life changes their communication and time patterns, their expectations and the ways in which the family works together.
If you think these tools aren’t shaping you, try living without them. In the moments when everything works as it should, our technologies often fade into the background. We think that this is the way things always have been and always should be. But when they break, the facade crumbles, and we are reconnected with the reality of our lack of control.
A call and warning about containment
As we develop and use technology, we need to stay alert and aware of these dynamics. While it’s not realistic for most of us to eliminate our use of technology, that doesn’t leave us helpless. However, if we just listen to the voices of the companies selling us their latest and greatest, it’s unlikely that their vision for a life filled with meaning is aligned with our own.
To hone our awareness, we need to think about technology differently. We need to cultivate a greater respect for the ways that it shapes us and our communities. This begins with an awareness of how the technologies of the past have shaped our world. This gives us a lens through which to see technology and its influence more clearly. Then, we need to think about if we will choose to engage with a particular technology, and if we choose to engage, how we will set boundaries around how we will use it.
Having a plan in place before a technology is developed and in the early stages of its use is critical. It’s especially important because, as time goes on, our agency recedes. Ursula Franklin again:
The early phase of technology often occurs in a take-it-or-leave-it atmosphere. Users are involved and have a feeling of control that gives them the impression that they are entirely free to accept or reject a particular technology and its products. But when a technology, together with the supporting infrastructures, becomes institutionalized, users often become captive supporters of both the technology and the infrastructures. (At this point, the technology itself may stagnate, improvements may become cosmetic or marginal, and competition becomes ritualized.) In the case of the automobile, the railways are gone — the choice of taking the car or leaving it at home no longer exists.
Containment is important because technologies are developed in feedback loops and those feedback loops are often built to leverage economies of scale. Once a technology hits a certain level of adoption, the choice of whether or not to participate begins to disappear. Whether it’s cars and the way they shape the use of roads and work against bike- or walking-friendly cities or the telephone, email, or text messaging, the choice about whether or not to participate is a quickly vanishing one.
Containment Strategies: Reveal, Rely, Reflect, Respect, and Relationship
If we want technology to support instead of inhibit our flourishing, we need to set up some guardrails before we engage with it. There are no easy answers here, but there are some simple things we can do and questions that we can ask to help us engage wisely.
1. Reveal What’s Under The Hood
The first step is to understand what is the root human need that a technology appeals to. How does it connect with our core desires for power, money, or fame?
Another way is to try and dig down to understand what core human need the technology is trying to address. To this end, we can ask: “To what problem is <insert technology here> the answer?”1
Even if there are no clear answers to these questions, the very act of asking them puts us in a frame of mind where we can look at technology more critically to understand both the intended and unintended impacts of a particular tool.
2. Rely on Redundancy: Containment is about layers
Whether we’re talking about containing technology at a personal or society-wide level we can’t rely on a single line of defense. We’ve got to build redundancy into our strategy such that we can survive the failure of one or more containment measures.
In The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman lays out some ideas about containing the next wave of potentially disruptive technologies in AI in synthetic biology. His approach demonstrates a layered approach as he lays out plans for containing the technology both at the scale of individual innovators and companies, but also at the scale of government regulation and international treaties.
Redundancy also matters at a personal level. I’ve seen this in my life over the past year as I’ve built a containment strategy to help me disengage from my phone before bed. Not only do I have my phone scheduled to enter Do Not Disturb mode each night, but I charge it in our living room and don’t bring it into my bedroom at night. Having a habit built with several layers helps me to be more successful in building healthier habits.
3. Reflect & Review: Create a plan to review how containment is going
When you set a containment plan in place, you should also set a plan for when and how you will review how it’s working. Invariably you’ll learn something from your experiment, but if you don’t have a specific time and date when you’ll revisit it, you’ll rob yourself of the opportunity to reflect on how things are going and to make adjustments.
What if before we introduced a new technology into our lives we sat down to think about what we hoped it would bring us and how it might shape us? We often approach the tools in our lives as if they aren’t going to shape us. This is foolishness.
4. Respect your weakness: Don't ignore your vulnerabilities
Knowing that tools are going to shape us is one thing. But cultivating a proper respect for the power of technology is not enough. We must also understand our own weaknesses in the face of technological power. Our willpower is limited. We can’t even meet our own expectations. If we are to engage responsibly, we must be sober-minded and clear-headed about the ways that technology may exploit our vulnerabilities.
5. Relationships: Build a community
In our weakness, we need others to walk alongside us. We need people in our lives who can pick us up when we fall down and call us out when we are going in the wrong direction.
A hallmark of technology is empowering the individual and reducing our dependence on others. This leads us to believe that we are, or can be, self-sufficient. Ultimately, none of us is enough by ourselves. We need each other.
Containing technology is in many ways the question of our day. Will we contain it or be contained by it?
Got a comment, I’d love to hear it!
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Great Things From This Week
Here are a few things I read or watched this week that I think are worth your time!
Are you sure you want to make a dent in the universe?
A talk from Andy Crouch about whether we want to have an impact or an influence.
What might it look like for you to commute in silence this week?
Learning to Receive the Day by
in .
How might you introduce friction into your habits with technology?
in 
How are our devices distorting our vision and cravings?
The Hollow Boys, and Girls: Restoring Risk, Efficacy, and the Small Triumphs of Life by
and in
The Book Nook
In the middle of our current murder mystery book club pick, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson. A fun read so far with some plays on the traditional murder mystery genre. I still am only about halfway to where I need to be for our first meeting to discuss this week!
The Professor Is In
The best thing about working at Harvey Mudd is the people I get to work with. I’m looking forward to seeing students again this week as the semester starts today, but last week I was celebrating the wonderful faculty and staff in the engineering department that I have the pleasure of working with. Appreciate their care, creativity, and passion for our work together.
This photo is taken in the foothills just north of Claremont where we spent last Friday together reflecting on where we are and where we’re going next.
Leisure Line
LA is full of great light shows. Some of our favorites are the LA Arboretum Lightscape, LA Zoo Lights, and the Enchanted Forest of Light at Descanso Gardens.
Lightscape at the Arboretum is our annual staple and we normally mix in one other. This year was the first time we went to the LA Zoo Lights and it was great. Fun to see the zoo at night with everything all lit up after seeing them put up all the decorations during the day.
Still Life
The new Costco chocolate chunk cookie has landed at the food court near us. Weighing in at an astonishing 750 (!) calories, combine this with a soft-serve ice cream and you can shoot over 75% of your daily recommended caloric intake in 10 minutes!
I’m not sure if it’s worth the 750 calories, but it’s huge, served warm, and at $2.49, a hard deal to beat. Very tasty too!
This was inspired by the title of
’s brilliantly-named first-year writing course: “To what problem is ChatGPT the answer?”
Hi Prof. Josh. I get the idea that if the several of us commenters were sitting together in a room with you, we could easily carry on this conversation for several hours or days. It's taken me a long time to even know what I would write here, since this topic has been whirling around in my head ever since you published this post. I will say only these two things.
First, the main question is about how we can set up safeguards around new technology so as to minimize negative social and personal effects and byproducts that are bound to result. I love the word that you chose to brand this with--containment--since it reminds me of us trying to tame a wild beast that we think we can get some mileage out of if only we can get it to obey our will. Somehow, I cannot seem to keep my mind on this question, but instead I've foolishly wandered off into a parallel conversation in which I'm seeing that IT IS US who are contained by the technology which we have crafted, thinking that we are the ones in control of our universe, but in reality we are constrained to the pathways which have necessarily formed. A very literal example is in transportation. We are so focused on the cars and vehicles which we have poured massive efforts into developing and perfecting, that we are routinely guilty of having neglected to dedicate an appropriate amount of time and resources to the actual pathways on which those vehicles carry us. I admit that it sometimes feels very freeing to be out cruising on I-5 in great excess of the speed limit, but how free am I? Can I suddenly point my vehicle in any direction I want and continue to experience the same exhilaration without a suitable road underneath my wheels? And no, flying airborne will never feel the same as having my car hugging the pavement at 90 MPH and up. Every technology we have invented poses many strict and unavoidable limits on us. The way I see it, it is almost as if the technology itself poses these limits on us, who are now victimized to live with those limits since our technology is built upon so much infrastructure and social integration that it sometimes literally takes an act of Congress to change things. The freedom that we thought we were crafting for ourselves through innovation, it may be nothing more than illusion that we have drugged ourselves into believing is real freedom.
In the way that I'm thinking, it is not containment that is needed, but rather wholesale disengagement. To borrow from your example, it is not just a matter of spending less time on my mobile devices before bed (woe is me). It is finding a way (help me God!!!) to not even be enslaved to them at all. I say all that knowing that daily, I must filter through at least 100 emails to get my inbox down to the 3-5 that are critical for me to read, because either my job or ministry activities or community involvements or personal relationships or hobbies have come to depend on those digital communications.
That brings me to the second and final point, in which I am myself earnestly seeking how I might practically simplify my life so that I do not again and again find myself to be a victim of the technological bulldozer. As I write that, I am taken back to when we watched the epic silent movie "Metropolis" in a one-off History of Technology class offered at Mudd in 1979, in which Lewis Mumford's tome was required reading. Picture the beleaguered masses enslaved to keeping their massive machines running. What is the antidote? I hope that it could be this simple. Namely, God created everything in the natural order, and it was esteemed to be nothing short of good. Over the millennia, we have managed to design and invent our way around that simple goodness and have created the impossibly complex world that we inhabit today. Piece by piece, practice by practice, device by device, could we not somehow retrain ourselves to return to what God originally intended, and find a way to limit and re-purpose how technology should fit into our lives? I see this happening with people who are growing their own food as a matter of lifestyle, or those who have for the most part ditched the use of a personal vehicle (I've been trying to do this in limited ways for going on 2 decades now). I know someone who even ditched phone messaging; his last smartphone is in the bottom of a creek with a bullet hole through the screen (I know, those lunatic Oregonians!). Our society is going crazy, and right now I'm thinking especially about the Vision Pro which you mentioned. We do not have to allow our individual and collective chains to be yanked by those who institute these usage standards for us. In many cases, we can decide that we want to live more simply, more in line with what our ancestors once enjoyed, more aligned with what our Creator gave us all the while knowing that we would immediately start tinkering with it.
Well, this is by no means any kind of complete thought on my part. I think that I've been wrestling with this question probably starting with my own days at Mudd, in fact, spurred on by that history of technology class and reading Mumford. My class of 1981 was a "special" one (lucky us) in which all of us had to write a pretty lengthy dissertation in order to graduate. This topic was in fact the subject of my paper. Your post (and some neighboring ones) have merely reminded me that I am still trying to address these issues in my own life. So then, Prof. Josh, thank you.
Really insightful piece, Josh! You mentioned "The comfort of technology dulls our senses and shapes us and our communities." How do you think we can counteract this dulling of senses, especially in younger generations increasingly reliant on tech? Aside from containment. Is there space for positive-use design in this? or is the technology too potent and containment the only viable way in your opinion