Thoughts on Techno-Anthropology
I wish someone would’ve predicted the emergence of an multidisciplinary study called Techno-Anthropology when I was an undergrad, Anthropology major at Syracuse University in the early 90’s. I left school certain that I would never use my ethnographic and cultural observation skills in my career as a technologist. Fast forward almost 30 years later and there’s a palpable need for social science expertise to justify, understand and perhaps sometimes counter the wide spread advance of technology in our society. Techno-anthropologists examine the cultural, social, and ethical implications of technology, as well as how technology is integrated into various aspects of human life.
As big tech corporations engage in an arms race to produce the smartest generative AI services, critical questions about how this technology both benefits and harms society cannot be answered fast enough. The people developing the technologies are probably not the most qualified to give the answers. I believe this is where the Techno-Anthropologist (TANs for short) can be useful. In full disclosure I’m one of the people asking these important questions at a big tech corporation (AWS) and managing programs to identify and potentially mitigate bias and harms. My studies in Anthropology and decades as a technologist certainly help, but I often find myself wondering if at some point I could transition to a role as a full-time, independent researcher.
The TAN of GenAI and Quantum Computing
One of the things I’d study almost immediately as a TAN would be the technology culture groups that emerge as an effect of the recent advancements in generative AI and quantum computing. In both cases these culture groups would be comprised of professional and academic elites, able to understand and apply the technologies at an expert level. Groups like this are some of the most difficult and interesting to study. For GenAI, I’d be curious how the culture groups would mitigate the potential for their creations to ultimately replace them. This possibility has lead to a new form of Elite Panic where technology fear mongering masquerades as public service warnings from lumninaries, such as Geoffrey Hinton and Elon Musk, all as they prepare competing, commercial offerings deemed to be safer.
For quantum computing my curiosity and research might focus towards culture groups attempting to answer the philosophical and ontological questions on if our reality is actually a simulation. The existence of working and stable quantum computers not only increases the probability (Neil deGrasse Tyson quotes it at 50/50) that we could be in a simulation (by Turing-equivalence), but it simultaneously puts the capability and computational power to create the simulation of the universe at our finger tips. The people working in the nascent field of quantum computing are highly intellectual and quick to name a litany of societal benefits for the technology. My question is are they equally adept at defining the risks? For anyone who enjoyed the Hulu series DEVS, you know the quantum computing startup Amaya could have desperately used a highly ethical techno-anthropologist on the team.
I’ve been infatuated with the idea of techno-anthropology ever sense I read Donna Haraway’s essay, A Cyborg Manifesto from her collection of papers titled Simians, Cyborgs and Women several years ago. Challenging the dualist constructs of man/animal , man/woman and man/machine in the context of technology is an amazing endeavor. Researching the societal harms and benefits of rapid advances in science on various sub-groups of the global population seemed like a no-brainer.
Flash forward a few years and it turns out that Aalborg University in Denmark agreed with my sentiment. Their undergrad and graduate programs were founded in 2011 and 2012 respectively. For people like myself looking to understand the mission of this new and exciting field, the Aalborg University Press released the textbook What is Techno-Anthropology edited by Tom Borsen and Lars Botin. Other academic institutions like Stanford University and MIT with its HASTS (history, anthropology, science, technology and society) program have also validated the field with doctorate programs.
I’m very excited to see how this emerging field might grow and what kinds of important insights and debates might spring from it. Organizations building advanced technologies are quick to claim that they’re helping solve society’s great challenges. TANs by definition appear to be the ideal people to prove or disprove that. If we start to see job listings for TANs pop-up over the next five years, we’ll know I was right.
Personally I’ve already taken on the mantel of layman techno-anthropologist. I haven’t quite decided if pursuing a formal degree is in my future but for the mean time I intend to continue exploring the field and conducting my own research. My learnings, thoughts and observations will be the subject of all of my subsequent Medium posts. As an anthropolgy student decades ago I had field guides and ethnographies in my toolkit. Today I have advanced skills in machine learning, data analytics and data science as well as a very knowledgable research assistant named ChatGPT.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are my own, and are neither representative nor endorsed by my employer.