Subtle Engine
About the blog
Subtle Engine is a blog about technology, people and religion.
Technology, People…
What is technology? Brian Arthur lists three meanings:
- Technology is a means to fulfil a human purpose
- Technology is an assemblage of practices and components
- The entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture
So toilets, stoves, computers, automobiles, steel and concrete buildings, mass production, public hygiene, the steam engine, modern agriculture, the joint stock company and the printing press are all technologies.
This blog focuses on the first of Arthur’s meanings: what are the human purposes behind technology? In particular it is concerned with emerging technologies and how they change the human/machine relationship.
For example:
- How technology is used to extend people’s abilities or character e.g. intelligence augmentation, moral enhancement, transhumanism
- How technology is becoming more person-like e.g. artificial intelligence, or how we are using technology as a metaphor to understand ourselves
- How technology is used to influence people in more sophisticated ways e.g. persuasive technology, large-scale nudges, political campaigns
Debates about the social effect of technology easily slide toward the extremes of technophilia and technophobia. This blog tries to navigate a technorealist path between the two, exploring ways in which technology can be used well.
…and Religion
But more than just the middle-ground, this blog explores what theological and religious perspectives have to say about emerging technologies. For example: what is technology for, from a Christian perspective?
Even for secular readers, religious perspectives may be of interest, as a helpful lens through which to look at the human purposes of technology.
David Noble describes technological enterprise as an “essentially religious endeavor … suffused with religious belief”. David Lewin wrote “insofar as technology expresses an ultimate concern, it expresses a religious concern”.
Not every post will contain theological content, but exploring religious perspectives on technology will be a consistent thread through the blog.
Subtle Engine
‘Subtle Engine’ is a throw-away phrase used by Elwin Ransom, a character in CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy, to describe a spacecraft. Towards the end of That Hideous Strength, the last of the trilogy, Ransom (referring to when he was kidnapped at the beginning of the series) explains:
But if men by enginry and natural philosophy learn to fly into the Heavens, and come, in the flesh, among the heavenly powers and trouble them, [‘Maleldil’, a symbol of Christ] has not forbidden the Powers to react. For all this is within the natural order. A wicked man did learn so to do. He came flying, by a subtle engine, to where Mars dwells in Heaven and to where Venus dwells, and took me with him as a captive.
That Hideous Strength is a story of a sinister research agency which attempts to engineer beyond the frailty of the human body through experiments in transhumanism. First published in 1945 as the second world war ended, it’s a dystopian parable of materialism and technological reductionism.
Editor
Subtle Engine’s editor is an engineer and researcher who has developed industrial and consumer products and written about the social impact of technologies for a think-tank. You can get in touch over twitter (@SubtleEngine) or by email to subtleengine@gmail.com.
Image Credits
Efforts are made to use and attribute images licensed for re-use, please email any questions. The header image used on the Subtle Engine home page and @SubtleEngine Twitter account are courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.
