Moral Technology

Tasked with creating a moral or amoral technology, our group generated several potential maxims. As a tool, Elizabeth proposed the use of a praxinoscope, a Victorian self-propelled animation device, to send subliminal messages through rotation. This led to a discussion concerning the type of messages the scope could convey and the moral implications of those messages.

The praxinoscope requires a 360° rotation to work as an animation device, however the Servo Motor (which we programmed to run through an Audrino) is limited to a 180° range of movement. Therefore, we decided to incorporate the servo’s ability to stop anywhere between 0° and 180°. This led our group to the story of the Russian cognitive psychologist and the peasant:

 “And let me tell you a story: the Russian cognitive psychologist, Vygotsky, who worked just after the Russian Revolution, worked with peasants, some of whom had been to the collective schools and some of whom had not. And he gave them little tests. And the basic pattern of the test was "Put together the things that go together." So he showed this peasant a hammer, a saw, a hatchet and a log of wood, and he said, "Put together the things that go together." And the peasant said, "Well, clearly, what goes together is the log of wood and the hatchet and the saw because you use the hatchet and the saw to cut the wood for firewood." And Vygotsky said—and this was his regular strategem—"I have a friend who says that the saw, the hammer and the hatchet go together because they are tools." And the peasant answered, "Then your friend must have a lot of firewood!" (Schon, 1987, para. 4).

With this story in mind, we came up with the idea for a device which would indicate the right or wrong combination of items.  We programmed the servo to stop on five items, and react to each item with a red or green light as follows:

1. A hammer / 30 degrees/ opposite colour cyan/ green LED

2. A saw/ 60 degrees/ opposite colour magenta/ red LED

3. The hatchet/ 90 degrees/opposite colour yellow/ green LED

4. Log of Wood/ 120 degrees/ opposite colour black/ red LED

5. Saw going through Wood/ 150 degrees/opposite colour white/ green LED

Our intention was to show the moral dilemma of society’s privileging of some opinions as “right” while others are considered “wrong”. If this device was to be used as a teaching tool, it would privilege the ideas those whom “have a lot of firewood” over those who must group the items in such a way to keep themselves warm. 

 

Bruno Latour views technology as delegated human activity.  As creators of technology we remove humanity from a task and replace it, in the case of our project, with a computerized device that can only indicate right or wrong answers: “If, in our societies, there are thousands of such lieutenants to which we have delegated competences, it means that what defines our social relations is, for the most part, prescribed back to us by nonhumans” (Latour, 1988, p. 310). The device we created allows us to sit back and be told the right answer.  It removes the thought process behind the question: which of these objects belong together?