techno-solutionism
In plain wordsThe belief that technology, such as a clever app or algorithm, can fix complicated social problems on its own, overlooking their political, economic and human causes.
The habit of treating tangled social, political or institutional problems as engineering puzzles that the right device, app or model can solve, and of reaching for technological fixes before other responses. Critics argue that it misdiagnoses problems whose causes lie in power, resources, values or conflicting interests; redefines goals to fit what can be measured or optimized; ignores side effects and the people a design leaves out; and can entrench the status quo while appearing to change it. In AI debates the charge is leveled at proposals to address poverty, education, health care, policing or misinformation mainly with predictive models or chatbots, and at some AI for goodAI for good, n.: Using AI to tackle social and environmental problems, such as disease, poverty, disasters or climate change, rather than only to make a profit. projects. Defenders reply that the critique can harden into reflexive rejection of tools that do help, and that technical and political responses are complements rather than rivals.
Buying a dropout-prediction model while cutting school counselors is techno-solutionism, not a strategy.
Origin
'Solutionism' in this sense was popularized by writer Evgeny Morozov in To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (2013), who borrowed the word from architecture and urban planning; the critique echoes older debates over the 'technological fix' associated with physicist Alvin Weinberg in the 1960s.
Related
- AI for goodAI for good, n.: Using AI to tackle social and environmental problems, such as disease, poverty, disasters or climate change, rather than only to make a profit.
- AI hypeAI hype, n.: Exaggerated claims about what AI can do or will soon do, made to attract money, attention or customers, which can mislead the public and policymakers.
- ethics washingethics washing, n.: Using talk of ethics, such as principles, advisory boards or pledges, to look responsible and head off regulation, without actually changing what a company does.
- value-sensitive designvalue-sensitive design, n.: A way of designing technology that deliberately identifies the human values at stake, such as privacy, fairness or autonomy, and builds them in from the start instead of patching problems later.
- Goodhart's lawGoodhart's law, n.: The rule of thumb that once a number is used as a target, people or AIs find ways to push it up that no longer reflect what it was meant to measure.
Sources
- Morozov, E. (2013). To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. PublicAffairs.