Hooke emphasized that nature will become as intelligible as technology once we see in it the workings of tiny, but ordinary machines. In contrast, the human brand of nanoengineering may end up giving us technology as opaque as nature’s alchemy.
From chalk to abalone shell [...] this is the “alchemy” of natural nanotechnology without human intervention. And now physicists, chemists, materials scientists, biologists, mechanical and electrical engineers, and many other specialists are pooling their collective knowledge and tools so that they too can tailor the world on atomic and molecular scales. (Amato, 1999, 4)
In the eyes of many, the promise of nanotechnology is to harness nature’s alchemy, its opaque, if not occult, powers of self-organization for the purposes of engineering. At first glance, this appears to be deeply implausible rhetoric. When scientists and engineers tailor the world, surely they do not do so alchemically. They will need to figure out first by what mechanism the abalone transmutes chalk into shell. And when a biological cell is represented as a factory that utilizes nanoscale machinery, we clearly project upon it the mechanical conception of “rotary motion just like fan motors whirring in summertime windows” (Amato, 1999, 4). Indeed, before we take nature as a formidable nanoengineer from which we can learn a trick or two, we must first attribute to it our idea of engineering.
As far as scientifically understanding nature and learning from it are concerned, not much has changed since the time of Hooke (or Kant, for that matter): nature becomes intelligible only to the extent that we can represent it intelligibly in terms of causal mechanisms, be they physical, chemical, or biological. From the point of view of scientific understanding, the difference between the texts from 1665 and 1999 thus evaporates fairly quickly. For the philosophy of technology and questions of design, however, the difference between the two texts remains striking, giving rise to my main thesis: naturalized technology drives a wedge between scientific understanding and technical reach. It requires very traditional conceptions of understanding and control to develop nanoscale devices, genetically modified foods, or smart environments.86 But once we think of these as technical systems in their own right, naturalized technologies cease to be objects of science and of experience, they take on a life of their own such that we no longer appear to perceive, comprehend, or control them, such that we no longer think of them as mechanisms or something “devised by human Wit,” but something instead that has receded into the fabric of uncomprehended nature with its occult qualities.
To obtain a more precise conception of naturalized technology, genetically modified foods may serve as a paradigm example. Here, the technical intervention that makes for a genetically modified plant and thus enters into food remains essentially inconspicuous to human senses. The genetic modification can produce visible and invisible phenotypic traits; these phenotypic traits might then whither away with the plant or literally become consumed, thus cease to exist - and for all we know, this may be the end of the story. However, at least in some accounts, the genetic modification may also persist and continue to act as it passes through our bodies to some untraceable place in the environment. In these accounts we should wonder about health effects, environmental interactions, the Monarch butterfly, and the like. Though they begin as purposeful interventions in nature, genetically modified foods can thus implicate us in a pervasive technical environment that appears to be just as uncanny as brute nature with its germs, viruses, or bacteria on the one hand, its hurricanes, earth-quakes, erosions, and eruptions on the other.
More briefly put, we encounter naturalized technology when, for all we know, a technical agency unfolds below or above human thresholds of perception and control.87 This needs to be taken quite literally and distinguished from the cases where technical agency unfolds merely below the threshold of awareness or attention. When we are simply not aware of the operation of a technical system, when we do not attend to it, this may be due to trust in its functioning and routinized use. When technology thus takes on the invisibility of the normal and habitual, this fits easily into narratives of nature becoming technologized. According to these narratives, science and technology progresses just to the extent that we can master nature or count on it. Reformulated in the terms suggested by Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation,” science and technology progress just to the extent that a magical relation to occult powers gives way to disenchanted and rationalized control. When a machine works well, we no longer attend to it, and when nature is technologized we can afford to black-box all of the particulars as we simply count on its deliverables.
Excepting physicists who know the subject, those of us who take a streetcar have no idea how it sets itself in motion. We do not need to know this. It is enough to “count” on the behavior of the streetcar, we orient our actions accordingly; but we know nothing of how one constructs a streetcar so that it moves. Savages know their tools incomparably better. [...] Increasing intellectualization and rationalization therefore do not imply increasing general knowledge of one’s conditions of life. It implies something else, namely knowledge of or faith in the fact that, if only one wanted to, one could find out any time, thus that in principle there are no secret, incalculable forces entering in, that instead - in principle - the things can be mastered through calculation. (Weber, 1988, 593 ff.)
As opposed to genetically modified foods that may or may not be passing through our bodies and whose causal agency may or may not persist, as opposed also to nanoparticulate sensors that might be used to monitor environmental conditions, Weber’s streetcar, a desk-top computer, or the heating-unit in our house are perfectly macroscopic objects. We can count on them because we know of their presence, absence, and reliable working. We can switch them on and off, enter and leave them, and even without knowing how they work, we can judge whether they are working or broken down. No matter how much of the inner workings and outer grids are black-boxed by users of those technologies that make for a calculable world, their technical control is attended by more or less schematic representations of how this control is exercised.
In contrast, the hallmark of technology naturalized is not that its use has become routinized, habitual, or “natural” in the sense of normal. Indeed, it is unclear to what extent we can be “users” of it at all. The hallmark of technology naturalized is that it acts below or above the thresholds of perception and control, that we cannot represent its agency as it occurs, that we have no switches to initiate or stop operation, no direct knowledge of whether it is functioning or broken down. As opposed to the case of the streetcar, reading up on genetic engineering does not help.
As we come to better understand and even admire the capabilities of a broadly enabling technology, the world becomes not more but less transparent to the individual consumer and it proves harder to maintain a sense of ownership, empowerment, responsibility, and control. When we black-box the workings of a macroscopically embedded device like a radio, what remains are a few buttons, dials, or displays and, of course, the sound that is received. We maintain a representation of a schematic causal relation between an input and an output. But when we black-box the working of a genetic modification or of automatic climate-control in a building, what remains is nothing at all but the technically altered environment itself that is indistinguishable in its mere givenness to a natural environment. Indeed, this might serve as formal criterion for what are here called naturalized technologies: when you black-box it, there is nothing left.
86
I use the term “smart environments” to refer to a technological program that also goes by “ubiquitous computing” or “ambient intelligence.”
87
In the following, I will focus on technological agency below the threshold of perception. At the end of this chapter, I also consider engineering approaches below the threshold of control. (From the perspective of the user, the two notions are closely associated, of course, in that we cannot control what we cannot perceive.)