2 - Learning from the Amish

Summary

The Amish are an unusual case of a community intensely concerned with maintaining control over how technology shapes its future. Though the community’s old-fashioned ways strike many as perplexing, in the age of AI there are good reasons as to why technology and its regulation should be just about as central to mainstream politics as they are to the way the Amish regulate their affairs. Technology is not neutral, as many still think, but is intensely political. This also means that political philosophy and philosophy of technology should be more closely related than they typically are. Mainstream philosophy of technology has unfolded largely separately from mainstream political philosophy. The primary exception is the Marxist tradition that has long investigated the role of technology in the dialectical unfolding of history as Marx theorizes it. We use the Marxist tradition to identify three senses in which technology is political (the foundational, enframing, and interactive senses) and argue that the Rawlsian tradition also has good reason to recognize versions of these senses. In this era, political philosophy must always also be philosophy of technology.