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Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought
The truth of the matter is that our deficiency does not lie in the want of well-verified "facts." What we lack is our bearings. The contemporary experience of things technological has repeatedly confounded our vision, our expectations, and our capacity to make intelligent judgments. Categories, arguments, conclusions, and choices that would have been entirely obvious in earlier times are obvious no longer. Patterns of perceptive thinking that were entirely reliable in the past now lead us systematically astray. Many of our standard conceptions of technology reveal a disorientation that borders on dissociation from reality. And as long as we lack the ability to make our situation intelligible, all of the "data" in the world will make no difference. From the Introduction
396 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1977
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 2, 2014
Autonomous Technology is an important book in the history of STS, synthesizing many school of technological critique from Ellul, to Weber, to Marx, in search of a way to talk about technology that accurately respects its power and its relationship to human society. The problem is that important is not the same as influential, or even particularly good, and I found this book confused on several critical points: what is the nature of autonomy-necessary for authentic human flourishing, or a sign of a system dangerously out of control? Speaking of control, is it a necessary part of governing technology, or a system by which elites can 'rationally program' society from the center?
Winner's original scholarly contributed is mostly rooted in a sense of nostalgia-a nostalgia he writes about in The Whale and the Reactor. It's a longing for a lost boyhood on the California coast, in a small town of orange orchards and sea breezes. That life sounds beautiful, but far to small to encompass human experience-or even the current human population. Winner proposes "epistemological luddism", a stance that people only use tools that they understand fully, with a sense of appropriateness and wisdom. Yet the first part is incompatible with any sort of urban, technological, interdependent life, and 'appropriate' and 'wisdom' are elusive virtues in the simplest of times, let alone gales of a technological revolution.
Winner's original scholarly contributed is mostly rooted in a sense of nostalgia-a nostalgia he writes about in The Whale and the Reactor. It's a longing for a lost boyhood on the California coast, in a small town of orange orchards and sea breezes. That life sounds beautiful, but far to small to encompass human experience-or even the current human population. Winner proposes "epistemological luddism", a stance that people only use tools that they understand fully, with a sense of appropriateness and wisdom. Yet the first part is incompatible with any sort of urban, technological, interdependent life, and 'appropriate' and 'wisdom' are elusive virtues in the simplest of times, let alone gales of a technological revolution.
December 22, 2024
I can’t get over the fact that this was written in 1970s, but only now, in the post-2022 AI boom time, we are beginning to raise the social issues that come with autonomous tech.
This should be a must read textbook for all policymakers, software developers, tech mangers and democracy advocates. I hope as this book resurfaces in popular (or at least academic) culture, more social scientists take notice and build off Winner’s analysis to help us figure out how society can control autonomous tech.
This should be a must read textbook for all policymakers, software developers, tech mangers and democracy advocates. I hope as this book resurfaces in popular (or at least academic) culture, more social scientists take notice and build off Winner’s analysis to help us figure out how society can control autonomous tech.
October 22, 2010
This book is incredible. Winner takes the thought of Ellul, Mumford, Marcuse, and others and makes their collective insights into the basis for a theory of technological politics that captures exactly what is missing from modern discourse: the effects of the overwhelming influence of modern technology on all forms of human experience. And all this in an academic book that is readable! Highly recommended.
July 6, 2026
Autonomous Technology
I: Autonomy and Mastery
Winner starts the book by outlining a concept of technological animism. Winner says we have to start by looking at technology as an extension of human life, which is a part of all life generally. He uses the myth of Prometheus and the creation story from Genesis to illustrate this point. Just as we are in some way extensions of God, vehicles of knowledge and experience for some higher power, so too we become little gods of our little technological worlds. Except, while nothing is taken from God and He remains through this process of creation, the extension of our agency into these objects results in a creation gone amok to where it becomes unrecognizable.
“If one asks, where did this strange life come from? What is its real origin? The answer is clear: it is human life transferred into the artifice. Men export their own vital powers-the ability to move, to experience, to work, and to think-into the devices of their making.” (34)
Winner addresses the fact that we transfer our energy into this artifice for several reasons. Winner never denies that there are different perspectives on these systems. For the corporate boardroom, the goal is higher manifestations of power and control, a flattening of our lives into a readily manageable populace. This is also a form of statecraft. The new realm of power isn’t on the battlefield or through traditional political maneuvering, but is contested through the creation of technological infrastructure in which a select group (the “center”) can manage a societal outcome. He illustrates this with a Francis Bacon quote:
“For these three [printing press, gunpowder, and the magnet] have changed the whole face and state of things around the world. .. insofar as no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.” (22)
This points to the paradigm that would continue to develop after Bacon’s time, and one that had been in motion for a while. We can analyze the impact of these inventions through their capacity to transfer energy and information.
We can also see how we displace certain human functions into these “mechanical discoveries”. For the magnet, we don’t need to use the sun or the stars to navigate the open ocean. The printing press represents a greater level of democratized information and a literate society, displacing oral narratives and localized mythology. And gunpowder represents an automated way to kill.
To put our current condition into perspective, the printing press came into wide use in the 1500s. Things have accelerated since that point and Winner points to this acceleration as a source of strangeness in our experience of these technologies.
“They then experience this life as something removed and alien, something that comes back at them from another direction.” (34)
While Winner isn’t denying the human agency at the center facilitating these relations, his framework of technological animism describes how technology seems to take (and in fact, really does) on a separate life of its own both removed from human interest yet firmly entwined with it, dictating it.
To read the full review, go to https://joelbeebe.substack.com/p/auto...
I: Autonomy and Mastery
Winner starts the book by outlining a concept of technological animism. Winner says we have to start by looking at technology as an extension of human life, which is a part of all life generally. He uses the myth of Prometheus and the creation story from Genesis to illustrate this point. Just as we are in some way extensions of God, vehicles of knowledge and experience for some higher power, so too we become little gods of our little technological worlds. Except, while nothing is taken from God and He remains through this process of creation, the extension of our agency into these objects results in a creation gone amok to where it becomes unrecognizable.
“If one asks, where did this strange life come from? What is its real origin? The answer is clear: it is human life transferred into the artifice. Men export their own vital powers-the ability to move, to experience, to work, and to think-into the devices of their making.” (34)
Winner addresses the fact that we transfer our energy into this artifice for several reasons. Winner never denies that there are different perspectives on these systems. For the corporate boardroom, the goal is higher manifestations of power and control, a flattening of our lives into a readily manageable populace. This is also a form of statecraft. The new realm of power isn’t on the battlefield or through traditional political maneuvering, but is contested through the creation of technological infrastructure in which a select group (the “center”) can manage a societal outcome. He illustrates this with a Francis Bacon quote:
“For these three [printing press, gunpowder, and the magnet] have changed the whole face and state of things around the world. .. insofar as no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.” (22)
This points to the paradigm that would continue to develop after Bacon’s time, and one that had been in motion for a while. We can analyze the impact of these inventions through their capacity to transfer energy and information.
We can also see how we displace certain human functions into these “mechanical discoveries”. For the magnet, we don’t need to use the sun or the stars to navigate the open ocean. The printing press represents a greater level of democratized information and a literate society, displacing oral narratives and localized mythology. And gunpowder represents an automated way to kill.
To put our current condition into perspective, the printing press came into wide use in the 1500s. Things have accelerated since that point and Winner points to this acceleration as a source of strangeness in our experience of these technologies.
“They then experience this life as something removed and alien, something that comes back at them from another direction.” (34)
While Winner isn’t denying the human agency at the center facilitating these relations, his framework of technological animism describes how technology seems to take (and in fact, really does) on a separate life of its own both removed from human interest yet firmly entwined with it, dictating it.
To read the full review, go to https://joelbeebe.substack.com/p/auto...
November 27, 2019
A fantastic introduction to the critique of technology. He goes through the most current themes, despite it being written in the 70s. He shows how the critique of technology has related to certain topics or problematics and develops a bleak but recognisable picture of our current predicament. Overall I can recommend this book to anyone whose even slightly interested in the critique of technology. At the same time, it can be tedious at certain moments, especially in regards to the overuse of long quotes and citations.
June 4, 2026
Dense read but super prescient. Changed the way I think about technology and free spirit.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews