My wife and I recently watched the confused Murder at the end of the World which talks a lot about hacking while not always being clear about what that means in the show (perhaps just using computers). One of the characters is openly delighted by augmented reality, robotic construction systems, AI assistants and surprisingly okay about pervasive surveillance. My wife asked if hackers would genuinely be so excited by technology if it is clear to a non-technical person what the downsides are. She expected a hacker to be much cynical about emergent technology.

Generally I’ve found that people who work in technology are very excited and optimistic about it. There is a general pro-sentiment to new things and a general willingness to overlook the problems that come with them. As a simple example while we’ve started to talk about sustainability on the web as a community we’re nowhere near ready to talk about the massive inefficiency and power consumption of most conventional Machine Learning and AI techniques.

Another interesting example is climate change where most technologists and engineers believe that a technological solution to the problem will be invented, even if they personally have no idea how that might come about.

There are technologists who are more sceptical though and I would say that it is often through the power of these, often marginalised and determined, individuals that I’ve been made aware of problems in current and proposed systems. These people rarely think that technological progress or scientific advances are bad. It is that they recognise that history indicates that not every invention is benign and that one cannot suspend critical thinking and give “progress” a free-pass.

Beyond these archetypes though there also seems to be a more profound divide between those technologists with empathy and those who think of themselves as having some higher insight into technology than most. If you think that you might suffer at the hands of defects of a technology, such as non-white people and facial recognition, then you are much more likely to be critical in your assessment of it.

If you think the problems with a technology can be blamed on people not being smart enough to understand it (such as cryptocurrency) then you judge the effect of the new development on how it effects you rather than society as whole.

Take robots; a technologist is unlikely to impacted by the consequences of more advanced automation and therefore will happily share videos of dancing robots who are intended for military or policing purposes. Those robots are never going to replace a technologist’s job and they are unlikely to hunt down and kill them. Their perception of the impact versus the benefit is going to be wildly different.

Overall then I think that the show was probably right in its depiction of technologists as being delighted by emergent technology and blind to or even surprised by the negative consequences of its adoption. The lesson to take is that maybe we should cherish our cynics more.