Sisyphean nature of moral panics against new technology

Moral panics around new technology are as absurd as they are predictable. No sooner do we forget that the last one ever happened and we do it all over again. That’s because we’re hard-wired for confirmation and negativity biases. 

“Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 

Anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 30 is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

Anything that gets invented after you’re 30 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it, until it’s been around for about 10 years when it gradually turns out to be alright really…” 

Douglas Adams

Every technology induces a ‘moral panic’ which has roughly similar features. Children and adolescents are targeted, as we see every new generation as degenerate and inferior to our own. They are always being distracted by technologies from writing to radio, film and television. No sooner did these old technologies become the norm, indeed part of our culture, than the attacks began on social media and computer games. 

Social critics, journalists, academics & researchers are curiously immune themselves, of course, to negative effects of the panic. They are above it all. Yet they feel confident in beating every piece of new technology like a pinata.

Stereotypical critiques become the norm. It makes us stupid, they will claim, quoting the use of calculators, Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia and now AI, as mind numbing technologies that turn us all into morons, all the while happily using such technology themselves. 

Eventually it all subsides and fades away as the benefits are realised. But the cycle is doomed to repeat itself, what Amy Orban called the ‘Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics’ where she shows that previous systematic reviews always overestimated the negative link between digital technology and wellbeing. 

This has gone on for as long as we have invented technology:

In my book 'Learning Technologies', I made the point that a fundamental feature of the science of techn-ology is the backlash against the new. We are experiencing this now with AI, on a Global scale. The backlash is greater because adoption and use have been quicker and larger than anything we have ever seen before.

A deluge of reports, frameworks, even hastily and badly written laws, such as the EU AI Act are all part of this backlash, along with an army of people who see this as their realm and opportunity....

But I am not downhearted, as history is on the side of those who see such technology as beneficial.

In December last year I used this whole set of images in a debate against this motion: "This House believes that the widespread implementation of AI in Learning will do more Harm than Good"

We won.