Visiem cibas [info]ctulhu
"The historian Nils Gilman wrote a book titled "Mandarins of the Future" about the legacy of modernization theory -- one of the Cold War's many examples of instrumental technical rationality gone horribly wrong. Modernization theorists believed that societies passed through deterministic and linear stages of political, social, and economic development. Modernization theory also can be viewed as small part of what is known as the "high modernist" view of the world, the belief that science and technology has an unlimited capacity to reorder the world. While high modernism and modernization theory are distinct (high modernism should be understood as a superset of modernization theory), both shared a common belief in the ability of top-down planning, the discovery of solutions through rational design, and the supremacy of scientific-technical experts. These were the means by which utopia would come.

[..] [T]echnical rationality often worsens intractable social problems rather than fixing them. In many cases, it even creates new problems! However, faith in experts and rational planning is only one part of technical rationality. Technical rationality is embodied within organizations.

[..] Thus, technical rationality's problems do not stem solely from hubris. Technical rationality's flaws arise from the pathologies of "rationalization" and its dominance in social life. Weber suggests that an era dominated by rationalization processes will see the dominance of calculation as the motivation and cause of social action (to the detriment of everything else).

[..] I will now detail why the continued plea for the tech world to do something -- anything -- to use technics, rational design, and experts to solve intractable social problems is not just profoundly wrong but also militantly stupid. Much of the world's social problems arise from technical rationality and its bureaucratic "technology" run amok. More of the same is not a solution but part of the very problem that technical rationality supposedly is supposed to solve.

[..] It is difficult to see how any objective history of the 20th century can justify the belief that all problems are tractable and that it just takes some smart people who care to fix them. Moreover, it is difficult to see how any objective history of the 20th century can avoid the conclusion that top-down centralized planning by scientific-technical experts in social and political matters has led to....undesired consequences, to put it mildly.

[..] Why do these people have such a burning desire to see engineers and bureaucrats use computers to "solve" problems that ANOTHER band of engineers and bureaucrats with computers created in the first place?"


https://aelkus.github.io/essays/ai_manhattan_project.html