Technology-Driven Moral Panics
Explore how societies—from Ancient Greece to the AI age—worried how new inventions would erode morality, upend jobs, or doom humanity.
Explore how societies—from Ancient Greece to the AI age—worried how new inventions would erode morality, upend jobs, or doom humanity.
The past two plus millennia have had their fair share of technology-driven panics, from warnings about the dangers of writing and printing, to the advent of bicycles, the car, radio, video games and — more recently — generative AI.
Most of these “techlash” responses look irrational with hindsight — knee-jerk social responses that place fear of the unknown, maintaining the status quo, and holding on to identity-defining ideas, ahead of rational thought. And yet, below the surface, there’s often more to them. Rather than being a simplistic rejection of a new technology, they are often responses to something that’s perceived as a threat to something of worth or value — identity, dignity, jobs, security, beliefs, the ability to find meaning in life, and more.
Of course, revisiting past incidents of technology-driven moral panic is entertaining — and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be. There’s nothing quite like getting the metaphorical popcorn out and reveling in the seeming foolishness of past generations.
And yet, each of the cases of “techlash” here goes beyond entertainment value alone, and reveals something about what people at the time valued, what they feared, and how they navigated a transformative technology transition. And as they do, they provide insights into how we approach current and future technology transitions. Not with a sense of superiority, but with the humility that comes from recognizing that we are all human, and all subject to our own biases, and ideas of what’s important to us, and what appears to threaten this.
With this in mind, each case here comes with insights into warnings and opportunities, as well as just being an interesting history of how there’s nothing new about pushback against new tech. And hopefully they are a reminder that, as is often the case, the way we successfully navigate new technologies rarely boils down to unbridled optimism or existential dread, but rather the day-to-day messiness of navigating uncertainty with care, humility, and ingenuity. Which, at the end of the day, is a very human thing to do.
The collection was created by Andrew Maynard (Director of Arizona State University’s Future of Being Human initiative), whose work on navigating technology transitions and approaching risk as a threat to value threads through the site.