Limits of Technology
Welcome!
Introduction
- who we are
- what we will do
- why we will do it
- how we will do it
People
Pierre Depaz, post-doc in KuPhi, spends a lot of time thinking about software and humans.
What about you? Why did you take this seminar?
What
An investigation into what technologies can and cannot do, and into what we can or cannot do with technologies.
What kinds of limits does technology face? What kinds of limits does it create?
Is technology evolving independently of human intention?
Are there things that technology will never be able to do? Why?
Is it possible to say no to progress?
Why would we want to do it, and how would we do it?
Why
The huge increase of technology.
The world has limits. Is it possible that technology does not?
A more academic discussion on what is a limit, and what is a technology.
How
The process is researching, presenting it, and writing it, alone or in pairs.
The result is an essay investigating one aspect of the relation between technology and limits.
Schedule:
- meeting today (30.01) and tomorrow (31.01) for inputs
- tomorrow, constituting groups through affinities
- meeting for a colloquium to present work-in-progress (tbd, most likely 12.02 online)
- handing in a final paper (2500w) (15.03.2026)
- clarifying terms
- limitless technology?
- intrinsic limits
- extrinsic limits
- research proposals and writing a paper
A limit
What is a limit?
What is Enlightenment?
Kant, I. (1996). An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? In G. J. Mary (Ed.), An answer to the question: What is enlightenment? Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511813306.005
What does Kant have to do with this seminar?
5 minutes for quotes
In general, Kant thinks about the conditions of possibility for thinking. What can know, and what can we not know?
Kant and the limit to pure reason (bounded conditions of knowledge) - What is Enlightenment? (Our efforts are finite but the problems are boundless, paradox of the limit). See SEP article
So, what is Enlightenment?
What kinds of limits does he mention?
Self-imposed laziness and cowardice.
And that self-imposed laziness and cowardice enables others to guide them.
Overcoming this limit of the self and this limit of the others leads to the free application of reason.
[...] if it is only allowed freedom, enlightenment is almost inevitable. For even among the entrenched guardians of the great masses a few will always think for themselves, a few who, after having themselves thrown off the yoke of immaturity, will spread the spirit of a rational appreciation [...]
A "natural spread" of reason through freedom?
Thus a public can only attain enlightenment slowly. Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking.
Denkungsart refers to one’s characteristic pattern of thought, whether it is marked by systematic, rational procedures or by prejudice and superstition, criticism or dogmatism.
Here we see Kant as the root of a shift to rationality (like Descartes and Leibniz before him)
This quote also shows that changing paradigms is harde than changing material conditions.
But there are limits to reason!
But which restriction hinders enlightenment and which does not, but instead actually advances it? I reply: The public use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among mankind; the private use of reason may, however, often be very narrowly restricted, without otherwise hindering the progress of enlightenment.
What is that difference between public and private? Public is one's responsibility in the world of ideas. Private is one's responsibility in the world of actions. So there should be not limit in thinking, but there should be limits in doing.
But you cannot limit reason itself!
One age cannot bind itself, and thus conspire, to place a succeeding one in a condition whereby it would be impossible for the later age to expand its knowledge (particularly where it is so very important), to rid itself of errors, and generally to increase its enlightenment. That would be a crime against human nature, whose essential destiny lies precisely in such progress; subsequent generations are thus completely justified in dismissing such agreements as unauthorized and criminal.
Is human nature about progress or about change? These are different things
This is also the difference between being in an enlightened age (state), and an age of enlightenment (process)
Caesar non eat supra grammaticos.
Caesar is not above grammar: There are (technical) rules which are above and beyond the realm of human matters
A paradox between critical thought and systematic thought.
They are good limits and bad limits. How do we make that distinction?
By making a value judgment. In the case of Kant, he refers to what is good for the governance of society as a whole. Such view might be different if we were to consider that the maximal development of knowledge is desirable.
Implicitly, he poses the question of freedom.
Which is defined by its relation to constraint.
whether implicit or explicit
Our rulers have no interest in assuming the role of their subjects' guardians with respect to the arts and sciences.
Why not? Why shouldn't one interfere with what the arts and sciences can do?
Freedom of speech would argue that there should be no limit imposed on what can be said.
But only a ruler who is himself enlightened and has no dread of shadows, yet who likewise has a well-disciplined, numerous army to guarantee public peace, can say what no republic may dare, namely: “Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!” Here as elsewhere, when things are considered in broad perspective, a strange, unexpected pattern in human affairs reveals itself, one in which almost everything is paradoxical. A greater degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people's spiritual freedom; yet the former established impassable boundaries for the latter; conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom provides enough room for all fully to expand their abilities.
The paradox of freedom through force.
aka creative constraints.
From thinking freely to acting freely, aka becoming more than machine.
For Kant, a machine is the epitome of a limited being. Why?
One aspect of this seminar is the relationship between both: do we need to think something before doing it, or can things be done independently of our deliberate thinking (e.g. are they automatic?)?
Dimensions of limits
Limits imply the scope of a task and the extent to which it can be accomplished.
Limits are also things to be overcome.
Simmel and man as overcoming limits
Whitehead which, fourteen years before Schrödinger, presents an account of the cosmological and historical struggle between a ‘downward’ tendency and an ‘upward’ counter-tendency.
The work of Eugenio Trias Sagnier is one that focuses on human as a limit, meaning as the between rationality and imagination.
External constraints
- time
- energy
- resource
- information
- insight
- application (does technology have a problem domain of its own?)
Mathematically, a limit is infinitely tending towards. Meaning there is always growth, but is that growth ever significant?
the limits of our language fix the limits of our world.
Limits facilitate the establishment of things (and ideas), acting as creative constraints.
Likewise, we can say that the limits of our experience fix the limits of our philosophy.
Paradoxically, limits, by bounding, recreate some sort of totality: they can disappear.
meaning that technology is limitless in that it is worldmaking.
Limits can be placed across two dimensions:
Their inevitability:
- limits as an unsurmountable given
- limits as something to overcome
Their location:
- limits as intrinsic
- limits as extrinsic
Technology
What is technology?
Technics, technique, technology?
(Technik vs. Technologie)
Technique
technè (art, craft, skill, know-how)
Technique is
"the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity." (Ellul)
Technique is efficient ordering.
Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.
Efficiency, or, endless optimization.
The sacred then, as classically defined, is the object of both hope and fear, both fascination and dread.
This fits our current relation to AI quite well!
Technics
The practical reality of technique.
Tools, machines, processes as they are put into action by humans.
Technology
technè (art, craft, skill, know-how) and logos (branch of knowledge),
it entered the English language in the seventeenth century but did not gain broad currency until after the Second Industrial Revolution (ca.1870–1914). It's about trying to make sense of the phenomenon.
From machine, invention, improvement, the mechanic arts to large-scale, complex sociotechnological systems.
it marked the inaptness of prior terms (e.g., machine, invention, improvement, the mechanic arts) in relation to the ambiguous developments in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century society and culture.
If a technique is the object of study, technology is the field of study.
Outro
Planning of sessions