Philosophy of Technology: How Tools, Machines, and Systems Shape Human Life

Technology is supposed to solve problems. It also has an inconvenient habit of changing the people, institutions, habits, and environments around those problems. A clock does more than tell time. A factory does more than make goods. A car does more than move its driver. A smartphone is not merely a phone with delusions of grandeur. Technologies shape what societies consider normal, efficient, possible, desirable, and increasingly unavoidable. Philosophy of Technology explores the ideas of thinkers such as Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, Bruno Latour, Langdon Winner, Neil Postman, and Shoshana Zuboff through the technologies and systems of everyday life. The book examines industrial machinery, infrastructure, bureaucracy, standards, measurement, surveillance, platforms, algorithms, automation, and artificial intelligence. Along the way, it asks why labor-saving devices so often create more work, how efficiency became a social ideal, why technological systems become difficult to escape, how design quietly distributes power, and what happens when human judgment is converted into metrics, profiles, and automated decisions.