Technological Fix Research Articles

Light and Shadow of Technological Fix in the COVID-19 Pandemic : Centered on “Itaewon Corona Crisis”

Light and Shadow of Technological Fix in the COVID-19 Pandemic : Centered on “Itaewon Corona Crisis”

Technological Fix: Students in Mobile Phone Repairs

Technological Fix: Students in Mobile Phone Repairs

Genome Editing in Livestock, Complicity, and the Technological Fix Objection

Genome editing in livestock could potentially be used in ways that help resolve some of the most urgent and serious global problems pertaining to livestock, including animal suffering, pollution, antimicrobial resistance, and the spread of infectious disease. But despite this potential, some may object to pursuing it, not because genome editing is wrong in and of itself, but because it is the wrong kind of solution to the problems it addresses: it is merely a ‘technological fix’ to a complex societal problem. Yet though this objection might have wide intuitive appeal, it is often not clear what, exactly, the moral problem is supposed to be. The aim of this paper is to formulate and shed some light on the ‘technological fix objection’ to genome editing in livestock. I suggest that three concerns may underlie it, make implicit assumptions underlying the concerns explicit, and cast some doubt on several of these assumptions, at least as they apply to the use of genome editing to produce pigs resistant to the Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome and hornless dairy cattle. I then suggest that the third, and most important, concern could be framed as a concern about complicity in factory farming. I suggest ways to evaluate this concern, and to reduce or offset any complicity in factory farming. Thinking of genome editing’s contribution to factory farming in terms of complicity, may, I suggest, tie it more explicitly and strongly to the wider obligations that come with pursuing it, including the cessation of factory farming, thereby addressing the concern that technological fixes focus only on a narrow problem.

COVID-19 and Contact Tracing Apps: Technological Fix or Social Experiment?

Mobile applications are increasingly regarded as important tools for an integrated strategy of post-lockdown policy response around the globe. This paper explores how the use of smartphone applications for digital contact tracing is currently being framed by media, experts and policy-makers and discusses a number of questions raised by the debate on digital surveillance at the time of Covid-19: How can personal data be adequately collected and protected? Who should access data? What is a legitimate role for Big Tech companies in the development and implementation of these systems? How is the cultural and moral context taken into account in the design of these apps? Should use of these apps be compulsory? What does transparency and ethical oversight mean in this context? As we show that responses to these questions are complex and uncertain, we argue that rather than technological fixes to the current emergency these apps should be introduced in society as societal experimental trials whose effectiveness and consequences need to be closely and independently monitored the same level of precaution and safeguards that social experimentation require.

Technological Fix or Divisible Object of Collective Concern? Histories of Conflict over the Geological Disposal of Nuclear Waste in Sweden and France

ABSTRACTScience and technology studies (STS) has cultivated a positive vision of technological controversies. By raising new issues to address, controversies are seen as generating more thorough and exhaustive processes of technology assessment. However, the ability to view controversies in this light remains dependent upon how technology is collectively imagined and understood. If it is envisioned as a classic technological fix then broader controversy is just what is intended to be overcome, not positively indulged. Albert Hirschman’s distinction between divisible and non-divisible conflicts captures such varying evaluations of controversy. In particular, it helps analyse how the long-standing fix of geological disposal of nuclear waste has been persistently defended as a non-negotiable object of technological concern – a recipe for escaping controversy by permanently isolating nuclear waste from the biosphere. Comparing the Swedish and French programmes for the geological disposal of nuclear waste shows how defending the technological integrity of a non-divisible disposal concept has remained an institutional fixation for Swedish nuclear waste management for over 30 years. In contrast, legislative demands for a reversible disposal concept introduced in France in the late 1990s have arguably served to unravel a technological fix into a divisible object of collective concern.

Green Revolution as Technological Fix to Agricultural Development

Green Revolution as Technological Fix to Agricultural Development

The Technological Fix as Social Cure-All: Origins and Implications

In 1966, a well-connected engineer posed a provocative question: will technology solve all our social problems? He seemed to imply that it would, and soon. Even more contentiously, he hinted that engineers could eventually supplant social scientists - and perhaps even policy-makers, lawmakers, and religious leaders - as the best trouble-shooters and problem-solvers for society [1].

Alvin Weinberg and the Promotion of the Technological Fix.

The term technological fix, coined by technologist/administrator Alvin Weinberg in 1965, vaunted engineering innovation as a generic tool for circumventing problems commonly conceived as social, political, or cultural. A longtime Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, government consultant, and essayist, Weinberg also popularized the term big science to describe national goals and the competitive funding environment after the Second World War. Big science reoriented towards technological fixes, he argued, could provide a new "Apollo project" to address social problems of the future. His ideas-most recently echoed in "solutionism"-have channeled confidence and controversy ever since. This article traces the genesis and promotion of the concept by Weinberg and his contemporaries. It argues that, through the concept, the marginal politics and technological confidences of interwar scientists and technocrats were repositioned as mainstream notions closer to the heart of big science policy.

The Lure of the Quick Technological Fix: Blockchain and the Case of Cobalt

We live in a time where new technologies seem to promise new solutions to old problems. One example of digitalisation that is very in fashion right now is blockchain technology. Blockchains are the subject of a lot of media hype: promising everything from the protection of privacy to its final destruction, from a new intrusion of artificially intelligent machines to the salvation of humanity. As discussed in Industriall’s research paper, The Challenge of Industry 4.0 and the Demand for New Answers, mining falls into the ‘low’ immediate impact category of Industry 4.0. However blockchain technology ranks high among pathways proposed to address and tackle labour abuses and other unsustainable practices in mineral supply chains. What is a Blockchain? Fundamentally, blockchain is an information security strategy. It provides a different level of security than, say, defending a database at the perimeter of the computer it resides on. Blockchain security is at the level of specific records or blocks of data, structured in what are called ‘linked lists’. Each item on each list has identifying data and a pointer to the previous item and/or the next item. Each new block of data must authenticate itself at particular nodes by some kind of proof, for example performing a mathematical operation on the current block, in order to be added to the chain. This proof must be difficult to falsify but easy to verify, to discourage spammers and hackers. This creates a data chain where one can be reasonably certain that each item was added in chronological order and not manipulated. It works fairly well with Bitcoin, for example. It is this property that makes blockchain seem attractive for the task of verifying the cobalt supply chain. Cobalt mining and the DRC New technologies such as smartphones and electric vehicles require batteries, and have greatly increased global demand for cobalt, a rare metal. It is estimated that over 60 percent of the world’s cobalt resources are to be found in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Industriall general secretary Valter Sanches recently described the working conditions at some multinational mining companies’ operations in the DRC as ‘appalling and disturbing’. In a letter to DRC President Kabila after a fact-finding mission to Glencore’s DRC mines, Sanches wrote that the global union was ‘saddened and outraged’ to discover ‘the daily experience of abuse and violation of fundamental labour rights of Congolese mine workers at these operations are in total disregard of the laws of the country and collective bargaining arrangements. The testimonies of around 80 workers represented by the union, offer clear proof of the abuse and violation of their labour rights and human rights, extending beyond the mine operations into their homes, families, communities and the surrounding environment’. A traceable and verifiable digital record of cobalt from its origin in mines in the DRC through to its installation in the battery of a Tesla would, proponents argue, enable anyone to know exactly when and in which mine – and potentially even by which miners – the particular cobalt in a particular battery was produced. This could provide assurance that environmental and social abuses, such as child labour, or abuse of trade union rights – were not used in the production of the cobalt, or if they were, enable tracing and tackling the abuses for remedy or punishment. Access to remedy is fundamental, and represents the litmus test for blockchain technology’s utility in bridging the divide between abuse and remedy. Technological Limitations It is worth remembering that even though we use terms like ‘blockchain’, in reality there is no abstract entity called a blockchain, it is just a network of physical computers, owned by a variety of people, using an agreed-upon authentication protocol. Where are these physical computers, and what are their characteristics? Are they vulnerable to failure or compromise? The application of blockchain to the cobalt supply chain raises the problem of capacity. It can be assumed that most small-scale producers, particularly so-called artisanal miners, will not have the resources or capacity to participate as a node in the chain. Artisanal mining, even though it is legal in the DRC and forms a large part of the...

The Lure of the Quick Technological Fix: Blockchain and the Case of Cobalt

The Lure of the Quick Technological Fix: Blockchain and the Case of Cobalt

We Can Rebuild Him and Her: Bionic Irony, Hysteria, and Post-Fordism’s Technological Fix in The Six Million Dollar Man

THE WORKING MAN'S CRASH LANDING Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis have observed that, when it comes to utopian visions regarding the societal benefits of space travel, it is not so much the alleged reasons for making a journey to Mars that matter but what they can do to you on Mars when they get you there (58). Programs such as the Apollo missions or even current speculation about manned missions to Mars, whatever scientific benefits might be expected, simultaneously generate a host of less obvious outcomes that are nonetheless useful from the point of view of social control, nation building, and ideological reinforcement. Collecting moon rocks might have added to the storehouse of knowledge, but the Apollo missions were also immensely useful to the U.S. government for providing a unifying goal by which to capture the national imagination in the midst of such legitimation crises as those related to Vietnam, the Cold War, and environmental destruction. We might go further, with Caffentzis and Federici, and discern in the asceticism and other-worldliness required by space exploration a way of disciplining the terrestrial labour force: launch of today's high-tech industry a technological leap in the machine--a big evolutionary leap in creating a new type of worker to match capital's investment needs (61). Just as a space program that trains only a handful of actual astronauts might have a much larger effect on the national imaginary, creating the utopian fascination needed to implement new disciplinary structures, so too can popular culture about science and technology provide the fantasy scenarios that help generalize new modes of control even while entertaining and stimulating our imaginations. (1) The popular 1970s television show The Six Million Dollar Man (hereafter Six) is a case in point. Celebrating technological aspiration in the face of sensational failure, the show's opening montage uses historic footage of the 1967 crash of nasa's experimental M2-F2 lifting body aircraft, in which test pilot Bruce Peterson was almost killed when his plane hit the ground at over 400 km/hr. The M2-F2 was part of a series of experimental aircraft that led to the development of the U.S. Space Shuttle program in the 1980s. In Six, Peterson's crash is used as the background for an opening sequence detailing the reconstruction of the fictional astronaut Steve Austin, a man literally reduced to human scrap, in the words of the government agent who oversees Austin's transformation into a cyborg super-soldier. Using digital sound effects with computerized graphics superimposed on images of Austin receiving his robotic implants, the opening sequence famously proclaims in voiceover: gentlemen, we can rebuild him ... we have the capacity to create the world's first bionic man. The show's dramatic juxtaposition of high and low, of human with $6 million of high-tech machinery, offers insights into the tensions faced by a largely white male American workforce confronting the contradictions of capital in the 1970s, a decade that saw the fraying of postWorld War II Keynesianism and the initial stirrings of the more turbulent and unruly neoliberal market that would replace it. With the escalation of Cold War tensions, labour unrest, energy prices, economic and environmental crises, and an increasingly unpopular military entanglement in Vietnam, the value of American lives seemed under question in a more nebulously unsettling manner than the century's two horrific but spatially and temporally circumscribed world wars (and the economic depression in between) had managed to do. The white male factory worker privileged by postwar Fordism was further confronted with threats of deskilling and obsolescence through technological innovations and shutdowns ferociously pursued by industrialists as a means of both streamlining the workplace and disciplining the workforce. In the midst of these tensions, like the fallen astronaut from the opening of Six, hegemonic American masculinity might have keenly felt the proximity of the human scrap heap confronted by Austin. …

The United States and Alternative Energies since 1980: Technological Fix or Regime Change?

Awareness of global warming has been widespread for two decades, yet the American political system has been slow to respond. This essay examines, first, political explanations for policy failure, focusing at the federal level and outlining both short-term partisan and structural explanations for the stalemate. The second section surveys previous energy regimes and the transitions between them, and policy failure is explained by the logic of Thomas Hughes’s ‘technological momentum’. The third section moves to an international perspective, using the Kaya Identity and its distinction between energy intensity and carbon intensity to understand in policy terms ‘technological fixes’ vs. low-carbon alternatives. The final section reframes US energy policy failure and asks: (1) Why, between 1980 and 1999, was America’s actual performance in slowing CO2 emissions better than its politics would seem capable of delivering? (2) How and why has the United States since c. 2007 managed to reduce per capita CO2 emissions?

Engineering the climate: the ethics of solar radiation management

Introduction: The Extraordinary Ethics of Solar Radiation Management Christopher J. Preston Part I. Present and Future Generations Chapter 1: Geoengineering, Solidarity, and Moral Risk Marion Hourdequin Chapter 2: Might Solar Radiation Management Constitute a Dilemma? Konrad Ott Chapter 3: Domination and the Ethics of Solar Radiation Management Patrick Taylor Smith Part II. Marginalized, Vulnerable, and Voiceless Populations Chapter 4: Indigenous Peoples, Solar Radiation Management, and Consent Kyle Powys Whyte Chapter 5: Solar Radiation Management and Vulnerable Populations: The Moral Deficit and its Prospects Christopher J. Preston Chapter 6: Solar Radiation Management and Non-human Species Ronald Sandler Part III. Moral Hazards and Hidden Benefits Chapter 7: The World That Would Have Been: Moral Hazard Arguments Against Geoengineering Ben Hale Chapter 8: Climate Remediation to Address Social Development Challenges: Going Beyond Cost Benefit and Risk Approaches to Assessing Solar Radiation Management Holly Jean Buck Part IV. Ethics of Framing and Rhetoric Chapter 9: Insurance Policy or Technological Fix: The Ethical Implications of Framing Solar Radiation Management Dane Scott Chapter 10: Public Concerns About the Ethics of Solar Radiation Management Wylie Carr, Ashley Mercer, and Clare Palmer Part V. The Cultural Milieu Chapter 11: The Setting of the Scene: Technological Fixes and the Design of the Good Life Albert Borgmann Chapter 12: Between Babel and Pelagius: Religion, Theology, and Geoengineering Forrest Clingerman Chapter 13: Making Climates: Solar Radiation Management and the Ethics of Fabrication by Maia Galarraga and Bronislaw Szerszynski

The technological fix as a frame in media debates about tailpipe emissions

Numerous studies of vehicle emission control policies suggest that, in many cases, technology and “technological optimism” shaped the policy process. This study contributes to this literature by content analyzing national media discourse on motor vehicle emissions from 2000 to 2008. We employ the social constructionism and policy design framework to identify problem definitions, policy solutions and policy actors in the media discourse and to deconstruct the role of technology in public debate about vehicle emissions. Our analysis indicates that tailpipe emissions are defined either as a public health or environmental issue, but in either case, ‘technological fixes’ are the most prominent solution promoted by policy actors in the media. The nature of the media debate conflicts with a growing consensus among transportation planners and the public that meaningful, additional reductions in vehicle emissions will require changes in individual travel behavior and transportation planning in addition to advances in technology.

The Technological Fix Criticisms and the Agricultural Biotechnology Debate

A common tactic in public debates over science and technology is to dismissively label innovations as mere technological fixes. This tactic can be readily observed in the long debate over agricultural biotechnology. While these criticisms are often superficial rhetorical tactics, they point to deeper philosophical disagreements about the role of technology in society. Examining the technological fix criticism can clarify these underlying philosophical disagreements and the debate over biotechnology. The first part of this essay discusses the origins of the notion of a technological fix and distinguishes two types of technological fix criticisms, philosophical and practical. These distinctions are then applied to clarify and evaluate arguments for and against agricultural biotechnology. This analysis should clarify the debates over agricultural biotechnology and bring to light fundamental philosophical differences over the role of technology in agriculture.

Can Technology Fix the Abortion Problem?

The abortion controversy as a cultural phenomenon is itself socially troublesome. However, current biotechnology research programs point to a possible technological fix. If we could harmlessly remove fetuses from women's bodies and transfer them to other women, cryonic suspension, or ectogenetic devices, this might mitigate the controversy. Pro-lifers' apparent minimal requirement would be met― fetuses would not be killed. Pro-choicers' apparent minimal requirement would be met― women could end pregnancies and control their bodies. This option has been optimistically anticipated by some ethicists, but some people reject this fix because they are averse to being genetically related to a child they are not raising, insisting on the right to destroy the fetus as well as have it removed. In this paper I examine these issues, asking what the real issues in abortion rights are, whether technology can help, what the scope of reproductive autonomy is, and how technology will change the abortion debate.

The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems (review)

Reviewed by: The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems Ben Shackleford (bio) The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems. Edited by Lisa Rosner. New York: Routledge, 2004. Pp. 265. $85/$24.95. The essays in this volume explore the tension among political machinations, human habits, and technological choices. In varied contexts, technologies find expression, arouse conflict, and, ultimately, redefine problems. Lisa Rosner has organized her book into four sections. In the first one, Shelley McKellar, Carolyn Thomas de la Peña, and Jim Tobias, in their respective essays on artificial hearts, the I-ON-A-CO electrotherapy device, and assistive devices intended for the differently abled, explore the contrast between the inelastic demand for improved health and the public, often promotional, representations of wellness. In the second section on food, Michael Ackerman, Shane Hamilton, and Warren Belasco discuss the nutritional enrichment of flour, long-haul trucking, and imagined food technologies as political, nutritional, and cultural artifacts. Although demand for food technologies is diluted somewhat by the bounty of twentieth-century production and the aesthetic dimension of eating, these essays demonstrate that perceptions of the relationship between food and technology remain heavily influenced by their political and cultural context. Indeed, the ubiquity of the demand for food encourages faith in a future made better, safer, or easier through the panacea of technology. The third section, which is organized around the broadly construed [End Page 246] topic of environment, brings to mind Melvin Kranzberg's notion of invention being the "mother of necessity." In essays that consider technology as Prometheus or Pandora, Timothy LeCain, Frank Uekoetter, and James R. Fleming describe technologies that have been assigned the hopeless task of compensating for unfortunate trajectories of human material culture. These analyze techno-fixes in American mining, the emerging conflict between professional engineers and skilled workers related to pollution control during the early 1900s, the dubious efficacy and political life of cloud seeding, and overall the iterative nature of technological development in which each new real or imagined fix creates new sets of problems that are vulnerable to further flawed technological solutions. In the book's closing section, titled "Fixing Business," the contributors attempt to reconcile technological fixes with the dynamics of change in business and government. Paul Ceruzzi charts the flux of technological change across the Internet—a system itself composed largely of technological fixes. In the virtual world he describes, the staggering pace and fluid direction of development constantly transform the parameters of usability, success, and impact. In their essay on business technologies, Onno De Wit, Jan Van den Ende, Johan Schot, and Ellen Van Oost track the interplay of successive regimes of artifacts with the business and social systems that govern their utilization. Because these essays work well beyond the theoretical limitations of the "technological fix," they indicate that technology is an activity retaining the contentious, political, imaginative, and gullible nature of humanity. By claiming a "distinction between a technological fix and a true technological solution," the book's editor, Lisa Rosner, suggests that technical merits can be judged apart from the human context. Such a conclusion implies that some technologies exist as unqualified successes while others are ersatz ploys flawed by unsystematic development, tainted by greed, or irretrievably constrained by their ethical or political environment. Crossing beyond the rhetorical qualities of "fix" to judge the genealogy of technologies in the physical world suggests an anachronistic privileging of perspective. Whether a technology is a fix or a genuine solution is wholly a matter of perspective; if, for example, the I-ON-A-CO rings studied by de la Peña offered relief to patients, were they not a successful treatment despite now being considered quackery? Unlike scientific projects more familiar to Rosner, the technological environment values more empirical qualities such as cost, speed, and results over abstract truths. Technologies represent the best solution available under a given set of constraints, and someday most technologies will likely be seen as crude fixes. Just as with "solutions," the term "fix" describes nothing more or less than a project whose design, creation, and perceived merits are utterly dependent on context. Indeed, Rosner confesses that...

The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems. Edited by Lisa Rosner. New York: Routledge, 2004. 265 pp. Illustrations, notes, list of contributors, index. Paper $24.95

<i>The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems</i>. Edited by Lisa Rosner. New York: Routledge, 2004. 265 pp. Illustrations, notes, list of contributors, index. Paper $24.95

The Limits of a Technological Fix to Knowledge Management

Our paper examines issues of epistemology, power and culture with respect to their impact upon the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to manage knowledge within an organization. Utilizing an empirical case study of a global pharmaceutical company, in which the implementation of an intranet failed to meet aspirations of the Chief Executive that employees freely share knowledge, we encourage academics and practitioners to reflect more critically upon the limits to technology in pursuit of knowledge management. Our study illustrates that ‘technical fixes’ to knowledge management issues merely harden existing practices and routines, rather than open up new directions. In particular, broader organizational issues of power and culture may mean that employees are unwilling or unable to share knowledge and, beyond the epistemological problem, this is likely to further inhibit the contribution of ICT to the management of knowledge.

Creating the American junkie: addiction research in the classic era of narcotic control

Contents: Introduction 1 Heroin Addiction and Urban Vice Reform 2 The Opportunistic Approach 3 The Technological Fix: The Search for a Nonaddicting Analgesic 4 Constructing the Addict Career 5 The Junkie as Psychopath 6 Healing Vision and Bureaucratic Reality 7 The Addict in the Social Body Conclusion Notes Acknowledgments Index