Appendix : Interviews with Experts in the Field of Technoethics

Question: How did you get involved in research in Technoethics and why? I was a technophile at an early age. I loved experimenting with electricity as a child and I started college in pursuit of an engineering career. I came of age in the 1960s when the United States was embroiled in an ill-conceived, protracted war against a small Third-World nation. The innocent views I held about technology in my early years had been shocked into rude arousal by the dubious aims of that war, aroused further as I engaged with peers in political and philosophical discussions about technology and society, and aroused even further as I immersed myself in dystopian narratives of popular writers like George Orwell (1949), Herbert Marcuse (1964), Jacques Ellul (1964) and others. Ellul put forward a biting, incisive analysis of our technological civilization , where the role of modern technology was reframed from that of a servant of humankind to that of a controlling overlord. Ellul pictured a bleak world controlled by a technical rationality that threatens our humanity and which lays waste to our natural habitat. Marcuse spoke of a technocracy that strips human beings of their uniqueness and subjectivity, a technocratic ethic that fosters conformist, passive, and homogenous behaviour, and a 'one dimensional' manipulative force that uses mass media to reshape active citizens into passive, mindless consumers. Both Ellul and Marcuse offered a vivid picture of a technical world not unlike the fictional world represented in Orwell's classic.