Technology is Not Neutral. Here’s How It’s Forming Us

In a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, Ezra Klein sat down with Jack Clark, co-founder of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic. Klein asked Clark what it might mean for human beings to live in constant conversation with AI systems.

Clark answered with unusual candor. “This is maybe my number one worry about all of this,” he said.

That line deserves more attention than it has received. A founder of one of the world’s most influential AI companies says his biggest worry is not whether the technology will make money, eliminate jobs, or unleash some Hollywood-style catastrophe.

His deeper concern is more intimate than that.

It is about formation. It is about what happens to human beings when we live in ongoing partnership with systems that do not merely give us information, but begin to influence our habits of mind, our patterns of attention, and even our character.

Most of the conversations I hear about AI ethics still feel pretty shallow. We acknowledge, of course, that a technology can be used for good things or bad things. It can heal or harm, connect or isolate, illuminate or deceive. And so the moral task, we assume, is to make sure we use it for the good things and avoid the bad ones.

That is not wrong. It just doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Technology is Not Neutral

Melvin Kranzberg, professor of the history of technology. Image: K, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The historian of technology Melvin Kranzberg put this more sharply than most commentators do.

He is best known for his Laws of Technology. The first of these laws states that “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

When I speak about this, I start by showing only the first phrase (“technology is neither good nor bad”) and pause there. People are usually comfortable with that.

But then the surprising turn of Kranzberg’s law settles in for the audience with a kind of quiet recognition that there is more to the technological story: “nor is it neutral.”

Technology is not just a tool that affects only the object to which we apply it. At a more profound level, it is also at work on us.

It changes what we do repeatedly, what we expect easily, what we notice, what we ignore, how we relate, how patient we are, and what kind of people we are slowly becoming.

Technology is not neutral because, no matter what we use it for, it is going to form us.

An Example: Driving and Community

I have a philosopher friend who moved from Europe to St. Louis for an academic job.

Back home, she had never needed to learn to drive. Europe’s public transportation systems made it easy enough to get where she needed to go by bus or train. Like many people there, she built her daily life around that reality.

But St. Louis was different. In a large Midwestern city, and especially in the neighborhoods where professors often live, public transportation was limited and inconvenient. To live there meant learning to drive.

What looked at first like a practical adjustment to the available technology turned out to be much more than that. My friend was struck not simply by the available convenience of driving anytime with a car, but the way it changed her relationships.

In Europe, getting somewhere usually began by walking out the front door and down the block to a bus or train stop. There, almost without trying, you ran into neighbors. You waited together. You chatted. You recognized familiar faces. These were not necessarily your best friends, but a real form of community was built into the practice of everyday movement.

In St. Louis, by contrast, she found herself stepping into the garage, pressing a button, backing out, driving away, and then returning at the end of the day to close the door behind her without ever interacting with any neighbors.

The trip was more efficient. It was also more solitary.

The Lesson: Technology Shapes Us

Cars are not good or bad in themselves. They can be used for generous purposes and destructive ones, just like any other technology.

But neither are they neutral. They change how we act and interact. They alter the texture of ordinary life. They make some practices easier and others less likely.

And when our practices change, we begin to change too. We become accustomed to different rhythms and ways of relating to the people around us.

The same is true of technologies from fire, to the printing press, to the smartphone. Every technology makes some practices possible, others easier, and still others less likely.

This means the real question is not only what a technology lets us do, but what it trains us to do again and again. Technology changes practices, and practices change people.

Artificial Intelligence Changes the Equation

Artificial intelligence sharpens this concern because it seems to move us one step beyond the internet as we have known it.

The internet gave us access to vast amounts of information. It put facts, opinions, arguments, and data within reach in ways no previous generation had experienced.

But information is not yet knowledge. Information is raw material: bits and pieces waiting to be sorted, weighed, interpreted, and connected.

AI seems to be pushing toward something more like knowledge. I’m not claiming it’s there yet, but already it doesn’t merely retrieve information. Increasingly, it synthesizes it.

It can gather, summarize, compare, infer, and present patterns that would have taken a person—or a whole team of people—immense amounts of time and labor to discover.

That is part of what makes this technology so powerful and enticing. It feels less like a library, and more like a partner. Less like a database, and more like a knowledgeable guide.

Artificial Intelligence, Wisdom, and Spiritual Formation

But even knowledge is not wisdom.

Wisdom is not simply having greater quantities of knowledge. Wisdom is knowing what matters, what is good, what should be done, when to act and when to refrain, what ends are worth pursuing, and what kind of person one ought to become. Wisdom requires judgment, humility, patience, and moral formation.

We Christians believe it also requires learning to live in ways that reflect the Kingdom of God.

That kind of life is not produced by speed or optimization. It is the long work of discipleship: being shaped over time into people marked by the fruit of the Spirit.

Wisdom means becoming the sort of people who can be trusted with power because we are learning restraint, who can hold knowledge without being mastered by it, and who can attend to others without turning them into instruments for their own purposes.

There is no shortcut to that kind of maturity. No technology can generate it for us. It grows slowly, through practices of prayer, community, worship, repentance, service, and love.

At best, technology can assist people already being formed in those ways. At worst, it can train us away from them.

And so the question is not simply whether AI can make us more informed or more capable. The question is whether we are becoming wise enough to live with this kind of power.

Have our technical abilities outrun our moral and spiritual formation? Have we learned how to build faster than we have learned how to discern?