How to critically analyze technology

A guide to anticipating the effects of AI and other emerging technologies

Guides are a new ‘how to’ offering for paid subscribers that will help you interrogate the system you’re trying to change, and align your actions, decisions, and strategies to the future you want to create. Each Guide includes an overview, an example to bring the Guide to life, resources to dive deeper, and approaches for applying the Guide in your working context.

Guide #1: How to critically analyze data. If you want to understand AI — what it is, what it can say, and what it can’t — and anticipate its impacts, then you need to understand data, and how they are made.

On to Guide #2: How to critically analyze technology.

---

Overview

Technologies are shaped by social systems like race and gender, and those technologies in turn shape social systems. This is what’s meant by ‘sociotechnical’ — that we can’t view social and technical systems separately. Critically analyzing technology, then, means analyzing the dynamics at the center of this entanglement, and the stakeholders implicated in creating and changing them.