Rehumanizing Technology
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[1:15:50] My research, summary, and presention of expert scholarship on Ancient Philosophy, rehumanizes technology through etymology to help people reconsider the essential role played by humans in it. Although it may involve tools, a technology is not itself a tool or a product, but a process. Techne is the basis of the word, and to Plato, the following were requirements to be considered a techne:
- a craft or skill,
- whose practitioner engaged in logical processes,
- and had to be able to articulate the causality for the order and outcome of the steps they took to produce a certain result,
- which they cared for,
- and was distinct from the process of its creation
Plato also spoke of logos; the basis of the word logic. To him, logic, or rhetoric, was already a necessary component of a techne. Therefore, the combination of these two Greek words into our contemporary word technology places double emphasis on the ability of craftspeople to explain the order and intention of each step they take in a process.
