The impact of cognitive technologies: Towards a pragmatic approach

Technological advances have been an integral part of human development throughout history. In recent decades such advances have been dramatic in that many of the new technologies have quickly penetrated into activities in the daily life of ordinary people. In contrast to very specific technologies (such as in the medical domain, which are used by highly specialized experts and directly affect only those people who suffer from specific syndromes) new technologies are now deeply embedded in many everyday activities of virtually everyone. With the accelerated pace of technological innovation, predictions were made on how they may affect us. Past forecasts focused mainly on the external and technical impact of technology — e.g., how technology will take over many human activities. The concern was how we would cope with the increase in free leisure time as we were served more and more by technological devices that would do what we had previously done and that would be subservient to us and our needs (e.g., Dumazedier 1967), as well as with the reduced offer of employment (a perspective still on the agenda today; e.g., Rifkin 2004). However, such forecasts not only did not materialise, but in many respects, it is we who ended up subservient to technology, rather than it to us. What we propose to consider is technology's impact not so much in terms of the 'quantity' of work and time employed in a given activity, but rather in terms of the 'quality' or kind of the activity. For example, the routine tasks of a worker in a car assembly line now have transformed to operating, maintaining, and contributing to improve robotic systems that assemble the cars, and more workers are perhaps involved in design, marketing and administrative tasks. Viewed from this perspective, we think that technological innovations have not necessarily reduced the amount of 'work' but rather significantly changed the type of work performed by humans. In this respect, these innovations did not replace human labour, but introduced deep changes in its environment,