TOK - Technology
The device you are reading this on is approximately three years old. The technology of reading - the alphabet and the page - is approximately three thousand years old. The technology of the tool, the shaped stone that extends what a hand can do, is approximately three million years old. What is changing now is the speed, and the difficulty of seeing what current technology is doing to us while we are inside it.
The Technology optional theme starts from Marshall McLuhan's argument that the medium is the message: what matters is not only what a technology carries but what it does to the people who use it - how it changes what they can perceive, remember, and think. The four pages of this theme apply that argument across the TOK framework, from the question of what technology is and how old it is, through to who it serves and who answers for what it does.
The Technology optional theme starts from Marshall McLuhan's argument that the medium is the message: what matters is not only what a technology carries but what it does to the people who use it - how it changes what they can perceive, remember, and think. The four pages of this theme apply that argument across the TOK framework, from the question of what technology is and how old it is, through to who it serves and who answers for what it does.
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1. Scope: What counts as technology?
Technology is usually the thing in your hand — but McLuhan argued it extends further than that, reshaping perception and social life in ways we rarely notice. Steven Johnson shows how innovations don't arrive fully formed; they emerge when existing tools and ideas reach a point where the next step becomes possible. This unit starts by asking what we mean by the word, because the boundary we draw determines what questions we ask — and what we miss. |
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2 Perspectives in Technology - Who designs the world?
Caroline Criado Perez documented how default assumptions built into technology, from crash-test dummies to voice recognition, systematically disadvantage women. Yanis Varoufakis argues that cloud capital has created a new class of techno-feudal landlords who extract rent from human attention. Shoshana Zuboff calls the underlying logic surveillance capitalism. Whose knowledge shapes the tools, and whose experience gets left out of the brief? |
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3 Methods and Tools in Technology - Can machines know?
Alan Turing asked whether a machine could think; John Searle's Chinese Room argued that processing symbols isn't the same as understanding them. AlphaFold solved a 50-year protein-folding problem that defeated human researchers, but could not explain its reasoning. Michael Polanyi's insight that we know more than we can tell has never felt more relevant. |
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4 Ethics in Technology - Who bears the cost?
The Luddites were not anti-technology; they were against machinery deployed to transfer costs onto workers while concentrating gains elsewhere. Cathy O'Neil showed how algorithmic systems can encode and scale existing inequalities without any single person intending harm. Autonomous weapons raise the question of whether accountability can survive when no human pulls the trigger. The education thread running through this theme asks what any of this means for how we learn and who we become. |
Two threads run through all four pages. The first is the unintended consequences argument: every major technology produces effects that were not intended and could not be foreseen from inside the moment of its deployment. The Gutenberg press is the example in Scope; the attention economy is the example in Ethics; the question AI raises is whether this transition is the same kind of case or different in kind. The second is the education thread: each page asks what technology is doing to knowledge and to knowers, with the student in the room as the nearest example. By the time you reach Ethics, you will be asking questions about accountability and the future of learning that only make sense because of what Scope, Perspectives, and Methods established first.