The possibility paradox: How technology both expands and contracts possibilities

Abstract

As we turn more and more to technology to solve the problems it has created – from misinformation to climate change – it is crucial to understand how innovations can both expand the possible and contract it. In this editorial, I first outline how technological advances increase what is possible, probable and feasible, and our sense of it, through four main processes: (1) Expanding what is possible, (2) broadening our sense of what could be, (3) making the possible reachable and (4) freeing up resources to explore new possibilities. I then look at six processes through which technology reduces them and narrows our horizon: (1) by destroying possibilities, (2) forcefully replacing tasks and jobs, (3) leading to a loss of skills, (4) bringing social and environmental destruction, (5) making existing systems obsolete and (6) creating possibility tunnels. This nomenclature is not meant to be exhaustive. It is instead an invitation to fellow researchers interested in possibilities, technologies and their intersection, to explore how novel tools affect our perceptions of what could be and as well as our actual actions.

It is now a little over a year since the release of ChatGPT, and few technological advances have made such a big impact in such a small amount of time. What seemed impossible yesterday – full essays, power points or illustrations ready in seconds, and a conversational AI that doesn’t spew out racist horrors within days of being released – is now available (almost) for free to anyone with a decent Internet connexion. Yet, beyond technophile circles, it has not been met by as much enthusiasm as one would expect for such an incredible innovation. Yes, Large Language Models (LLMs) can hold seemingly intelligent conversations (Hagendorff et al., 2023), creatively solve problems (Doshi & Hauser, 2023) and even pass the Turing test (Biever, 2023). But they also confabulate and blatantly plagiarise (Alkaissi & McFarlane, 2023), all the while risking to steal our jobs (Hatzius et al., 2023). But our fear of AI doesn’t not only stem from its capabilities and lack of thereof. It also comes from our past experiences with technology and what it has done to us. And, more importantly for the study of possibility, what is has made impossible, unthinkable or simply unfeasible.

This is what I propose to call the Possibility Paradox of technology. In theory, technological advances should only expand the possible. At the minimum, they add new options and new opportunities. At the maximum, the open up whole new areas of possibilities on which future generations can build (e.g. Beghetto, 2023). Yet, in practice, new technologies have often reduced the field of what we think can or could be done. Yes, the Internet has made online shopping possible, but it has not just been an ‘addition’ to traditional in person shopping: It has, in some places, replaced it, making life for shoppers and businesses that remain offline much more complicated and limited. Yes, online dating has allowed people to connect with likeminded individuals they wouldn’t have met otherwise. But it has also created new norms around interpersonal relationships that are constraining new interactions for younger generations way beyond that is happening in dating apps (Bergström, 2021). And when we are afraid of ChatGPT being widely used to write texts or Midjourney to generate images, we are not afraid of the new options it gives us, but of the fact that we will not have a choice but to use them and to be exposed to their content. Because they are so cost effective, the danger is not in what it will add, but in what it will make disappear.

As we turn more and more to technology to solve the problems it has created – from misinformation to climate change – it is all the more crucial to understand how it can both expand the possible and contract it. In this editorial, I first outline how technological advances increase what is possible, probable and feasible, and our sense of it. I then look at six processes through which technology reduces them and narrows our horizon. This taxonomy is not meant to be exhaustive. It is instead an invitation to fellow researchers interested in possibilities, technologies and their intersection, to explore how novel tools affect our perceptions of what could be and as well as our actual actions.

Technology in service of possibility

New technologies, by their very nature, expand the possible. They make the impossible possible, from going to Mars to reading the news on your watch. Robot servants, tirelessly working for you in your own home, used to be the stuff science fiction was made off. Now, I write this as I watch my automated lawn mower cut the grass for me under the rain. It might not be as flashy as the flying cars I dreamt of as a kid, but it sure is a pretty convenient possibility. Technological innovations don’t need to be life changing leaps to expand possibilities: At minimum, they offer us new options.

More fundamentally, however, new technologies broaden our sense of what could be. It’s not so much what ChatGPT can do now that impresses me – and as someone who has worked on the dangers of AI for some time, I can’t help but focus on its limits. No, what strikes me is the whole new universe of possibilities it has opened. Will we now talk to software in plain language instead of clicking through unintuitive menus? Will the app I use to order groceries offer me menus for the week and order the ingredients for me? And, more annoyingly, will I ever get to chat with a human again when I contact consumer service? The little robot that is tirelessly taking care of my lawn is a clear descendent of robot hoovers, that have paved the way for a host of domestic innovations.

A lot of these expansions are the result of what these innovations have made possible, but not only. There are also the result of a shift in our perspectives and of how big inventions guide our attention and imagination (Corazza, 2023; Hanchett Hanson, 2023). The leaps that have been made over the past decade in AI and automation have made autonomous cars seem all the more possible. If not now, at least in the near-ish future. But for decades, the car of the future, in people’s imagination, was not a self-driving car: It was a flying car. Or even better, a small space ship. Rapid leaps in aviation technology during most of the 20th century captured people’s imagination, and guided what they thought was possible for the future.

Technological innovations can also make the possible reachable. Yes, it was already possible to cross the Atlantic a century ago, but commercial aircrafts have not just made it easier. By making it faster and cheaper, they have made it more accessible, as the explosion of international travel exemplifies. While there is a strong ethical argument to be made about the democratisation of possibilities, it is sadly not one that is always in favour of new technologies. By and large, technological innovations have actually increased inequalities (Acemoglu, 2002): Yes, more people have the opportunity to travel the world today than ever before. But the overwhelming majority of people who book international flights are still, at the scale of the world, extremely privileged. But increased inequalities do not necessarily mean that new technologies don’t positively impact underserved populations: It means that it doesn’t impact them as positively as privileged groups. Yes, the latest healthcare tech – from 3D sonograms to robot assisted surgeries – is only available in the richest of country, and usually to their more wealthy inhabitants. But healthcare has been profoundly transformed over the past century, in large parts thanks to innovations such as vaccines or the bifurcation needle, which eliminated small pox. While improvements have been unequal, the vast majority of the population has benefited from them to some degree.

Finally, innovations can free up resources to explore new possibilities. This is one of the biggest promises of AI: No, it will not write poetry for us. Instead, it will do our boring, repetitive tasks, while freeing up the time we need to explore the artist within. Only time will tell whether this is a lie, but historical precedents do give some weight to this argument. Many domestic innovations – from the modern mop to the dishwasher – have transformed the lives of women by making it possible to take care of a home and pursue their own goals (Greenwood et al., 2005). I am not suggesting here that gender based inequalities could be solved by a few well designed innovations, and far from me the intention to reduce sexism to a simple question of domestic necessity. Instead, I am arguing that technology can help free up resources – in particular time – thereby opening up new horizons, even when they might have been closed for ideological rather than practical reasons.

This impact of technology on the possible certainly participate to the increasingly important place we give it in our lives, maybe it be in our homes or in society at large. New technologies don’t just offer us new gadgets and fantastic tools. They offer us dreams and opened up horizons we would have never imagined possible. And as such, they more than deserve the hold they have on our imagination and our economies. Does this mean I am ready to go sing Kumbaya with the millionaires of the Silicon Valley? Well, not quite.

How technology can kill possibility

If technology holds so much promise for the future, how come it is often met with resistance and scepticism? Our tendency to resist change certainly holds some responsibility here, but not only: Many of the life changing innovations that made modernity and the times since have also produced incommensurable damage, from pollution to the atomic bomb. Sure enough, new technology can reduce the possible by destroying human life and what supports it, very literally destroying possibilities. But there are less direct ways in which innovations can negatively affect the possible.

First, it can forcefully replace tasks and jobs. Automation, for instance, has not just taken painful and repetitive tasks away from workers. In some cases, it has entirely replaced them, depriving workers of their livelihood. But even in less extreme cases, adopting new technologies at work is rarely a personal choice; it is rather imposed by a hierarchy. In those cases, it does not add a new choice for the workers, but at the very least replaces an existing one. Very often, however, technology actually reduces what can be done. Many workplace innovations – from software to track client data to new security systems – constrain workers’ actions. This is because they often lack the flexibility of manual actions – as anyone who has tried to move table in Word can attest – but also because they are often instruments of control (Kellogg et al., 2020), meant to ensure a certain productivity and quality is met.

Second, new technologies often make existing systems obsolete. Declaring your taxes online, for instance, used to be an option offered to those who preferred it to a paper declaration. In many countries, it is now the default. And as more and more public services become quasi exclusively accessible online, the possible has been dramatically reduced for those who still do not have access to the Internet. In France, for instance, the Minitel – a videotex online service accessible through a free and easy to use device – allowed millions to access a variety of services, starting from the late 70s. Even as the Internet took off, millions continued to use it, especially in the older generations. Until the service was cut in 2012, as the Internet made it completely obsolete. For the many who exclusively relied on it, the Internet did not open new possibilities, quite the contrary.

Third, innovations can lead to a loss of skills. This is perhaps one of the biggest worry that generative AI has raised for future generations: If ChatGPT can write essays for them, will they really learn how to argue, to organise their thoughts or even to write on their own (Reich, 2023)? Of course, not all losses of skills are to be decried – is it really a problem if I don’t know how to operate a typewriter, even if it was a basic skill for an academic 50 years ago? But others raise real questions: Not knowing how to write by hand means not being able to take the type of notes that only a pen and paper – even if digital – afford, and instead being constrained by the limits of text editing software. This is all the more problematic now that we know that children learn better with printed rather than digital materials (Froud et al., 2023) – and that is before they even start writing themselves.

Forth, some innovations, even when seemingly harmless, have resulted in tremendous social and environmental destruction. The damage can sometimes be quite easily foreseeable: We have long known that cars pollute, it hasn’t stopped manufacturers from designing bigger and bigger SUVs. But some environmental destruction can be more insidious. Sunscreen, for instance, was supposed to ward off cancer, not to destroy coral reefs. And societal effects are often even harder to predict, yet they can have tremendous consequences for the possible. Who would have thought that a little social network designed to rate fellow students’ attractiveness would one day threaten democracy? Sure, Facebook’s early goals can’t really be qualified of prosocial, but it took more than a decade for us to realise what it could really do to our institutions. Sure, we cannot let social media alone carry the burden of having endangered our political systems, when media pundits, TV personalities and politicians freed from the shackles of the truth have all played a role. Yet one cannot look at what social media has done to public debate – let’s not even mention youth mental health – and confidently say that it has not, in some ways, reduced what is possible. From self-censorship to the quasi impossibility of public consensus, social media has often left us less rather than more connected.

Finally, and significantly for possibility studies, new technology can create possibility tunnels: Certain innovations can focus our attention and our imagination so much that they blind us to alternatives and other ways of thinking. Gig apps, where workers can be matched with consumers for car rides or food deliveries, captured much of the collective imagination in the 2010s. To the point that almost every new business idea had to be reformulated as the ‘Uber of…’, as if it was the only possible future for economic growth. Because technology can hold so much promise, it can also thwart efforts to address issues it has not even solved yet. This is a recurring issue when trying to limit climate change: Decarbonisation technologies are far from efficient enough to address pollution, and are in no way a solution to over consumption. Yet, it is hard to resist the promise that technology will solve the issues it has created, especially when the alternative requires a complete change of lifestyle.

The myth that ‘technology will provide’ has been an enduring one and has permeated many aspects of our lives. Social media is over run with misinformation? Fear not, moderation algorithms will clean up your feed. Smartphones produce massive pollution and use rare resources? Don’t worry, in the future they’ll use greener materials. Fast fashion is filling up landfills on the other side of the planet? We now have an app to sell those clothes you’ve never worn – so that someone else can never wear them as well. Who needs to think up of alternatives, when you have the magic wand of technology at your disposal?

A pragmatic perspective on technology and possibility

You would be forgiven for thinking, after this diatribe, that I am against technology. Yet it could not be further from the truth: All in all, it would be foolish to argue that our lives have not been improved by it. Overall, new technologies have opened more doors than they have closed. Yet we have often fallen prey to the flashy promises of innovations, and looked less carefully at what it has actually done. And, as a result, the ranks of the tech sceptics have only grown. What is needed, I believe, is a balanced view of how technology both expands and contracts the possible.

What this editorial is, first and foremost, is a call to study what technology really does to possibility, to adopt a pragmatic perspective on the topic. It means taking into account that every possibility we choose to explore or to ignore includes a moral and ethical dimension (O’Brolcháin, 2023). It also calls for us to look at how in practice innovations affect possibilities, for the better or the worst – resisting the urge to take a prima facea stand for or against a new technology. It is not about debating whether the best case or the worst case use have the most value. Should we judge social media for its role in spreading misinformation or in helping organise revolutions against tyrannical regimes? But about understanding how, in practice, technology can be used for both. Only then, I believe, we will be able to tilt the balance, for the better.

But this editorial is also an invitation to explore possibility paradoxes in other places: From education to health, the abondance of new possibilities has often failed to materialise into a multitude of realisable paths. This was already beautifully captured by Barry Schwartz’s paradox of choice, which showed how ever increasing numbers options can paralyse instead of empower us (Schwartz, 2004). But beyond the question of how we deal with the vertiginous promise of infinite possibility is another, more pressing issue. In a world of finite resources, every door we open necessarily closes another one. How to choose which possibilities to explore, if we do not understand the impossibles it will create?