The question: “is technology value-neutral or not?” evokes a great deal of debates and arguments for and against.
Various technological innovations have been promoting the successful development of the world economy for the previous ten years. The technical progress allows creating new enterprises and improving the work of the existing ones in various directions. At present, it is difficult to imagine how huge corporation and small companies can exist without the modern technologies. Now these systems are widespread and well coordinated. A high cost efficiency of computer systems induced their owners to struggle for the customer in the market.
Technology is only one of specific types of activity. From the philosophical-methodological point of view technology concerns not the bases, but the data domain; it is studied by means of such categories as “activity”, “reality”, “existence”, “value” and others. The representations of activity as technology are quite lawful means if to take into consideration an appropriate context - the analysis of the essence of technology’s genesis in culture. Out of this context the identification of technology with activity can lead to various paradoxes. One of them is that technology can be both valuable and valueless.
On the one hand, technology represents the activity in the frames of which there are not only innovations, but also “control of their development”. On the other hand, technology is a social cultural sphere, peculiarities and evolution of which are caused at least by five global factors - cultural schematics and world patterns, social institutes, values and beliefs of the modern person and structure of our technogenic civilization. Simultaneously, the technology itself causes the specified global factors in many respects. Such a role of the modern technology led our society, nowadays more than ever, to the explicit conviction that technology is an important determinant of values in our lives.
Modern science and technology promptly expand natural possibilities of a person. There are revolutionary changes in various areas of a science and extraordinary progress in all areas of knowledge. However, this development of knowledge and technologies increases a rupture between exterior possibilities of the person and his internal moral force. Therefore, as a person has both good and bad qualities, this growing misbalance between exterior possibilities and internal moral force leads to numerous unfavorable situations and problems.
“Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely represent and pursue the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain not free and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it” (The Question Concerning Technology: n.d.).
Nowadays technologies can be compared to a bistro where a person is fed up very quickly but not with a very nutritious food. The same happened to the technologies: there is enough knowledge and information but there is no wisdom. Many highly-educated people using modern technologies became successful in the professional work, but …