The clever tool effect
Briefly stated, the Clever Tool Effect works as follows. You are an engineer or a scientist. You listen to your superiors discuss the technology you have spent your life mastering. They confuse basic concepts, misunderstand limitations, and make claims that would embarrass a competent undergraduate. You exchange knowing glances with your colleagues. These people have absolutely no idea what they are talking about.
Then you return to your desk and build what they asked for.
Somewhere between the meeting room and your workstation, “they do not understand my work” has become “they could never outsmart me.”
Meanwhile, they decide what gets funded, who owns the results, and against whom those results may be used. They understand your appetite for difficult problems, your need for recognition, and how readily you accept power when it arrives disguised as an interesting engineering challenge.
Your contempt makes the arrangement remarkably efficient. You interpret their ignorance as evidence of your independence. Questions about the project’s purpose become distractions from the technical work. Critics “don’t understand the technology.” You improve the surveillance, refine the targeting, perfect the machinery of persuasion—each advance another reassuring demonstration of how much smarter you are than the people directing you.
The possibility that your intelligence is precisely what they are exploiting scarcely enters the picture. After all, you are the expert.
You understand the machine perfectly. You forget that you are part of it.
#Culture #Science #Technology #Economics