Philosophy is the Original Technology

If I were to expand on this, I’d say it’s like watching engineers attempting to construct a building but stopping at the scaffolding. Philosophy, after all, is the original technology. It’s the underlying framework that got us thinking about thinking. But most engineers don’t go beyond the surface—content with the Microcontroller Unit, that simple, mechanical, predictable loop; it’s a closed system, something controllable, with predictable inputs and outputs. Engineers often treat philosophy like they treat hardware: plug in what you need, discard the rest.

Yet, this approach—content to cling to the MCU, whether in its hardware form or as the Marvel Cinematic Universe—leaves so much unexplored. These crutches provide repeatable comfort in a chaotic world, like preferring a bland, reheated meal over something complex, nuanced, even risky.

Let’s take reproducibility. The idea is that everything can be remade, replicated, without degrading meaning. We teach engineers to value it as though the act of copying doesn’t inherently warp the original. But philosophy knows better—every reproduction is a slight twist on reality, each version a little further from the source, a game of telephone across generations of thought.

Consider commodification. Engineers often don’t realize they’re walking around with Karl Marx in their toolkit. In Marx’s framework, everything has a price tag, everything is transactional. To engineers, every solution is a product, every innovation has a dollar amount, which leads to a transactional view of the world. Then there’s component-level thinking, a Cartesian notion, reducing complex problems to smaller, simpler ones. It’s useful, sure, but it can also fragment understanding, turning nuanced phenomena into bite-sized bits that don’t really connect once they’re recombined.

Conformity—Émile Durkheim would have a field day. Engineers are taught to conform, to abide by the standards, the protocols, the regulations, the known safe pathways. But that can turn the human element into an assembly line process, stripping creativity in favor of reproducibility.

And then there’s the Paperclip Maximization problem, the drive for efficiency, optimization, and profit that can run amok. Engineers start by wanting to make one perfect thing, but in the process, they end up in a spiral of Bentham, Mill, or Weber-style utilitarianism where maximizing value means losing sight of the cost. The obsession with measurable metrics often ends in systems that churn out endless paperclips, even if it means dismantling humanity.

Risk aversion? That’s pure existential angst, straight from Sartre. Engineers often fear the unknown, preferring reliability to innovation. They’d rather stick to what they can measure, control, and predict, even if it means dodging the very questions that give life meaning.

Finally, we’ve got the technology-driven paradigm shift of McLuhan. Engineers are taught to worship technology, to place it on a pedestal. But McLuhan knew: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” This blind worship means forgetting that technology is a lens, not a life raft. It’s supposed to clarify, not obscure.

Each of these philosophical ideas, if engineers recognized them, would open up the entire world of innovation. But as it stands, they’re running around with the tools of the mind, but without the keys to understanding.