Epistemological Technology

A technology whose greatest social impact lies in what it reveals about how the world works, as against an instrumental technology whose impact lies in what it does to the world. Bratton derives the distinction from Lem's existential technologies; telescopes and microscopes enable "Copernican shifts in self-comprehension." Planetary computation is the central instance: the research statement gives the term two connotations, a global apparatus and the ways that apparatus reveals planetary conditions, and SPoC says its most decisive impact will be epistemological. Accept All Cookies makes it the second entry ("a technology of knowing") and the ground of the case against alignment overfitting (entry 41): forcing AI to tell us what we already believe squanders it as an epistemological technology.