These are some reflections on morality stimulated by Carlota Perez's book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. It takes a long time to popularize a new technology, writes Perez, because "a highly visible 'attractor' needs to appear, symbolizing the whole new potential and capable of sparking the technological and business imagination of a cluster of pioneers." The same sort of thinking might be applied to changes in our conception of morality. "There are morally significant events -- these are the historical occurrences that awaken the moral conscience and tip it into a new mode of thinking. Second, there are the moral pioneers -- these are specific individuals that help symbolise a new mode of moral thinking." These combine to form a new "techno-moral paradigm" that results when technologies change "the cost-benefit ratio for certain decisions.
But new technologies sometimes force new conceptions of morality. "To take advantage of the economic potential of mass automation, a social reckoning may be in order. For instance, redistributive policies may need reform to compensate for the loss of income associated with automation (and to prevent a collapse of consumer demand). The basic income guarantee is the most widely discussed of these policy reforms. In addition to this, education and training systems may also need reform. The goal of such institutions may no longer be to train the next generation of workers but to encourage the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake or to develop their civic responsibilities and sense of public duty."
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