Most of the problems in our day and age are based on the utterly nonsensical idea that the "progress" of technology is some kind of natural force or trajectory implying a moral imperative to accept and make use of every form of technology possible. Can we make cellphones? Then we all must get cellphones, and use them. Can we make an atom bomb? Then we must make one, and use it. Can we make biological weapons? Torture devices and techniques? Elaborate data-collection algorithms? Sex robots?
Technology is nothing but the extension and partial reification of the human will, the will, ultimately, of some person or persons. The idea of a "morally neutral" technology is thus not just wrong, but self-contradictory. All technology is, by its very nature, ethical, since it is, again, a reification & extension of the choices of the human will, and since ethics is nothing other than the science of understanding and judging the choices of the human will. There is no other conceivable way to judge or even understand technology *except* ethically. And if you judge technology ethically, it must be possible to judge it negatively; to decide that this particular technology is, as an extension and reification of human choices, bad and ethically inadmissable.
If we cannot do this, then we are in a very fundamental and inescapable way simply insane, as insane as we would be if we simply refused to judge or even understand any human action, including our own. If our society cannot do this, then it is simply a very large and technologically advanced insane asylum.
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