At this point, you have no doubt heard about GitHub’s availability woes over the past several months. In April, Mitchell Hashimoto (of Hashicorp fame) wrote a post about how he is moving his Ghostty project off of GitHub:
…for the past month I’ve kept a journal where I put an “X” next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work. Almost every day has an X. On the day I am writing this post, I’ve been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage. This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.
The irony here is that GitHub, a centralized service, is built on top of git, a version control system that was designed by Linus Torvalds to be fully decentralized. I can’t read Torvalds mind, but I’m pretty sure that GitHub was not what he had in mind when he was developing git to support Linux kernel development. Which, of course, brings us to the pope.
We are called to reflect on the great “construction sites” of our era and ask: What are we building? – Pope Leo XIV
Pope Leo XIV just released an encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. Now, I don’t usually write on the topic of papal encyclicals, since this isn’t a blog about religion, and I’m not even Catholic. However, this particular encyclical discusses technology in general, and artificial intelligence in particular.
For this reason, technological progress — valuable in itself — requires careful discernment of the anthropological vision that guides it and the ends it pursues.
In this encyclical, the pope encourages us to be deliberate about the kinds of technological projects that we work on: rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem is good, but building the Tower of Babel is not. He writes about the dangers of a technocratic perspective that is focused solely on matters such as efficiency, control, and profit, and neglects humanistic ends. AI isn’t neutral, argues the pope, because technologies are never neutral. The technologies reflect values that were made by the designers, either explicitly or implicitly.
In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations.
I bring up the encyclical not to argue in support or in opposition to the content, but to bring up a point that is frequently neglected when these sorts of discussions of technologies come up. Designers of technologies are not particularly good at predicting how those technologies will actually be used. Could Linus Torvalds have predicted the role that git would have had played in enabling GitHub to become a centralized point of failure? Heck, could AI researchers have predicted the fantastic success of LLM-powered code generation tools like Claude Code? In a sense, the technologist is worst-positioned to predict the impact of technology, because the intended use is so fixed in their minds, they are unable to imagine how others might use their technology in different ways or for different purposes. If you’ve ever seen a UI designer observe a usability study of their own designs, and you’ve seen the shock on their face as the user behaves in unexpected ways, you’ve seen this in action.
We engineers are trained on how to build things, but we’re not trained on how to predict the effects of the things that we build. Now, there is some lip service paid to this: when I was an undergraduate engineering student at McGill University, I had to select a single humanities course to cover my impact of technology on society requirement (I chose religious ethics and the environment, which is still being taught). But, really, that’s just a single course.
I frequently write in this blog about how the technologies we work with are fundamentally unpredictable, which is why incidents are unavoidable. But it’s not my intent to be a fatalist here about coming to grips with the impact that a particular technology may have. Instead, what I want to argue is that studying the impact of technology requires an additional set of skills beyond the ability to design technology.
Here I’ll make a pitch for an engineering domain which specifically focuses on the impact of technology: cognitive systems engineering (CSE). CSE is a field that lives at the intersection of people, technology, and work. These are folks who study how the work is shaped and changed by new technology. John Allspaw just wrote a blog post about CSE over at Adaptive Capacity Labs: How is a Cognitive Systems Engineering perspective different from traditional UX/UI? I also maintain a bibliography of CSE papers if you’re interested in reading further.
Surfing Complexity 