For this week's reading response, I'd like to write about Principle 8.5 — technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral — and its association with definition 8.8 — Immanuel Kant's idea of the categorical imperative.

I have thought about the he idea that technology is neither good nor bad quite a lot in the past. In fact, the idea applies to most things we encounter in life, and seems to be quite universal. In Chinese, this idea is best described in the saying "the water that bears the boat is the same that swallows it up." And in English, we have the concept that something can be a "double edged sword." Technology, like water or a weapon, is not inherently good or bad, because whether it can be considered good or bad often depends on whether it is put to good use or bad use, and both types of uses often coexist in this wild and complex world. The internet, for example, provides countless benefits to people by allowing them to be connected with each other and to information on the web rather effortlessly. On the flip side, the internet is also a dark place because the same useful features facilitate serious crimes as well as unkind treatments of others, such as verbal bullying.

However, being introduced to the idea that technology is not only neither good nor bad but also not neutral surprised me. For me, this is a new way to think about technology as I had previously believed that if something is neither good nor bad, then it must be neutral. As I read the later parts of the chapter, how and why technology is not inherently neutral began to make more sense to me. More specifically, Immanuel Kant's theory about categorial imperatives sheds a lot of light on this seemingly confusing concept. Even though technology seems to fit the model of the hypothetical imperative because the creation of technology often has the purpose of achieving a desired goal, design decisions always have to be made in the processes of creating and using some technology, and therefore morality is necessarily and inevitably involved in the creation and use of any technology. As stated on page 410, "morality is itself a categorial imperative," so technology cannot inherently be neutral. That means that when creating any sort of technology, we cannot assume that there would not be any issues with the end product or how it'll be used as long as we don't intend for any issues to happen. We have to be more mindful and more intentional about the good that the technology we created will bring to the society, and do our best to ensure that we make ethical choices and decisions as we develop the technology, monitor people's usage of it, and performance necessary maintenance work.