CONCEPT
The Road Not Taken (Noble)
David Noble’s methodological principle that at every major technological transition a suppressed alternative existed—a different design that would have distributed power differently—and that recovering this alternative is the primary tool for dismantling
the mythology of inevitable progress.
The most consequential fact about any technology,
David Noble insisted, is not the technology that was built but the technology that was not. At every technological fork in the road Noble’s archival research found, the path taken was the path that served the interests of the institutions controlling the development process, and the path not taken was typically the one that would have preserved workers’ control over productive knowledge.
Record playback was, in many applications, technically superior to
numerical control; it captured the skilled machinist’s actual movements rather than replacing them with programmer-specified commands. It lost because it left productive knowledge in the wrong hands. Noble’s method was to recover these
suppressed alternatives—to show not that the technology that won was bad but that the criteria by which it won were political rather than technical. The AI equivalent of record playback is
expert-amplifying AI: systems designed to extend the specific expertise