Technology and wellbeing have a complex relationship. More than anything, it's a relationship of co- dependency. We cannot do without technology any more than technologies can do without us. We are what we are because of technology; we brought each other into being and have co- evolved alongside each other since at least the knapped stone tools our ancestors fashioned more than 3.3 million years ago (Stiegler, 1998; McPherron et al, 2010; Harmand et al, 2015). We’ve come some way together since then. We’ve brought out some of the best (and worst) in each other and we’ve grown a lot. Life isn't quite as nasty, brutish and short as it was before vaccinations, penicillin and fidget spinners entered out lives. But this book isn't about these benefits. It's not a techno- utopian ode to technology, our great benefactor. It's less hit parade, more hit parade of tears, to borrow from Izumi Suzuki (2023).

This book examines how technologies – from pistols to PredPol – contribute to social harms. Pistols and predictive AI (artificial intelligence) snake oil couldn’t, of course, be more different (see Narayanan and Kapoor, 2024), but if we want to explain how they contribute to different types of harm, we must avoid some common pitfalls. First, we must avoid two determinisms, one technological, the other social. Technological determinists view technologies as the underlying cause of social change. For determinists of this stripe, technological development is a linear and teleological process that pays no heed to human agency (McCarthy, 2013). Indeed, ‘hard’ technological determinists tend to write human agency out of history, and view artefacts as the authors of social change (Dafoe, 2015; Kline, 2001: 15495). Social determinists, by contrast, treat human behaviour and social change as thoroughly social products.