The term autonomous technology is associated with arguments that modern technology has grown out of control or develops independent of any particular human intention or plan. It is usually used to highlight undesirable aspects of technological society undermine human autonomy, thus signaling its ethical relevance. The clear ethical connotation of autonomous technology marks its difference from the notion of technological determinism, with which it is often associated.

Challenging the taken-for-granted notion of technology as simply an instrument or a tool, as well as the belief in human freedom, the concept of autonomous technology has been at the center of various controversies in the philosophy of technology, where it has functioned in three related contexts. First, it has served to articulate an uneasy feeling that has accompanied the mastery of nature and the fast pace of technological change since the Industrial Revolution. As early as the nineteenth...