Mary Shelley was perhaps the first to illuminate modernity’s insatiable appetite for temporal progress. Today humanity continues its quest to maximize its knowledge, not to attain truth, but in a bid to achieve a new age of heaven on earth, powered by the rule of applied science. “I agree Technology is per se neutral: but [...]
Deep in the wellspring of science fiction is the ongoing struggle between mechanical monsters and holistic heroes. From bleak and dour tales of extermination and human destruction, to optimistic but nevertheless struggling and pathological battles to save life, science fiction has been battling with our modern monsters from the id boiling up inside of us [...]
In many ways, cultivating relationships into a thriving community looks like cultivating a garden. Human beings can tolerate uprooting from one place to another, but every time this happens we disrupt those tiny little fibers of attachment from which we draw life. For a long time now, our culture has faced a crisis of loneliness. [...]
Instead of carved statues of Adonis or Venus, we have created for each person his own hand-held idol, designed with amazing ingenuity and carved with utmost skill from precious materials. Each one of us has a little god who offers us the world in the palm of our hand. While I was reading from the [...]
We wonder whether smartphones have somehow fundamentally altered our human nature, but ask why we were so vulnerable to addiction when they arrived on the scene. Technology amplifies, but does not alter, who we are. We are creatures with a deep and abiding desire to avoid the real. We seek to escape awareness of ourselves [...]
Podcast stories, like reading, have the advantage of engaging the audience’s imagination. And lest the technophobes among us decry the dominance of gadgets, rather than the gadgetry taking us into a brave new world, the technology is actually allowing us to participate in a much older form of literature: storytelling… Some time ago, on these [...]
It only took a moment. The smartphone was somewhere in the grass, forgotten. Our hands and jeans were covered in smears of purple and green sidewalk chalk. My two-year-old daughter and I were busy drawing roads and buildings on a square of pavement—here a library, there a post office, with our house around the corner. [...]
At its finest, the new conception of nature enabled people to appreciate, and wish to safeguard, the natural environment on which life depends. At its worst, this reverence for the natural world gave rise to a mindless sentimentality that regarded all human activity as harmful and exploitive. I. The English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North [...]
All the minds of all the brilliant thinkers that the world has ever known will still come up pathetically short when compared with the grandeur of the universe. Technology, if it is to soberly measure its own capabilities and power, must approach the questions of the universe with a certain degree of humble modesty. "Until [...]
Some dream of a time when we will achieve immortality by downloading the contents of the brain into a computer. But is this truly possible?… I have just read a fascinating and, to my mind, cheerful article, by the research psychologist Robert Epstein, on why your brain is not a computer—for the simple reason that your brain does not store memories [...]
Robin Sloan attempts to show the ways in which technology can improve upon our old and outdated modes of reading. But his novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, demonstrates that though Mr. Sloan knows technology, he misunderstands books and bookstores… Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan (288 pages, Picador, 2013) In the wake of [...]
The world may ultimately be broken down, not into atoms or elements or quanta of energy, but into something like “pixels” or units of information. These build up into the impressions of things that are the objects of our consciousness, constituting the other half of reality. Will the world end with a bang, or just [...]
Tradition, philosophy, and religion long ago succumbed to science as the sole arbiter of truth, but now science too has been dethroned. What rules today is a different form of ideology—ideas and images replace concrete experience. Can we escape the Screen with its hollow images and counterfeit emotions and experience the human way of life?… At [...]
Millions of children today are raised, by default, to be slaves to group-think, addicted to endorphins released from a digital device, burdened with neural pathways so obliterated that nary a logical thought might pass from brain to lips... In The Princess and the Goblin, George MacDonald casts both an unlikely hero and an unlikely weapon [...]