technology 161
The Cult of Efficiency and the Technological Society
Modernity lays at your feet hundreds if not thousands of tools to make our lives cleaner, smoother, and more efficient.
A Sign Does Not a Century Farm Make
You can’t have a farm divorced from community, and you can’t have community without people. A farm isn’t a farm without a farmer.
Don’t Call it a Comeback
We may ask ourselves how we can defend academic integrity from AI, but we should first ask how we became so vulnerable to AI in academia.
Doctoring and the Device Paradigm
Like most of my colleagues, I routinely familiarize myself with the iPatient before going to meet the real patient. Their story is told in numbers, flowsheets, radiology reports, and poorly…
Still Asking Berry’s Question
The promise of liberation from drudgery quickly becomes liberation from purpose.
A Brightly Colored—and Toxic—Digital Childhood
The negative effects of digital poison can, as documented by Haidt, cause a sort of phantom anxiety and depression for an entire generation.
Inside the Workings of Joel J. Miller’s The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape our Future
The world of books is tacitly conceived of as a homey yet elevated sphere analogous perhaps to Tolkien’s Shire. How did books become what Joel Miller calls “the forgotten technology”?
Old Warnings for New Possibilities
What made the Isle of Pines an instance of regression is being sold to us as progress
Leisure in an Age of Technology
Leisure is not entertainment, play, or a chance to catch your breath in order to return to work restored.
Escaping the Matrix: A Review of Are We All Cyborgs Now?
Phillips and Pauling help us to consider new emerging technologies and how we can avoid becoming cyborgs living off grubs and gruel.
The Monster and the Mirage
Technology may assist the surgeon, illuminate the astronomer’s field, or console a mother in her sorrow. Yet it cannot give the soul the perfection it longs for.
Knausgaard’s Literary Response to the Tyranny of Technique
The right kind of literature has the power to make the immediate visible to us once again.
Parenting Across the Digital Generational Divide
One of the most curious things about raising two boys seventeen years apart is the divide I feel in their digital generations.
AI is Not Like a Calculator, and Other Conversations Worth Having
We are forgetting about other ways AI may be affecting people close to us, even ourselves.
The Land Ethic for AI
We have long drawn a dividing line between technology and humans, imbuing one with ethical responsibility and treating the other as merely contingent— therefore, technologies are “neutral” and it’s simply…
What Do Clare Morell and Chuck Magill Have in Common?
Chuck dreams of overcoming his allergy so he can reenter normal society. We reject the status quo because we want something better for our kids.
An Economist’s Take on the Age of AI: A Review of Robert Skidelsky’s Mindless
Skidelsky’s expertise is on full display as he tells the story of the impact of machines on the human condition.
The Crisis of the Self in an Age of Solutions
We live under the impression that we can do for the human community and the individual human soul what physicists have done with the atom.
Heroic Romanticism
It's entirely possible that many will give up human relationships, turning instead to the safety and predictability of technology, like an AI companion
1.5 Speed to Nowhere
Over the decades, I suppose I learned a lot from podcasts; plenty of facts and all the “sides” to stories. Very little of those things seem to matter to me…
Local Porch in NOVA: The Tech Exit with Clare Morell
Join Ben Christenson and others for a discussion with Clare Morell.
In Praise of “Old”
Similarly, I believe that most people can tell the difference between ugly and beautiful buildings.
Let us Converse Together (Without Our Phones)
Bilbro’s book is a careful study through profound literary texts about how we live in a world that has no patience for careful study through profound literary texts.
