Reads tagged with “technology”

Trees, Whales, and Our Digital Future: George Dyson on Nature, Human Nature, and the Relationship Between Our Minds and Our Machines
“Nature’s answer to those who seek to control nature through programmable machines is to allow us to build systems whose nature is beyond programmable control.”

Bicycling for Ladies: An Illustrated 1896 Manifesto for the Universal Splendors of the Bicycle as an Instrument of Self-Reliance, a Training Machine for Living with Uncertainty, and a Portal to Joy
“You are at all times independent. This absolute freedom of the cyclist can be known only to the initiated.”

Moral Wisdom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener’s Prophetic Admonition About Technology and Ethics
“The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

Killed by Kindness: Virginia Woolf, the Art of Letters, the Birth and Death of Photography, and the Fate of Every Technology
An elegy for the triumph of commodity over creativity.

Music, Feeling, and Transcendence: Nick Cave on AI, Awe, and the Splendor of Our Human Limitations
“What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe… A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.”

Art and the Human Spirit: Olivia Laing on What the Lives of Great Artists Reveal About Vulnerability, Love, Loneliness, Resistance, and Our Search for Meaning
“We’re so often told that art can’t really change anything. But… it shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living.”

The First Surviving Photograph of the Moon: John Adams Whipple and How the Birth of Astrophotography Bridged Impermanence and Immortality
A dual serenade to being and non-being, composed in glass, metal, and stardust.

Adrienne Rich’s Haunting Poem About Love and the Cosmic Perspective
“…equations letting sight pierce through time into liberations, lacerations of light and dust…”

The Source of Self-Regard: Toni Morrison on Wisdom in the Age of Information
“We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other… knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about.”

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