Control over Thinking with Technology: But surely at least our devices are our own, to do with what we want? I turn on the TV, choose a movie I want to watch in the privacy of my own home: one can’t be any more master of their domain than that? Except that the options available…
Setting aside The Great Irony of Technology, let’s spend just a minute talking about something I call The Return of Magic. I’ve now given talks on this subject to global technology and think tank events, regional academic conferences in Archaeology, and locally to an audience of senior scientists and astrophysicists. What one topic would be…
If my magic label seems a little abstract, there’s one final concrete reason you should take notice of regarding the effects of accelerating technological innovation. As I’ve hinted at elsewhere in this book, increasing complexity is inherently more likely to fail. As systems have larger numbers of small interdependent parts, all it takes is for…
We can see some of that in the writings of David Weinberger and Sam Arbesman, who both, while not tackling ‘thought’ directly, write about the complexity of modern life. They show us how we resolve this complexity traditionally by breaking it into chunks, and developing hyper-specialization to tackle the various aspects of the thing. What…