“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of […]
John Markoff’s Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots is another addition to the growing stack of books designed to help us think about the relationship between humanity and emerging technologies. Markoff offers a detailed history of artificial intelligence and robotics, and attempts to show how past trends are […]
“There’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It’s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never.” ––The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, pg. […]
“What do these onlookers see as they bend over my broken body? I do not know. But inside me, the sun.” ––The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, pg. 320 “In an augmented reality world, the ‘Web’ will become the space that surrounds you. Cameras embedded in the glasses will recognize the objects […]
“We mustn’t forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don’t want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where’s the joy in these […]
“Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn––and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: […]
“Apparently, now and again adults take the time to sit down and contemplate what a disaster their life is. They complain without understanding and, like flies constantly banging against the same old windowpane, they buzz around, suffer, waste away, get depressed then wonder how they got caught up in this spiral that is taking them […]
We live in a world shaped by scientific principles, but our understanding of those principles is always less than perfect. As technology and scientific inquiry become ever more embedded in our social and professional lives, it’s important not only to ensure exposure to reliable information, but also to ask how this trend affects the quality […]
“I still haven’t found that place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.” ––We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler, pg. 298 “Will machines supplant human workers or augment them? On one level, they will do both. But once again, […]
David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature is not a breezy book. From the first page, it plunged me into a fervid mode of double-layered analysis in which my struggle to comprehend the text was mirrored by efforts to track my personal reactions to whatever content I was able to wrest from it. Early on, […]