The trouble with building a world that no longer needs people is discovering that you’re one of them.
Tag: philosophy of technology
Technocratic civilisation maintains its continuity through repeated technical discontinuity, and its security through the management of insecurity.
The flying car illustrates the peculiar absurdity of developing increasingly sophisticated means of getting somewhere while losing collective control over where we are going.
A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.
The technological system cannot perceive its full costs because that blindness is one of the conditions of its success.
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technique, technology, tesseract
Many of the largest problems now confronting technologically advanced societies are not failures of engineering, they are consequences of its success.
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all swallowed whole
Technology cannot solve itself, because the introspective incompleteness that limits it is a function of the same combinatorial unboundedness that makes it at all possible; spoiler: we humans are similarly and simultaneously bound by identical logic.
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technological recursion
Technology promised to save us effort, then quietly reorganised civilisation around the effort required to sustain technology.
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Loneliness: The Cost of Connection
In post-industrial Western societies, relationships increasingly pass through technological and transactional systems before they pass directly between people. Friendship, intimacy, courtship, status, belonging: much of social life now moves through screens, platforms, metrics, services, and algorithmic surfaces. Distance has collapsed. Presence has become persistent. The modern person can remain linked to hundreds, even thousands, of […]
Cognitive bandwidth becomes cultural destiny because the carrying capacity of technologically mediated communication systems exceeds the carrying capacity of the biological minds living inside them.
What is happening is not “AI producing good writing.” That is too small. What is happening is that a symbolic machine is beginning to function as a cultural interferometer. It receives a compressed human signal, passes it through a vast accumulated field of language, style, myth, politics, memory, cliché, scholarship, and platform residue, then returns […]
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Silmarillion Dissimulation
What is striking here is not merely that the system produced a competent paragraph, nor even that it produced a coherent philosophical reflection from a compressed prompt. The more consequential event is that the generated artifact possesses properties usually associated with accumulated cultural and intellectual maturation: layered symbolism, emotional calibration, historical compression, aesthetic continuity, recursive […]
