23 octobre 2019

Doug Hill, Not So Fast. Thinking Twice About Technology - breviar de idei


01. We live in an era of technological enthousiasm.

02. There is a recurrent theme in the American experience: that we can cleanse all our past mistakes by opening a new frontier.

03. There is a utopian vision: new technologies will be able to remedy the problems created by previous technologies.

04. The vision named “the machine in the garden”: industry and agriculture could peacefully coexist.

05. Edison had achieved in the eyes of the public the status of a “secular saint” who represented what was best in the American character.

06. The meaning of culture was to know the best that has been thought and said in the world.

07. The frontier mythology never dies; it just shifts to the latest technology.


08. All definitions of technique which place it outside ourselves hide us from what it is.

09. Technology is not only hardware, but also a state of being that incorporates everything it touches, including humans, into itself.

10. At some point a change of quantity becomes a change of quality.

11. For a long time the assumption was that science begets technology. By then scholars has already begun to argue that science was applied technology.

12. Today, all scientific research presupposes enormous technical preparation.

13. Capitalism has proved to be the economic system best suited to the unhindered development of technology.

14. Technology is by nature expansive.

15. Technology is by nature national, direct and aggressive.

16. Technology by its nature combines or converges with other technologies.

17. Technology by its nature strives for control.

18. Globalization is the natural result of technological expansion and represents the ongoing colonization of the nontechnical world.

19. The breaking up of every kind of experience into uniform units in order to produce faster action and change of form (applied knowledge) has been the secret of western power over man and nature alike.

20. Simply put, our entire social system runs on a vast array of technologies and would collapse within a day or two without them.

21. We are becoming the servants in thought, as in action, of the machine we have created to serve us.

22. We live in an era of de facto technical autonomy.

23. The fundamental purpose of any technology is to have a deterministic effect in the world.

24. We often become committed to a technology before we realize we’re becoming committed to it and also before we fully appreciate the full range of consequences that commitment entails (the technological drift).

25. The technological momentum: the tendency of techniques or machines to become increasingly difficult to displace because of the economic and psychological investments of those who build them.

26. The technology steer us away from quality and toward distraction and disengagement.

27. Fonctioning in the technological society confronts us with an overwhelming flood of demands on our attention. After a while, in any number of ways, we begin to shut down. Caring and attention dissipate. We disengage.

28. Things actively change the content of what we think is our self and thus perform a creative as well as a reflexive function.

29. Inventions are far more than lifeless objects.

30. All travelling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

31. When you had all that information glued to your cerebral being, it was almost as if your own mind had merged into the environment of the computer.

32. When a device amplifies human experience in one way, it inevitably reduces it in other ways.

33. Technologists talk about changing paradigms like most of us talk about changing socks.

34. Confusion between mediated life and real life is the rule rather than the exception. We respond to modern media with ancient instincts. We automatically tend to accept that what seems real is real.

35. The projection of dreams is an inherent quality of the technological project.

36. The technological project has been characterized by a progressive process of disengagement via action at a distance.

37. Abstraction increased as our tool drew on sources of power other than our bodies.

38. The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter.

39. The metaphors of information processing and computation are at the center of today’s intellectual action.

40. Life becomes a form of technology as we learn how to engineer and reproduce it.

41. Models do not just predict, but they can make things happen.

42. There is something in the computer itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the world in its own image.

43. The human brain literally rewires itself in response to what we experience.

44. The environment enters into the nature of each thing.

45. When technique enters into every area of life, including the human, it ceases to be external and becomes his very substance. It is no longer face to face with man but is integrated with him, and it progressively absorbs him.

46. Men have become tools of their tools.

47. There are no unrelated technologies.

48. The more powerful a given technology, the more difficult it will be to predict those effects, and the more damaging those effects can potentially be.

49. Failing to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery and innovation seem to be a common fault of scientists and technologists.

50. The godlike aura enjoyed by those who create or wield technologies is a direct reflection of the godlike power of the technologies themselves.

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