Battling for Your Soul in the Age of Technology

At a time when 65 percent of American consumers spend more time with their PCs than they do with their significant others, according to a recent study, we are ignoring one thing that defines our humanity as a species--our selves, the human spirit from which technology springs.

Hanging in the balance, argues Steve Talbot, editor for The Nature Institute in his brilliant new book about understanding human potential and technologies place in it, Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines, is the fate of mankind: "a hellish, counter-human, machine-like society" or "a humane society in which the machine...reflects back to us our own inner powers." 

"Self-forgetfulness," Talbot writes, "is the reigning temptation of the technological era. This is why we so readily give our assent to the absurd proposition that a computer can add two plus two, despite the obvious fact that it can do nothing of the sort--not if we have in mind anything remotely resembling what we do when we add numbers. In the computer's case, the mechanics of addition involve no motivation, no consciousness of the task, no mobilization of the will, no metabolic activity, no imagination. And its performance brings neither the satisfaction of accomplishment nor the strengthening of practical skills and cognitive capacities."

When we freely give our power over to technology, he says, "we arrive at a computer's-eye view of the entire world of industry, commerce, and society at large...an ever more closely woven web of programmed logic."

The ultimate danger is that, in our willingness to adapt ourselves to technology, "we will descend to the level of the computational devices we have engineered--not merely imagining ever new and more sophisticated automatons, but reducing ourselves to automatons."

"Nothing is as rare or sorely needed in our tech-enchanted culture" says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World  "right now is intelligent criticism of technology, and Steve Talbott is exactly the critic we've been waiting for: trenchant, sophisticated, and completely original. Devices of the Soul is an urgent and important book."

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines

 

Comments

[Dave]

Just a tad sensationalist there Casey? Machines are tools and tools are merely an extension of our ability to manipulate the real. What is 'Technology' anyways? Does it mean computers? Does it mean steel foundries? Does it mean fire? How is it that along every step in the progress of humanity someone comes along crying that we are losing what it means to be human, when the technology they decry merely gives us more time to be human in a more human way?
Regards
Dave