God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

“It is very easy,” he wrote of one of his insect robots, “for an observer of a system to attribute more complex internal structure than really exists.

As Anderson noted, researchers in virtually every field have so much information that it is difficult to find relationships between things or make predictions.

These algorithms are not the sly devil that has outsmarted its creator. They have become instead the absolute sovereign who demands blind submission. As these technologies become increasingly integrated into the spheres of public life, many people now find themselves in a position much like Job’s, denied the right to know why they were refused a lo

Daniel J. Solove, a law professor who writes about privacy and surveillance, argues that the novel presciently captures the dilemma of the modern subject of information technologies. Concerns about data collection and predictive analytics, he argues, have focused too much on Orwellian fears—the notion that the state is surveilling our most private

Some critics have argued that emergentism is just an updated version of vitalism—the ancient notion that the world is animated by a life force or energy that permeates all things.

As he spoke, it seemed to me that he was being rocketed upward by the power of his own vision, into the highest reaches of space, watching the earth become smaller and smaller until it shrank into a single pixel. Arendt once referred to the view of the earth from space as the “Archimedean point,” drawing on the popular anecdote that Archimedes once

The more we try to rid the world of our image, the more we end up coloring it with human faults and fantasies. The more we insist on removing ourselves and our interests from the equation, the more we end up with omnipotent systems that are rife with human bias and prejudice.

In 1995 the philosopher David Chalmers called this “the hard problem” of consciousness. Unlike the comparatively “easy” problems of functionality, the hard problem asks why brain processes are accompanied by first-person experience. If none of the other matter in the world is accompanied by mental qualities, then why should brain matter be any diff

The pointlessness of my existence would often hit me in the midst of some ordinary task—buying groceries, boarding a train—and I would become paralyzed by confusion and indecision. Any discrete action, detached from a larger context, comes to seem absurd, just as a word considered on its own, removed from the flow of language, quickly becomes meani