To be a Technologist is to be Human — Letters to a Young Technologist

We are an unprecedentedly self-augmenting species, with a fundamental drive to organize, imagine, construct and exercise our will in the world.

If our tools don’t better our collective humanity, we need new tools.

we should directly tie the success of our technologies to how much they enable our humanity (as in, our positive human characteristics), and use this criteria to evaluate past, present and future technologies.

A technologist makes reason out of the messiness of the world, leverages their understanding to envision a different reality, and builds a pathway to make their vision happen. All three of these endeavors—to try to understand the world, to imagine something different, and to build something that fulfills that vision—are deeply human.

Indeed, philosophers of technology have argued that technology is the essential human activity. Ernst Kapp said that human existence is always and everywhere bound up in a relationship to tools.