Tagsociety
Remote Work: Liberation or a Major Step Back?
Feeling disconnected or undervalued can lead to quiet quitting, data showsArticles and studies abound on the viability of remote work, particularly following the mass transformation of the white-collar workplace after 2020. While millennials and Gen-Z workers, fresh out of college, fled metro areas and moved online, whole office spaces found themselves empty. Office real estate workers continue to struggle leasing out their spaces to businesses, since so many employers now have a remote or hybrid work schedule. It is difficult to reach a conclusive stance on the pros and cons of remote work by reading the dozens of articles on the topic. Opinions vary so widely. Some praise the new shift towards remote work as a revolutionary step in the workforce. Others note that remote work is actually a step Read More ›
U.S. Drops in Happiness Poll
A year ago the U.S. was 15th in the world. Now it's 23rd. What happened?
Artificial General Intelligence is the Answer, says OpenAI CEO
The tech optimism talk just got a little vagueThe tech optimism talk just got a little more bizarre from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman is confident that artificial intelligence is going to better our world in countless ways; sometimes, however, he doesn’t specify just how that’s going to happen. Other days it seems like he’s actually on the doomsday train. Which is it? Is AI going to save us and pilot us into a transhumanist eternity or will it enslave us forever and diminish everything that makes us human? Maybe it’s both at this point! Maggie Harrison writes in a new blog at Futurism, It’s true that AGI could, in theory, give humans a helping hand in curing some of our ills. But such an AGI, and AGI Read More ›
Her, Part One
The 2013 dystopian film proposes an intriguing "what if"When I was reviewing the Orville, Season Three, I spent a lot of time complaining about the robot-love subplot which consumed far too much of the series. I will probably always find the idea of such a relationship ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean the concept can’t be explored in a thoughtful way. One such thoughtful exploration is the movie Her, where a man falls in love with his AI operating system. Unlike the Orville, which demands that the viewer take the relationship seriously, almost going so far as to call the viewer a bigot if they don’t get on board with the fantasy, Her leaves everything open-ended, treating the whole idea of a man and robot falling in love as Read More ›
Friendship in the Technological Age
Even though our generation has a bad set of cards, how can we respond?It is easy to criticize social media, new technology, and artificial intelligence. To be fair, the automobile and the smartphone alone are at least partially to blame for how fragmented and isolated we’ve become as Americans. But it’s also necessary to find hope and a sense of solution. Leaving it at the negative can be depressing and leave us feeling more helpless than hopeful. Clare Coffey is a writer from Idaho who acknowledges the ways technology has transformed our society, in many ways for the worse, but then recalibrates the discussion around solution in a new article from The New Atlantis. Even though our generation has a bad set of cards, how can we respond? Coffey offers a bullet point Read More ›
The Technological Society We Live In
In today's world, we think we can solve everything through technique. How's that going for us?In a blog post this week from Salvo, Joshua Pauling cites the influential thinker Jacques Ellul on the development of a “technological society” in Western culture. Pauling writes, Even in the mid-20th century, Ellul, a French philosopher and theologian, saw technique and efficiency coming to consume every aspect of life and society. As he defined it in The Technological Society (originally entitled La Technique in French), technique is the “totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity” (xxv). Just as the factories of the industrial world were optimized according to new standards of efficiency, now everything is measured, recorded, analyzed through a lens of efficiency, and then submitted to a technique to maximize outcomes according to Read More ›
Art, Propaganda, and the Role of the Novelist
Bestselling author Dean Koontz talks fiction, human exceptionalism, and transhumanism with Wesley J. Smith in new podcast episode (Part I)Dean Koontz is a renowned novelist, known for books such as Devoted, The Big Dark Sky, and Odd Thomas. His books have topped the charts as New York Times bestsellers, and at age 77, he doesn’t plan on quitting the craft of fiction any time soon. He is also a longtime proponent of intelligent design and human exceptionalism, both of which find their footing in his many writings. On September 12th, Koontz was featured on the Humanize Podcast, where he and Wesley J. Smith, Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Human Exceptionalism, discussed Koontz’s career as a writer as well as some of the central themes that pervade Koontz’s work. For Part I of this two-part discussion on the Read More ›
Does Technology Favor Tyranny?
Part One: Deconstructing Yuval Harari’s Silly Forecast of AI’s Future ImpactWill infotech and biotech erode human agency, subvert human desires, and render free-market economics obsolete? At first glance, there looks to be a wide gap between the future of AI and the destruction of democracy. Some futurists claim to have jumped that chasm. In a cheery little column published by the Atlantic, Yuval Noah Harari posits AI will ultimately destroy Read More ›