Data modelling as a tool of environmental campaigning has created dataworld, in which nature’s full reality is lost, even to those committed to its salvation.
In the proliferating genre of obituaries for experience and the self in the digital age, one is inclined to wonder whether we are, at this stage, crying wolf—so that when experience is really gone, we will not be able to tell.
What is ‘good’ or of ‘value’ is a complex question, one radically narrowed by the utilitarian, quantitative approach, which assumes that what is good is what can be measured.
Albert Einstein issued a dire warning: that we were living under threat not only from the atomic bomb and the spectre of extermination in nuclear war, but also from a second weapon, one he considered just at dangerous for humanity and the planet—‘the Information Bomb’.
The announcement that Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corporation has succeeded in implanting a microchip capable of working with a human brain has hit the news just as I write this editorial. By the time you read this, it may have vanished again into the news-ether, or it may be all anyone is talking about. It is […]
In this world of depersonalised narcissism, shaped by a uniform corporate directive and the imperative of comfort, convenience and consumption, it would be quite sensible to lose trust in reality.
Seismic exploration has the central contradiction that has been with us since the first nuclear explosions opened the new epoch: the combination of the highly rational and the entirely mad.
What concerns me is that Oppenheimer, far from shaking us out of our slumber, is unable to grasp the radical nature of what happened in the New Mexico desert or connect what happened there to our current techno-scientific moment.
In the tech world profit acts as a great ‘enshittifier’, but we also need to think critically about the materiality of the technologies themselves: their embedded alienation and their resource-intensive and polluting nature.
Human solidarity depends on the sense that we are all equal in coming from nature, and that attempts to reengineer ourselves will prove corrosive of this deeper equality.
Lil Miquela is a software robot, but that doesn’t stop her followers from asking ‘What’s your skin care regime?’. Thanks to AI, even models will be out of a job.
The hubris of science towards the everyday world is not a new phenomenon, but where the practices of technoscience now frame our world this tendency is radically escalated.
