“Technology”
No time to give this the blogspace it deserves, but here goes anyway… AKMA attended a lecture by Albert Borgmann that purported to discuss
…a binary distinction between technology (identified with hard-core AI advocacy), which was bad, and reality unmediated by technology (which is good).
AKMA (and, he implies, Borgmann as well) realizes “that’s too simple,” but I don’t think they understand just how simplistic it genuinely is. What they both need to do is talk to an anthropologist.
Just so happens that my father is one, so I’ll borrow a leaf from his book a moment, shall I?
The idea of human culture divorced from technology is thoroughly absurd, given any reasonable definition of technology. (The one my dad uses is “any item altered from its natural state that enables a human to do something far more difficult or not otherwise feasible with the unaided human body.” Spoken language is not a technology, but writing is. Catching trout barehanded is not using technology; fishing with a fishing pole is.)
Viewed in that light, the idea of “reality unmediated by technology” deservedly evaporates. Those books on your double-shelved bookshelves, AKMA? You better believe they’re technological, and they surely do mediate your reality. (Mine, too.)
What Borgmann is doing, from a historical (not anthropological) perspective, is a very old game: define “technology” as “the latest thing down the pike that I don’t approve of for whatever reason” and then demonize it, by divorcing it from its context in technological history and pretending there’s never been anything in the world like it.
Not having read Borgmann (though he just went on my list), I may well be traducing him. Still, from what AKMA says, I certainly see the game being played. It’s an old game. For fun, I recommend digging out some histories of early printing (in the West, I mean, not Chinese printing) and watching the game played in that context. Fascinating, and just distant enough from modern times to help develop one’s technological perspective.