Reading Group: Recovering the Intellectual Origins of Technology

Epochal moments in science and technology confront us with new conceptions of what it means to be human. Copernicus dislodged humanity from our central position in the cosmos. Bacon showed us how to master nature for our purposes. Newton’s laws dethroned human perception as the interface to reality. Darwin situated us amongst the animals. And Freud challenged the notion that man is primarily a rational being. Now, at what is perhaps the culmination point of the modern technological project in the Age of Turing, we are invited to return to the history of ideas to reconsider the place of technology in human life: what good it produces, what danger it poses, and what should be its relation to human guidance or morality. Each change in the orientation of intellectual life emerged from a fundamentally optimistic or pessimistic disposition toward technology. Though the ancients were concerned about technology, they were moderate according to their orientation to nature’s apparent limits. We

Epochal moments in science and technology confront us with new conceptions of what it means to be human. Copernicus dislodged humanity from our central position in the cosmos. Bacon showed us how to master nature for our purposes. Newton’s laws dethroned human perception as the interface to reality. Darwin situated us amongst the animals. And Freud challenged the notion that man is primarily a rational being. Now, at what is perhaps the culmination point of the modern technological project in the Age of Turing, we are invited to return to the history of ideas to reconsider the place of technol