by Justin E.H. Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 22, 2022
A worthy critique of a technology in need of rethinking—and human control that seeks to free and not enchain.
A professor of history and philosophy of science casts a stony eye on the liberatory promises of the internet.
When most people talk about the internet, they’re really talking about the tiny slice that is social media. It’s a “reverse synecdoche, the larger containing term standing for the smaller contained term,” writes Smith by way of introduction to his central argument. These social media, he argues, are fundamentally enemies of human liberty. Employing that reverse synecdoche, he shows how the internet “has distorted our nature and fettered us” by, among other things, turning users into addicts (in the strictest terms) and serving as a surveillance device that often limits our political freedoms. We are bent by our technology, unable to concentrate on reading and no longer remembering anything without Google’s help. Of course, as Smith points out, this is a charge leveled against previous information technologies. When Gutenberg printed the Bible, people could simply read it rather than having to memorize it, which many critics at the time considered to be a diminution of human intelligence. Smith is not quite so doctrinaire about print, but he makes a good case that the computer of Gottfried Leibniz’s dreams more than 300 years ago was not the personality-shaping machine of today. Leibniz imagined something whose workings, in modern terms, “can be performed without ‘strong AI,’ without any internal life or experience of all the calculative operation it performs.” Leibniz further held that human thought is an instrument of excellence, whereas those who shape algorithms today seem not to think much about human thought (or excellence) at all. The best parts of this thoughtful book-length essay link those algorithms to the “gamification of social reality,” of which a strong example is the down-the-rabbit-hole entity called QAnon.
A worthy critique of a technology in need of rethinking—and human control that seeks to free and not enchain.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-691-21232-6
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
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by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2023
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
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A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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