Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In the tradition of Jaron Lanier s You Are Not a Gadget, a rousing, sharply argued and, yes, inspiring reckoning with our blind faith in technology
Can technology solve all our problems? Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many of our most famous journalists, pundits, and economists seem to think so. According to them, intelligent machines and big data will free us from work, educate our children, transform our environment, and even make religion more user-friendly. This is the story they re telling us: that we should stop worrying and love our robot future.
But just because you tell a story over and over again doesn t make it true. Curtis White, one of our most brilliant and perceptive social critics, knows all about the danger of a seductive story, and in We, Robots, he tangles with the so-called thinkers who are convinced that the future is rose-colored and robotically enhanced.
With tremendous erudition and a punchy wit, White argues that we must be skeptical of anyone who tries to sell us on technological inevitability. And he gives us an alternative set of stories: taking inspiration from artists as disparate as Sufjan Stevens, Lars von Trier, and Francois Rabelais, White shows us that by looking to art, we can imagine a different kind of future.
No robots required.
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Curtis White on PowellsBooks.Blog
As Henry Fielding would have put it,
Lacking Character is a novel: a comic epic poem in prose. It is a book about nothing much more than its own happy self-development. No Trump, no pedophiles, no climate change. It is, as the French say (and I have to say it as the French say it because English has no equivalent, sadly and revealingly), a
jeu d’esprit, the play of spirit...
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