The Future Does Not Compute

Peter Edman

We’re getting ready for the revision of the forthcoming curriculum on technology after some very helpful feedback from our first pilot forum in September. 

Coincidentally, Volume 75 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal arrived in my mailbox a few weeks back and its topics are salient to our revision work. In particular I found helpful a conversation that Ken Myers had with Steve Talbott, author of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst. They talk about the way the technology we use affects the way we talk, and then the way we think. This is a very difficult subject to talk about.

In particular, computers are (necessarily?) incapable of dealing with abstracts and metaphors, but the deepest things about us are in what we cannot directly express, what comes through in the spaces between the words, the realm of scientific discovery and the spiritual life. Talbott uses the example of the phrase “love your enemies,” which says a lot to a human but its metaphor is such that any attempt to subject it to a computer translation into another language would fail miserably. Do we, then, stop using such phrases? Technology can be wonderful, but we need to make sure we do not allow it to trample the full expression of our humanity.

Overall, the conversation was very helpful in shaping my own thinking on how to express what we’re trying to accomplish with our new curriculum. If we do not have a real vision for what makes us human, for what a human being is and should be, then the technologies we use will supply one for us by their very limitations, and it will by definition be less than fully human. 

Fodder, Science and Technology, Tue 15 Nov 2005