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Coevolution: the entwined futures of humans and machines

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Should digital technology be viewed as a new life form, sharing our ecosystem and coevolving with us?\r\n\r\nAre humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In this book, Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that we are less in control of the trajectory of technology than we think. It shapes us as much as we shape it, and it may be more defensible to think of technology as the result of a Darwinian coevolution than the result of top-down intelligent design. Richard Dawkins famously said that a chicken is an egg\'s way of making another egg. Is a human a computer\'s way of making another computer? To understand this question requires a deep dive into how evolution works, how humans are different from computers, and how the way technology develops resembles the emergence of a new life form on our planet.\r\n\r\nLee presents the case for considering digital beings to be living, then offers counterarguments. What we humans do with our minds is more than computation, and what digital systems do—be teleported at the speed of light, backed up, and restored—may never be possible for humans. To believe that we are simply computations, he argues, is a “dataist” faith and scientifically indefensible. Digital beings depend on humans—and humans depend on digital beings. More likely than a planetary wipe-out of humanity is an ongoing, symbiotic coevolution of culture and technology.

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Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

004.019 LEE c

Publisher

Cambridge : The MIT Press., 2019

Collation

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Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262043939

Classification

004.019

Content Type

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Media Type

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Edition

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Subject(s)

Technology
Computer systems
Human-computer interaction

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