Plato and the Nerd: The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology

Lee, Edward Ashford

ISBN 10: 0262036487 / ISBN 13: 9780262036481

Published by MIT Press, Cambridge, 2017

About this Item

8vo, 266 pp., Front free endpaper missing, else fine. Nearly fine copy in fine dust jacket.

Seller Inventory # 100772

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Plato and the Nerd: The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology
• Publisher: MIT Press, Cambridge
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262036487
• ISBN 13: 9780262036481
• Binding: hardcover
• Edition: 1st.
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Science & Engineering

About this title

Synopsis

How humans and technology evolve together in a creative partnership.
With the explosion of interest, hype, and fear about artificial intelligence, data science, and robotics, it is essential that we better understand how it is that technology and society evolve. Without such understanding, we are assured of making dumb decisions. This book is an effort to develop such an understanding. It emphasizes the creative partnership and the coevolution of human culture and technology. Not to dismiss legitimate fears about the disruptive effects of technology, the real power of technology stems from its partnership with humans. We humans, with all our limitations and foibles, are central to its creation and nurture, and technology is central the progression of our society. Many technological developments are as much cultural as scientific, and human creativity provides the random mutations in a fundamentally Darwinian coevolution.

The book examines the question of whether technological advances are driven primarily by discovery or by invention. The question is important, because "discovery" presupposes preexistence of the facts that are discovered and abdicates responsibility for those facts. Invention, on the other hand, creates facts out of nothing and cannot escape responsibility. The book explores the ways that engineers use models to build inventive artificial worlds and to give us things that we never dreamed of before--for example, the ability to carry in our pockets everything humans have ever published. But in a yin-and-yang balance, the book also attempts to counter the runaway enthusiasm of some technology boosters who claim that everything in the physical world is a computation--that even such complex phenomena as human cognition are software operating on digital data. I argue that the evidence for this is weak, and the likelihood that nature has limited itself to processes that conform to today's notion of digital computation is remote.

The book goes on to argue that artificial intelligence's goal of reproducing human cognitive functions in computers vastly underestimates the potential of computers. Technology is coevolving with humans. It augments our cognitive and physical capabilities while we nurture, develop, and propagate the technology itself. Complementarity and symbiosis are more likely than confrontation and annihilation.

About the Author

Edward Ashford Lee is Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, where he runs iCyPhy, a research center focused on industrial cyber-physical systems. He is the author of Plato and the Nerd (MIT Press) and other books.