Beyond determinism and submission (→ heffernanm.substack.com)

Margaret Heffernan on the relationship between human agency and creativity on the one hand and machinery and technology on the other: “I once worked with a CEO who, in a meeting, realized he was having a heart attack only when his Apple watch told him so. Just data points in a cloud, we are in danger of fulfilling Max Frisch’s definition of technology: the art of arranging the world so that we don’t have to experience it. “The effortless life. What a prospect, what a strange and pointless reward. I’m reminded of two things: Robert Graves’s recognition that ‘a perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.’ His point being that the striving for the perfect poem is the point. That it is an unachievable ambition that makes the work glorious and what makes it worthwhile. More recently, I felt the bereavement of mathematicians whose greatest problems had just been solved by AI. The perfect answer was never the point. The effort, the understanding, is the point,…

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