Technology and Human Existence

🔗Connect

🔼Topic:: Technology (MOC) 🔼Topic:: Philosophy (MOC)

✒️ Note-Making

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas

1. Technology is a tool for transcendence - Humanity uses technology not as a tool to adapt itself to nature, but rather the opposite, to adapt nature to it, and it's ambitions. Technology was never just a tool for answering our basic needs, but to also fulfill our grand visions, and therefore it is a tool for transcendence.
2. Humanities are relevant for STEM - Since technology is always aimed towards a certain subjectivity, a value, a perception of the world of some kind, it is vital that we ask ourselves towards what are we aiming, and this is precisely the goal of the humanities. To explore what is truly contributing to our wellbeing. And that's why humanities and STEM should be more involved and familiarized with each others' fields.
3. Humans are both nature and aspiration - a person is a combination of it's subjectivity, it's higher aspirations, and it's circumstances, which is the nature around them, their objectivity.

🗒️Relate

⛓ Life lessons, action items

🔍Critique

✅ by following this method, what will happen?

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are...

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... This book is a summary of Ortega's ideas in a modern context. The language is easy to read, and the summary is short and concise.

📒 Notes

introduction

It is a disaster that the humanities were separated from the scientific departments. Technology has a great effect on our lives but it is currently hidden, treated as the default way of life, turning us into slaves Attention Economy. Technology should become again a subject of inquiry for the humanities to further enrich our understanding of technology and it's effects, while people who study science should also be familiar with the humanities to prevent from misuses of technology.

Preface

• we have less time to read entire books and spend more time cut off from social interaction and physical activity. We become more like the machines we created. (Location 62)

Ortega’s Introduction: What Kind of University

• the radical separation of the university and engineering is one of the greatest calamities fostering the incredible inertia that modern humans display in response to great, present-day tragedies. (Location 112)
• those controlled and deceived by modern technology are being transformed into the “slaves by nature” (Location 144)

Human needs

What makes humanity special is our ability to escape our circumstances Context, to picture a different world Planning, and working towards that, rather than simply answering our basic needs Maslows pyramid. It is the fulfilment of our Will to Power through technology which changes our circumstances, the nature around us. With technology, we triumph over nature.

Chapter 1: Human Needs

• the human being, as just seen, is not his circumstance, but is only immersed in his circumstance and can on some occasions exit his circumstance, withdraw into himself, enter into himself (“ensimismarse”) and, alone, devote himself to things that do not directly or immediately address the imperatives and necessities of his circumstance.[21] (Location 183)
• technology is not the mere satisfaction of necessities but the imposition of change upon nature in order to annul the burden of unmet necessities. (Location 196)

human wellbeing

Technology is a way to change nature according to our needs, and not adapt ourselves towards nature. Also, it was proven that technology was never just about primal survival, but it was also arts and higher aspirations from the start. Therefore technology is a tool for transcendence , an expression of our pursue after well being, of development and overcoming nature.

Chapter 2: Human Well-Being

• “Technology is the contrary of the agent adapting to its environment, instead technology is the adaptation of the environment to the agent.” (Location 203)
• technology, from its primitive beginnings, does not merely seek to satisfy needs necessary for survival but also seeks to satisfy forms of pleasure. (Location 210)
• the animal is merely looking for survival and not for well-being, while for the human being “technology and well-being are, in the end, synonymous.” (Location 235)

existing as humans

Technology aims at a certain purpose, towards a definition of wellbeing. if that definition changes, then so does the technology.
We need to think about our goals, the direction of our transcendence, because technology will eventually make all labor obsolete, so how will we spend our time? To what purpose will we dedicate ourselves? introspection

Ch. 3: Existing as Human

• “[T]echnology varies to the highest degree and is supremely unstable, depending on the idea of well-being that humans embrace on any particular occasion.” (Location 276)
• view of technology as the activity 1.) that assures the “satisfaction” of basic needs; 2.) that achieves that goal “with minimum effort” on the part of human beings; and 3.) that creates “completely new possibilities” in the human environment. (Location 279)

programming life

Humans are a combination of "life", which is our Subjectivity, our desire to transcend, to fulfill certain values, and our circumstances which are our Objectivity, the context that shapes the way our project will be implemented. That is way "I am I and my circumstances".

Ch. 4: Programming Life

• “I am I and my circumstance; and if I do not save it, I cannot save myself.” (Location 322)
• our human life is that program or project that I intensely desire and pursue. (Location 336)
• If the human is a project, then “nature” or “world” or “circumstance” is a collection of things favoring or making difficult our life project. (Location 346)

the original pre technological desire

Since technology is aimed at human wellbeing, it is up to the humanities to explore the expression of that wellbeing in every age, to adjust it based on our circumstances

Ch. 5: The Original, Pre-Technological Desire

• The human being, whether he desires it or not, must create himself (Location 359)
• For the human, to live is, always and above all, to bring about the existence of what does not yet exist; namely, to bring himself into existence (Location 362)
• This original human desire is the choice and commitment to an imagined future life project that emerges from past experiences, dreams, emotions, and even rebelliousness seeking to change one’s circumstance. (Location 382)

the variety of human creativity

Only human intelligence is able to reproduce the purpose of technology, no ai can be the inventor of it's purpose

three stages of technology

Technology has developed from:

1. Primitive - it seems part of nature, the set of natural acts a human can do, like lighting fire
2. artisan - a form of specialty, of mastery, a person who combines wisdom into his craft, when the craft is a very small subset of all human endevers
3. modern - technology can be the tool that will change our very nature, and the person who creates it (the engineer), it no longer the person who uses it (the worker). To practice building technology is a craft in itself