Become a Readings Member to make your shopping experience even easier. Sign in or sign up for free!

Become a Readings Member. Sign in or sign up for free!

Hello Readings Member! Go to the member centre to view your orders, change your details, or view your lists, or sign out.

Hello Readings Member! Go to the member centre or sign out.

The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines
Hardback

The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines

$79.99
Sign in or become a Readings Member to add this title to your wishlist.

Should digital technology be viewed as a new life form, sharing our ecosystem and coevolving with us?Are 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. Lee 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.

Read More
In Shop
Out of stock
Shipping & Delivery

$9.00 standard shipping within Australia
FREE standard shipping within Australia for orders over $100.00
Express & International shipping calculated at checkout

MORE INFO
Format
Hardback
Publisher
MIT Press Ltd
Country
United States
Date
21 April 2020
Pages
384
ISBN
9780262043939

Should digital technology be viewed as a new life form, sharing our ecosystem and coevolving with us?Are 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. Lee 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.

Read More
Format
Hardback
Publisher
MIT Press Ltd
Country
United States
Date
21 April 2020
Pages
384
ISBN
9780262043939