Episode summary Technology has quietly taken over our everyday lives and the idea of living with less, not more, technology is almost unimaginable. As a result, its growth and impacts are being felt well beyond the realms of work and play and it reshapes our politics, culture and ethics. The rapid and pervasive influence of technology over human society today raises important questions: are we still in control of technology, or are we letting it control us? How has Big Tech’s focus on the “optimization of everything” impacted our own sense of ourselves as agents of our future? Is there any merit in the fear of robots replacing workers, the erosion of privacy and disinformation? Just how worried should we be?  And maybe most important of all, what could, or should, be done to reform technology in society today?

QUOTES:

Technology in my view, in its worst aspects, flattens the radical diversity and pluralism of humans to our great detriment. Inefficient solutions to problems sometimes are better because they reflect the grand diversity of ends that human beings have long had.

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