Fear Orgs not Bots

 Tom Gauld's delightful cartoon "Department of Machine Poetry Research" shows a room full of robots at rows of desks. Two people are looking in from a door at the back, with one saying to the other, "The poetry is absolutely dreadful, but anything that distracts them from rising up and enslaving us has to be a good thing." It beautifully captures both our fear of automation and our inclination to over-attribute agency to machines rather than the organizations in which they're embedded.

Philosophical origin myths

I’ve begun to notice origin myths embedded in philosophical and political theories, thanks to re-reading Dreyfus & Spinosa’s “Further Reflections on Heidegger, Technology, and the Everyday” (2003) alongside Segal’s “The Modern Study of Myth and Its Relation to Science” (2015). Adopting a mythical perspective has tempered my skepticism about the historical accuracy of such accounts. I now view them more as moral exhortations than accurate narratives.