(Quartz at Work)
Traditional religion in the Bay Area is being replaced with another sort of faith, a belief in the power of technology and science to save humanity. It’s a creed that says poverty and disease are simply programming challenges yet to be solved, bad code to be debugged. There’s a reason technologists use words like “evangelist” and “mission” to talk about themselves and their work.Farther out on the fringes is the belief in the technological singularity, the idea that artificial intelligence will evolve to a point where it surpasses human intelligence, resulting in a fundamental transformation of civilization. In some versions of the theory, people will merge with machines. Humans will become both obsolete and eternal.
For men and women immersed in the old-fashioned sort of religion, Silicon Valley’s faith in itself is a challenge. How can a religion based on ancient texts hope to compete with something as new and exciting—and sacrifice-free—as technology’s promise?
Author: Dr. Dean
Walking on sunshine
7.5.18
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6.21.18
6.18.18
Where Silicon Valley Is Going to Get in Touch With Its Soul
(New York Times)
BIG SUR, Calif. — Silicon Valley, facing a crisis of the soul, has found a retreat center.
It has been a hard year for the tech industry. Prominent figures like Sean Parker and Justin Rosenstein, horrified by what technology has become, have begun to publicly denounce companies like Facebook that made them rich.
And so Silicon Valley has come to the Esalen Institute, a storied hippie hotel here on the Pacific coast south of Carmel, Calif. After storm damage in the spring and a skeleton crew in the summer, the institute was fully reopened in October with a new director and a new mission: It will be a home for technologists to reckon with what they have built.
A Place of My Own
A Place of My Own, in which Michale Pollan builds a hut in the woods — deliberately. Huh? This continues my belief that all of Pollan’s books are all parts of the larger Pollan meta-narrative. He starts by discussing the fact that this is his second book and second books are in some ways the hardest. We end with the writing hut which becomes something of a character making cameos in future books, not unlike the actual members of his family. Also, he has not yet hit on his four topic formula — which I quite like.
I really like that these first two books are staged on his property and are directly tied to his family and their home. Additionally, I admire how he uses this intimate and domestic setting to explore the larger issues of gardening and architecture.
Second Nature
I am happy that I have gone back and started reading Pollan’s books from the beginning. I indented the pun because it is meaningful, all of the seeds of his future writing are in this book. This is where he starts writing books about nature and our cultural relationship with food and eventually the food industry. We are introduced to his wife Judith and their home. I believe key ingredients in Michael Pollan’s successful recipe for writing are the details of his biography and lived experience writing the book. Traditional documentary films always pretend the camera crew is just some invisible omnipresent eye. With Michael Pollan, we are always clear that there is a subject exploring an object. In fact, the subject/object relationship is perhaps the real story.
As a first book, it is quite good but still rough around the edges compared to the later works. He has not yet found his 4/4 rhythm which is a staple of his later books. His literary voice is still developing and there are some rhetorical choices that seem off. It’s a bit like listening to your favorite band just before they really find their sound. But as I said all the seeds for his future work are here. There is even a moment towards the end where he knows there is something missing in the garden. It doesn’t look right. He solves the problem in a different way than I had expected, but even this solution really sets the stage for his next book.
Dean’s List 