WELL I GUESS IT WOULD BE NICE
TALKING WITH THE PHILOSOPHERS
February 24, 2006DEMOCRACY
February 25, 2006The always astute Bellman posted a link to a nice little story on Atwood’s new machine for remotely autographing books. It is a good and far less artificial example of the deep confusion we have of how to treat the technology that continually interferes and intervenes in our lives.I’ll let the discussion continue over there, but I had to post the following:
Ms Atwood insists that the device is not a hoax. “It’s real. Trust me. You need to have more faith.”
Its easy to say that how we treat the contributions of machines to our practices is just ‘a matter of convention’, but that presupposes that our conventional intuitions are informed by principles that extend nicely to novel cases. Convention breaks down when our intuitions and practices are confused and confusing, and we need some way of sorting this mess out before we can even start to assess the situation.
