Should we look on new technologies with awe and dread?
NEW YORKER
Technologists are rational—at least, that’s the idea. But they’re also people, and people live in culture and have emotions, and the patterns through which those emotions are experienced have been largely the same since the time of Edmund Burke.
Listen to the titans of tech talk about what they do, and you’ll often notice the patterns of the technological sublime. A.I. researchers at the “frontier labs,” for instance, speak in sombre tones about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, which they believe is a sort of fated discovery, almost a potentiality of the universe, to which they are nearly witnesses.
The fact that they aren’t entirely in control of these systems seems to heighten their sense of being in the presence of something sublime.
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