Duplicate this page before you start, and write your answers in your own copy.

↩️ 1. Back to the beginning

In the first lesson of this unit we asked: does technology shape what we know, or does what we know shape technology?

✍️ Write here, in 3 or 4 sentences: what is your position now? Has your thinking changed since the start of the unit, and if so, how?

🕯️ 2. Can AI "cure" grief?

https://youtu.be/jmQtJLO9myo

As you watch, notice the knowledge questions this raises.

✍️ Write here, after the clip.

  1. Hannah Fry says she understands why someone would want this, even though she knows it is not real. What kind of knowledge is at work here? Rational? Emotional? Something else?

  2. Justin says "the hopelessness of forever is too much for people to bear". Is avoiding hopelessness a good reason to use technology that creates something you know to be false?

💬 3. Eight views on technology and knowledge

  1. "The medium is the message." Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
  2. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (revised edition, 1973)
  3. The critic Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) that George Orwell feared a world where books would be banned, while Aldous Huxley feared a world where nobody would bother to ban them, because nobody would want to read them.
  4. "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." John Culkin, writing about McLuhan's ideas (1967)
  5. "AI is not going to replace humans, but humans with AI are going to replace humans without AI." Attributed to Karim Lakhani, Harvard Business School