Plato and the Nerd

The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology

By: Edward Ashford Lee

Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon

Edward Ashford Lee explores the ways that engineers use models and abstraction to build inventive artificial worlds and to give us things that we never dreamed of - for example, the ability to carry in our pockets everything humans have ever published. But he also attempts to counter the runaway enthusiasm of some technology boosters who claim everything in the physical world is a computation - that even such complex phenomena as human cognition are software operating on digital data.

Lee argues that the evidence for this is weak, and the likelihood that nature has limited itself to processes that conform to today's notion of digital computation is remote. He goes on to argue that artificial intelligence's goal of reproducing human cognitive functions in computers vastly underestimates the potential of computers. In his view, technology is coevolving with humans. It augments our cognitive and physical capabilities while we nurture, develop, and propagate the technology itself. Complementarity is more likely than competition.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2018 Gildan Media

very good and thought provoving

very good but challenging in certain places especially when referring to formulas and diagrams but that is more a short coming of the medium.

Really technical - a difficult listen

I’ve listened to over a dozen technical books but this was the first one I really struggled to understand by listening alone. It’s very technical and references supplementary PDFs quite a bit. Would definitely be a better hard copy read.