Home 9 Passage 9 Technology

The existential theme of techné is touched upon in the relation to especially Heidegger, Ihde, and Stiegler. It may be helpful to add some additional thoughts to the existential theme of technology.
Technology as taken-for-granted is the attitude that most of us take toward technology in our lives as tools and techniques. Our lifeworld is increasingly changed through ever-newer forms of technology that make life more comfortable for those who can take advantage of new technologies, but also more cumbersome for those who are less inclined to keep up with the latest gadgets and media. Fans of technology tend to think that technology is all good and cannot really do wrong. It enhances our health, work, learning, and productivity and adds joy and interest to living. Are we taking our cyborgian existence for granted? How?
While at MIT Dreyfus wrote What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence (1972), which was updated and revised in 1979 and again in 1992 as What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Dreyfus argues that technologists tend to think of the brain as computer hardware and cognition processes as software programs. Artificial intelligence proponents promise a future when machine learning becomes the new intellectuality. Our brains will be hooked up to digitized machines that will transform our cognitive selves into artificially embodied information-processing and problem solving intelligences that can write literary master works, compose modern operas, and build new architectural habitations for people.