Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
We march on to our third entry in this year’s reading list. Hopefully we do so with an eye toward spring. But I suppose we’ll see.
This month’s list is especially eclectic. In it, we’ll see everything from politics and philosophy to literature and medicine. Let’s get to it!
I recently re-read Cal, one of Isaac Asimov’s final short stories. It was published in the 1995 collection Gold, which is a hit-or-miss collection of unpublished Asimov stories sitting around near the end of his life, paired with essays on sci-fi as a genre and writing as a practice.
That’s enough by way of an intro. Here’s the point: In the story, Asimov lays out a scenario involving a robot that learns how to write. As the robot becomes more complex, its writing becomes better than the writing of its master. The master worries that the robot will come to overshadow him. In response, he calls a technician to dumb down the robot’s programming.
This produces a crisis in the first law of robotics.
Sound familiar?
Hi everyone! I just wanted to leave a quick note that there’s going to be no Monday post this week. I’m off on a little vacation during spring break.
Yes, I’m teaching a philosophy course this semester. And it’s currently spring break. I’ll be back next Monday on my usual schedule.
Not long ago, I started subscribing to Long-Haul magazine. At its best, the mag showcases real stories about work, exploitation, and organizing from the perspective of workers themselves.
In a recent issue, I felt a strong connection to a discussion of restaurant work. For anyone who’s never done restaurant work, I suspect it’s a bit of a mystery just why people do it. It’s tough work in a grueling, highly exploitative industry, even in comparison to other working-class jobs. Even I struggle to explain it, though I’ve been a restaurant worker.
This country feels different than it did just a few years ago. We’ve moved past the ‘Great Awokening’ and into a backlash phase. Many of us – especially liberals, progressives, and/or college graduates – seek answers. How did it happen? Musa al-Gharbi offers answers in his book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.
But they might not be the answers folks seek.
Let’s take a closer look at We Have Never Been Woke and find out.
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