Seminar: The Opportunities of Technology [Fall 2025]

Few things are easier than adopting a pessimistic attitude towards technology, and not only in its current state, but as a whole.  Although we all today reap the benefits (some obviously, some we take for granted) that improved mastery over nature provides, the arc of its development seems nevertheless to veer away from the human good.

The technologies of the “information age”—the digital era we now inhabit—evidently incline us towards laziness, unthinking, social disconnection, apathy, and a dull sensitivity even to pleasure.  They turn our bodies into raw matter for experimentation, entrap us in a system from which we cannot escape, and turn war into the coldest and most calculated of affairs; making death ever easier to deal.  Technological development seems inevitably dehumanizing.

But, as we argued throughout our first seminar in the Humanitas Technica project, the Difficulties of Technology, this trajectory follows not from the essential nature of technology, but the severance of that nature from its own roots.  Restoring technology to those roots—found in the Greek concept of ποίησις (poiesis)—may allow us to redeem technology and restore it to its proper role in the order of human living.  This seminar aims to affect such a restoration, and to indicate how it may be alter the pursuit of technological development in communication and information; production and economy; education; memory; and time.