The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines

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Edward Ashford Lee (Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor, University of California, Berkeley)

The Coevolution

The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines

Edward Ashford Lee (Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor, University of California, Berkeley)

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English

MIT Press
21 April 2020

Intermediate technology; Machine learning; Human-computer interaction

Series: The MIT Press

"Should digital technology be viewed as a new life form, sharing our ecosystem and coevolving with us?

Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In this book, Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that we are less in control of the trajectory of technology than we think. It shapes us as much as we shape it, and it may be more defensible to think of technology as the result of a Darwinian coevolution than the result of top-down intelligent design. Richard Dawkins famously said that a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg. Is a human a computer's way of making another computer? To understand this question requires a deep dive into how evolution works, how humans are different from computers, and how the way technology develops resembles the emergence of a new life form on our planet. Lee presents the case for considering digital beings to be living, then offers counterarguments. What we humans do with our minds is more than computation, and what digital systems do-be teleported at the speed of light, backed up, and restored-may never be possible for humans. To believe that we are simply computations, he argues, is a ""dataist"" faith and scientifically indefensible. Digital beings depend on humans-and humans depend on digital beings. More likely than a planetary wipe-out of humanity is an ongoing, symbiotic coevolution of culture and technology."

By: Edward Ashford Lee (Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor University of California Berkeley)
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 25mm
ISBN: 9780262043939
ISBN 10: 0262043939
Series: The MIT Press
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 21 April 2020
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Edward Ashford Lee is Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, where he runs iCyPhy, a research center focused on industrial cyber-physical systems. He is the author of Plato and the Nerd (MIT Press) and other books.