Plato and the Nerd: The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology

· Gildan Media · Narrated by Timothy Andrés Pabon
Audiobook
12 hr 1 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

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.



Lee 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.

About the author

Edward Ashford Lee is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He has coauthored several textbooks on topics including digital communication, signal processing, embedded systems, and software modeling.

Timothy Andres Pabon is an actor and Spanish and English voice-over artist/audiobook narrator from Washington D.C. He has recorded over 140 books, one of which was nominated for a 2015 Society of Voice Arts and Sciences Award and another which received an AudioFile Earphones Award as part of an ensemble cast in 2014.

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