There is a demon in technology. It was put there by man and man will have to exorcise it before technological civilization can achieve the eighteenth-century ideal of humane civilized life.
Interpretation
Technology has flaws imposed by humans that must be addressed to improve society.
Rene Dubos highlights the inherent flaws or 'demons' within technology that result from human actions and intentions. He suggests that for society to fully realize the humane and civilized ideals that were prominent in the eighteenth century, humans must take responsibility and work towards rectifying these technological issues.
In practice
In a technology ethics seminar while discussing human impact on tech.
The wooing of the Earth thus implies much more than converting the wilderness into humanized environments. It means also preserving natural environments in which to experience mysteries transcending daily life and from which to recapture, in a Proustian kind of remembrance, the awareness of the cosmic forces that have shaped humankind.
Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.
Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious manifestations, yet some of their worst enemies creep on them unobtrusively.
Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.
To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks!
Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person's life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.
AI is going to be extremely beneficial, and already is, to the field of cybersecurity. It's also going to be beneficial to criminals.
I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.
We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.
We want to build systems that can generalize to a new task. Being able to do things with much less data and with much less computation is going to be interesting and important.
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