technology | ZETEO

Consumers, Apprentices, Failed Universities

April 3, 2016 by Ed Mooney

I have no complaints about living in Maine. I find good music, good restaurants, good friends in the small city of Portland. I’ve taught inland and upstate in Bangor – just this side of Old Town, home of the classic canvas canoes I grew up with and rigged for sailing in a tidal river that opens on Buzzards Bay. That inlet-laced coast reminds me of the Maine Coast. There’s an older, slower, pace to life here. All this nostalgia […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, Uncategorized, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, education, literature, reading, technology, writing

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Power to Intrude, Illustration by Ben Jennings, Prospect Magazine, February 2016

Privacy and Power

March 28, 2016 by fritztucker

Two weeks ago I wrote about the relationship between privacy and power, and how may of today’s spokespeople for the oppressed focus more on stopping surveillance in the name of privacy than daring to call for surveillance of oppressors, or imagine ways that surveillance could be used to create a world devoid of oppression. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about our current obsession with privacy. In The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiR • Tags: books, capitalism, civil rights, crime, criminals, ethics, literature, New York City, philosophy, politics, reading, social justice, technology, women, writing

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Technology in the Age of Inequality

March 13, 2016 by fritztucker

Last week, I attended the Technology, Privacy, and the Future of Education symposium at NYU’s Media, Culture, and Communication department. One panelist, NYU Sociology’s Richard Arum, addressed the impact of technology on education-as-vocation—a subject on which I recommend Sugata Mitra’s self-organized, child-driven pedagogy. The other panelists focused primarily on digital technology’s impact on educational administration. Debates arose around the development of online-only curricula, apps that send parents reports on how late their children arrive to class, and the ethical implications […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: capitalism, civil rights, crime, death, education, ethics, History, New York City, politics, science, social justice, technology

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Holocaust, Son of Saul, Kierkegaard

March 6, 2016 by Ed Mooney

Kierkegaard appears unexpectedly on the “Opinionator” page of last week’s New York Times. He’s discussed in “The Stone” by a canny and sensitive philosopher, Katalin Balog. She finds the Danish thinker just under the surface of the Hungarian movie about the Holocaust, “Son of Saul,” which was recently awarded “Best Foreign Language Film” at the Oscars. The movie’s central theme is Saul’s inner world, the loss and recovery of his soul. In scene after scene we see his face unmoved, […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: death, ethics, film, love, philosophy, technology

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Airplanes, environment, capital, giving up!

February 23, 2016 by William Eaton

A.k.a., Littlering There is a strain of environmental thinking that proposes (with more than a little sense) that we need to learn how to do more with less. Or perhaps we need (yet again?) to discover how less is more. Fewer human beings always seems like a good place to start. There is of course the problem that biggering (as Dr. Seuss called it) has come to seem essential to our economic “growth” and “health,” and to the health […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: airplanes, Bob Dylan, capitalism, climate change, economic crisis, England, environmentalism, global warming, technology

Big Science, Big Art

January 31, 2016 by Ed Mooney

I was startled to read in yesterday’s Boston Globe that a scholarly paper on “the God particle” (the Higgs boson) had 5,154 authors. I wondered if they hired a stadium for the signing and celebration. I usually think of science as dancing with poetry. An odd couple, you’ll say, but I’ve learned from Thoreau that they don’t have to stay off the dance floor, or only glower at each other. But here, in this headline about the “God particle,” I […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: art, philosophy, technology, writing

Will Robots Displace Human Workers?

September 7, 2015 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Third in a series Arobot killed a young contractor in a German Volkswagen production plant recently. While the worker was installing the stationary robot in its protective cage, the device suddenly struck out with a fatal blow. Apparently, this robot killing was the first of its kind in German manufacturing, with the greatest use of robots in Europe. In the United Kingdom, however, in 2007, 77 robot accidents were reported, with people crushed, hit on the […]

Categories: Article • Tags: AI, jobs, labor, robots, Stephen Hawking, technology, The Singularity

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Cocteau, Americans, Dignity, Slinkys

August 6, 2015 by William Eaton

In 1949, the French writer, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau wrote a few lines about French politics at that time, lines that might help Americans today view their own political battles with more optimism than usual. In my translation: I know well that in 1949 politics are a big deal and the clashes of different factions seem more important than lovers’ quarrels. But, just between us, don’t these political battles feature the same injustice and bad faith as lovers’ quarrels? […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: art, France, Hollywood, Jean Cocteau, Le Journal des Goncourt, Museum of Modern Art, Picasso, technology, toys, United States of America

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RealDoll prosthetic device, leg, being repaired

RealDolls and Other Humanoids

July 21, 2015 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Second in a series Last time I wrote of the relationship of various prosthetic devices to the people who wear them. This time my topic is humanoids. At first glance, they may seem to be very different subjects. Prosthetics often and humanoids always, however, do share roots in robotics and artificial intelligence. But, more significantly, they question the relationships of human beings to devices that possess human characteristics. Recently, humanoids have become a particular subject […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: literature, movies, robots, sex, technology