Feed, a novel by M.T. Anderson

READ THIS FIRST!! The book will make a lot more sense:

In the next two weeks, you will be reading the novel, Feed, by M.T. Anderson. Feed is the story of a teenager named

Titus, who lives a few decades in the future from us. In his society, technology has advanced to the stage where

people no longer have to carry their computers and electronic devices in their hands – instead, at a young age

people have a device called a “feed” implanted into their brain, which allows them to do all the things we now do

with cell phones and computers, using only their mind to control it.

One aspect of the novel that will take some getting used to is the author’s use of language. Titus and his friends use

a lot of slang words that exist only in their future world – so when they call something “null,” that means it’s boring

or bad, and the guys often call each other “unit,” in place of “dude” or “man.” In addition to the slang, the author

wanted to create an accurate portrayal of these teenagers, so they do use some profanity as well. These are aspects

of the language in the novel that you will notice right away. However, eventually you will find that the characters’

use of language will also convey some more subtle, deeper ideas.

Technically, this book is considered young adult fiction, so while it’s a great story with some very pertinent

messages, the reading level of this book may be somewhat less sophisticated than what is typical in AP English.

However, you will also have some supplementary articles to read along with the novel, and the articles will provide

you with some good practice in higher-level reading.

About the articles and the quizzes:

The novel has four parts. For each part, there is also an article to read and annotate. By each due date below, you

must read the part of the novel, as well as read and annotate the corresponding article (3-6 annotations per page).

On each due date there will be a quiz, consisting of AP-style multiple choice questions on both the novel and the

article.

Due date (AP question quiz this day): Part from Feed: Article to read and annotate:

Tues, 2/6 Part 1, “moon” p. 3 “Review of MT Anderson’s Feed”

Thurs, 2/8 Part 2, “eden” p. 43 “Generation Wired”

Thurs, 2/15 Part 3, “utopia” p. 75 “Technological Slavery”

Part 4, “slumberland” p. 207 “Stupider and Worse”

Essay:

When we are finished with the book, and the articles, and the quizzes, you will write a timed, in-class essay.

Review of M.T. Anderson’s Feed By Eric Rosenfield, for Wetasphalt.com

(1)MT Anderson's

dystopian 2002 novel

Feed takes place in a

future where most of the

people of the world are

connected to a global

network through brain

implantation, the

technology actually

taking over many of the processes of the

limbic system to the point where once

installed it cannot be removed without

killing the host. Those plugged into this

"Feed" are bombarded by a constant barrage

of entertainment and advertisement

customized to their own tastes, which the

Feed learns by monitoring everything they

do. (Privacy is a thing of the past.) Schools

are completely privatized and more

concerned with teaching you how to shop

than teaching you arithmetic, reading and

writing are forgotten arts known only by

university professors, and a criminally

irresponsible government covers up any

corporate wrong-doing. When people start

getting lesions all over their bodies, the

president goes on the Feed to insist that all

rumors that this is caused by corporate

activities are absurd. Meanwhile, characters

in a popular Feed show get lesions, and

suddenly lesions are cool; teenagers start

having artificial lesions cut into them.

(2)The planet is dying—there are almost

no fish left in the sea, and oxygen factories

have replaced the world's wild plant life.

And no one seems to care; in fact no one

seems to be paying any attention at all,

intent as they are on distracting themselves

with Feed shows and movies and shopping

and advertisements, all of which are

dumbed-down to the point of inanity.

(3)Into this milieu is thrown a love story

between protagonist everyman Titus and

odd-ball poor girl Violet, who's home

schooled and didn't even get the Feed until

she was 7. This love story is the strongest

part of the narrative, the two characters'

simultaneous attraction and repulsion to

each other played out in a complicated push-

and-pull as each discovers (or fails to

discover) what the other is about. There are

tender moments here, and moments of

revelation where the inner workings of a

character's mind suddenly come clear like a

window shade being let up. The novel

contains real wit, and moments of excellent

comedy, mostly at the expense of the over-

the-top consumerist world in which these

characters live. Unfortunately, the over-the-

top nature of this world is also the novel's

greatest flaw.

(4)It goes without saying that part of the

satirical method is to exaggerate modern-

day problems. However, here the

exaggeration was often so extreme and one-

sided that it was hard to find credible,

especially when otherwise serious and three-

dimensional characters are abutted against it.

You are meant to sympathize with Violet,

for instance, when her Feed is

malfunctioning and her life is in peril. But

when she calls the Feed's help line, an

automated avatar asks her if she's having

problems deciding what to buy, as if that's

the only possible thing someone could call

the Feed help line about. Later, when her

petition to the company to have her

malfunctioning Feed repaired for free is

denied, the reason given is that the company

doesn't have enough of a handle on her

shopping habits to make her a worthwhile

investment.

(5) But the real problem with credibility

comes with the book's main point of

concern—the apathy of the masses. This

apathy is blown up to such an extent in this

book that even when corporate

irresponsibility is causing people's hair to

fall out and skin to fall off, no one seems to

be bothered. Cartoonishness of this sort

would be amusing in a cartoonish story, but

in one with so much grittiness and realism it

just seems incongruous. In general, the

world which Anderson is criticizing

(predicated on assumptions that people are

getting more apathetic, entertainment is

getting more dumbed down, and the world is

all around going to hell in a handbasket—

none of which, incidentally, are assumptions

that I hold) is so singularly vile that it comes

off as a simplistic straw man.

(6) This book is marketed as a Young

Adult novel and before my genre conversion

I might have written it off as such. That is, a

simplistic book for teens to help them

question our consumerist culture—a

laudable enough aim. And yet not only have

I been exposed to works in the Young Adult

genre that can compare with anything in the

other sections of the bookstore, I've even

been exposed to works of that caliber by this

same author, namely The Astonishing Life of

Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation.

(Which is a book I've been meaning to

review here but can't seem to find more to

say than "This book is really great and you

should read it.") In both of these novels we

find an intense distrust and dislike for

corporations and their aims, but in Octavian

Nothing this fear of the corporate is

tempered by the compassion of certain

people forced to work within the system in a

way that it never is in the pages of Feed.

Because its author is simply such a good

writer, Feed still comes off as a decent

novel, but unlike its brother Octavian, it is

not a great one.

•

GENERATION

•

THEY TEXT[AND TEXT AND TEXT]. THEY HAVE HUNDREDS OF "FRIENDS"

THEY'VE NEVER ACTUALLY MET. THEY GAME FOR HOURS. HOW TO KEEP YOUR KIDS SAFE AND HEALTHY IN A HYPER-CONNECTED WORLD. - By Emily Listfield

Cover and inside illustrations by Hanoch Piven

HE OTHER NIGHT-AS IWAS GETTING

ready for bed, I turned off my phone and put . it on the dresser. My 17-year-old daughter stared at me in disbelie£ "But, Mom," she exclaimed, "it's.so far away!"

For today's youth, technology isn't just a handy way to keep in touch or organize your

calendar; it's as integral as eating and breathing-and seems to come just as naturally. Between smartphones, iPocls, video games, and the Internet, being wired is a way of life. The average teen sends more than 50 texts a day; younger children spend over 10 hours a week playing video games; and the amount of time all kids spe�d online daily has tripled in the past 10 years.

We are just beginning to assess how this nonstop connectivity is affecting our kids' social and intellectual development. It is increas­ingly clear that it's changing the nature of children's relationships to each other, to their families, and to the world around them. The latest research suggests it may even be rewiring their brains.

In a world where sextingts:-6:h the nightly news, plagiarism is just a Wikipedia click away; and people have hundreds of online friends

they've never met, helping your kids make smart choices has never been more crucial. But there are few rules of the road, as any parent who has watched his or her child fall down the Facebook hole for hours can tell you. In part this is because technology is changing so rapidly that it can be hard to keep up.Just afew years ago, a10-year-old with a cell phone could do little with it beyond placinga call. Now, handing her one is giving her the ability to text, go on­line, and send and receive photos. Are kids ready for that? Are you?

The notion that parents need to get involved in their children's digi­tal lives as a�y as they do in academic or sports activities is still new. "The digital landscape is a positive place for kids," says Dr. Gwenn O'Keeffe, lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics 2011

report on the impact of social media on children, adolescents, and families. "It promotes a lot of healthy habits like socializa­tion and a sense of connected­ness to the greater world and to causes." But, she says, children

9I need guidance. Here are D

. .

Visit us at PARADE.COM

� " . .--;WK

Wired I continuedfmm page to

healthy psychological-develop­ment. "Technology encourages this fantasy that adolescents grow up with that they will never have to be alone; that they will never have to separate from parents and peers. But if you don't learn to be alone, you will only know how to be lonely." Parents who constantly text their children compound the problem.

Though kids treat their_ cell phones like appendages, getting them to talk on the phone can be nearly impossible. Experts worry that this fundamental change in how kids communi­cate is endangering the develop­ment of an important set of skills they'll need later on: how to converse, read cues from vocal

· intonations, and even negotiate."There's a big difference betweenan apology that involves lookingin somebody's eyes and seeingthat they're hurt, and typing 'I'msorry' and hitting send," T urklepoints out. Parents need to insistthat their children actually talkto them rather than just te,\.1.T urkle also favors setting upnon-texting zones, including thekitchen and dining room. And,she advises: "No texting in thecar on the way to school Thatwas always one of the most im­portant times for parents to talkto children. Don't give it up."

The minute you hand a child a cell phone, you're also open­ing up the entire online world to them, including sexting. Dr. O'Keeffe recommends that you talk about the dangers from day one. ''If you don't feel ready to have that conversation, hold off giving them a phone. Ten years C) continued on page 14

Wired I continuedfi•ompage 12

old is the minimum age a kid should have a cell phone unless there's a medical issue, in which case you �hould get them a watered-down model that can basically just make calls."

• How Many HoursDoes Your Child SpendGaming? When kids playvideo games, that little pleasurechemical dopamine also kicks in.The intermittent-reinforcementthat games provide-you win alittle, you want to play more;-issimilar to gambling, and for somekids, just as addictive. Ninety-twopercent of kids ages 8 to 18 playvideo games, and 8.5 percent can.be classified as addicted, meaning

. their play interferes with the restof their lives. According t6Douglas Gentile oflowa StateUniversity, lead author of a 2011study on video game addiction,12 percent ofboys and 3 percentof girls who play will get addicted.

Parents are right to worry about the violent content of some games, but they should be just-as concerned about the amount of time kids spend playing even benign offerings. "Increased game play is related to poorer school performance as well as higher rates of obesity," Gentile says. "For every hour children .are spending on games, they are not doing homework, exercis­ing, or exploring:"

There is no clear-cut way to predict which kids will become hooked, but those who have poor impulse control or are socially awkward and have difficulty fit­ting in at school are at higher risk. Watch for these telltale signs of addiction: a drop in grades, a

PARADEPOLL

'OF•PARENTS SAYTHE INTERNET HELPS THEIR KIDS PERFORM

BffiER IN.SCHOOL.

change in sleep patterns, and in­creased anxiety. Gentile recom­mends that parents limit video game play to one hour per day and monitor the content. And you should pick out g.ames with your kids rather than letting them choose their own. Though the ratings on video games may not tell you everything you need to know, they can help you make decisions about whether content is age-appropriate.

• Should Teachers UseTwitter in the Classroom?There is near-universal agree­ment that schools must play arole in getting kids to be cyber­smart, but teachers have strug..:gled as much as parents to catchup.A2011 survey by theNational Cyber Security Alliancefound that only 51 percent ofK-12 teachers feltthat their dis­tricts were doing an adequate jobof preparing students for onlinesafety, security, and ethics. Only15 percenr-had taught lessonsinvolving online hate speech, andjust 26 percent had addressedcyber-bullying. Most teachershave little or no training in theseareas. Still, a growing number areadapting their methods to betterreach kids used to constant digitalstimulation. 'We find that youhave to switch activity or deliverymethod 0 continued on page 23

'

Technological Slavery (Excerpts from the book by Dr. Theodore Kaczynski)

(1)Ancient cultures, that for hundreds of

years gave people a satisfactory relationship

with each other and their environment, have

been shattered by contact with industrial

society, and the result has been a whole

catalogue of economic, environmental,

social and psychological problems. One of

the effects of the intrusion of industrial

society has been that over much of the world

traditional controls on population have been

thrown out of balance. Hence the population

explosion, with all that it implies. Then there

is the psychological suffering that is

widespread throughout the supposedly

fortunate countries of the West. No one

knows what will happen as a result of ozone

depletion, the greenhouse effect and other

environmental problems that cannot yet be

foreseen. And, as nuclear proliferation has

shown, new technology cannot be kept out

of the hands of dictators and irresponsible

Third World nations. Would you like to

speculate about what Iraq or North Korea

will do with genetic engineering?

(2)

"Oh!" say the technophiles, "Science

is going to fix all that! We will conquer

famine, eliminate psychological suffering,

make everybody healthy and happy!" Yeah,

sure. That's what they said 200 years ago.

The Industrial Revolution was supposed to

eliminate poverty, make everybody happy,

etc. The actual result has been quite

different. The technophiles are hopelessly

naive (or self-deceiving) in their

understanding of social problems. They are

unaware of (or choose to ignore) the fact

that when large changes, even seemingly

beneficial ones, are introduced into a

society, they lead to a long sequence of

other changes, most of which are impossible

to predict. The result is disruption of the

society. So it is very probable that in their

attempt to end poverty and disease, engineer

docile, happy personalities and so forth, the

technophiles will create social systems that

are terribly troubled, even more so than the

present one. For example, the scientists

boast that they will end famine by creating

new, genetically engineered food plants. But

this will allow the human population to keep

expanding indefinitely, and it is well known

that crowding leads to increased stress and

aggression. This is merely one example of

the predictable problems that will arise. We

emphasize that, as past experience has

shown, technical progress will lead to other

new problems for society far more rapidly

that it has been solving old ones. Thus it will

take a long, difficult period of trial and error

for the technophiles to work the bugs out of

their Brave New World (if they ever do). In

the meantime there will be great suffering.

So it is not all clear that the survival of

industrial society would involve less

suffering than the breakdown of that society

would. Technology has gotten the human

race into a fix from which there is not likely

to be any easy escape.

(3)

But suppose now that industrial

society does survive the next several

decades and that the bugs do eventually get

worked out of the system, so that it

functions smoothly. What kind of system

will it be? We will consider several

possibilities.

(4)

First let us postulate that the

computer scientists succeed in developing

intelligent machines that can do all things

better than human beings can do them. In

that case presumably all work will be done

by vast, highly organized systems of

machines and no human effort will be

necessary. Either of two cases might occur.

The machines might be permitted to make

all of their own decisions without human

oversight, or else human control over the

machines might be retained.

(5)If the machines are permitted to make

all their own decisions, we can't make any

conjectures as to the results, because it is

impossible to guess how such machines

might behave. We only point out that the

fate of the human race would be at the

mercy of the machines. It might be argued

that the human race would never be foolish

enough to hand over all the power to the

machines. But we are suggesting neither that

the human race would voluntarily turn

power over to the machines nor that the

machines would willfully seize power. What

we do suggest is that the human race might

easily permit itself to drift into a position of

such dependence on the machines so that it

would have no practical choice but to accept

all of the machines’ decisions. As society

and the problems that face it become more

and more complex and machines become

more and more intelligent, people will let

machines make more of their decisions for

them, simply because machine-made

decisions will bring better results than man-

made ones. Eventually a stage may be

reached at which the decisions necessary to

keep the system running will be so complex

that human beings will be incapable of

making them intelligently. At that stage the

machines will be in effective control. People

won't be able to just turn the machines off,

because they will be so dependent on them

that turning them off would amount to

suicide.

(6)On the other hand it is possible that

human control over the machines may be

retained. In that case the average man may

have control over certain private machines

of his own, such as his car or his personal

computer, but control over large systems of

machines will be in the hands of a tiny

elite…If the elite is ruthless they may

simply decide to exterminate the mass of

humanity. If they are humane they may use

propaganda or other psychological or

biological techniques to reduce the birth rate

until the mass of humanity becomes extinct,

leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite

consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may

decide to play the role of good shepherds to

the rest of the human race. They will see to

it that everyone's physical needs are

satisfied, that all children are raised under

psychologically hygienic conditions, that

everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep

him busy, and that anyone who may become

dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure

his "problem." Of course, life will be so

purposeless that people will have to be

biologically or psychologically engineered

either to remove their need for the power

process or to make them "sublimate" their

drive for power into some harmless hobby.

These engineered human beings may be

happy in such a society, but they most

certainly will not be free. They will have

been reduced to the status of domestic

animals…

(7)It is overwhelmingly probable that if

the industrial-technological system survives

the next 40 to 100 years, it will by that time

have developed certain general

characteristics: Individuals will be more

dependent than ever on large organizations;

they will be more "socialized" than ever and

their physical and mental qualities to a

significant extent (possibly to a very great

extent) will be those that are engineered into

them rather than being the results of

chance…and whatever may be left of wild

nature will be reduced to remnants preserved

for scientific study and kept under the

supervision and management of scientists

(hence it will no longer be truly wild). In the

long run (say a few centuries from now) it is

likely that neither the human race nor any

other important organisms will exist as we

know them today, because once you start

modifying organisms through genetic

engineering there is no reason to stop at any

particular point, so that the modifications

will probably continue until man and other

organisms have been utterly transformed.

(8)Whatever else may be the case, it is

certain that technology is creating for human

beings a new physical and social

environment radically different from the

spectrum of environments to which natural

selection has adapted the human race

physically and psychologically. If man does

not adjust to this new environment by being

artificially re-engineered, then he will be

adapted to it through a long and painful

process of natural selection. The former is

far more likely than the latter…

About the author: Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, a

former mathematics professor at Berkeley, received his undergraduate degree from Harvard, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Kaczynski is also known as “The Unabomber,” and is currently serving a life sentence in federal prison on murder and terrorism charges; his mail-bombing spree from 1978-1995 killed three people and maimed 23 others. Portions of Technological Slavery are also referred to as “The Unabomber Manifesto.”

Stupider and Worse?

Nick Smith, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Philosophy

These questions are the questions of the 21st cen-tury and nothing is more important.2

From this perspective, the primary problem of too much information is not a matter of “information overload” for a busy population. The information tech-nologies of our generation will, in all likelihood, shape humanity to an even greater extent than Gutenberg press or electricity. As we come to have instantaneous access to all digitized information, we become differ-ent creatures. We think differently and we socialize differently, and the changes are upon us before we have time to evaluate them. As an example of the speed of these changes, imagine the equivalent of the iPhone in 2030. It may well be a few millimeters in size and have powers that would seem even more magical to our 2010 minds than the 3GS would have seemed to me in 1990 when I was a first-year college student. For one example of the possible information technologies of the near future, consider the ambitions of Google cofounder Sergey Brin: “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”3 Your phone may soon be smarter than you.

More importantly, at some point it becomes difficult to distinguish you from your phone or your laptop. Surely we are smarter in some respects because we can recall limitless information via our machines, and I personally place considerable value in this. I could not be who I am without my laptop. But at some point it seems fair to ask: Is it the machines or the people that are becoming smarter? If my spell check automati-cally fixes mistakes, it seems questionable that I would receive credit for submitting an error-free paper. The machine did that bit of the work, just as a calculator does arithmetic for me. To use Bill McKibben’s exam-ple, driving a marathon course in a car is very different from running it and our sense of achievement differs accordingly.4 But what if Wikipedia does most of my research for me? Where should we draw the line be-

As a parent of two small children who takes seriously Richard Louv’s concerns about “nature deficit disorder,” I continually won-

der how I can raise my children in this environment so that they are skilled with the technology but not drowning in it.1 Practical issues regarding how much time my privileged children should spend in front of a screen, however, give way to broader concerns about the future of information processing. In this paper I will attempt to frame everyday issues regarding the role of information technology in our lives in terms of the “big picture” of where such incredibly power-ful tools might lead us. Questions about our emerging digital world, I believe, speak to the very meaning of human life and the possibility of our extinction. Google cannot answer these questions, which makes them especially worrisome.

At root, my concerns stem from the popular senti-ment that all knowledge is really just information. Biology, for instance, increasingly understands life as a matter of information processes that are not that dif-ferent from the subject matter of computer science. The consequences of this paradigm may seem academic, but Leon Kass—former chair of President Bush’s Council of Bioethics—captures the immense powers of the infor-mation age:

All of the boundaries are up for grabs. All of the boundaries that have defined us as human beings, boundaries between a human being and an animal and between a human being and a super human being or a god. The boundaries of life, the bound-aries of death…. We may be able to do new things, but it will no longer be clear who is the “we” do-ing them—whether enhancing athletes’ bodies through steroids, changing who you are with eu-phoriants, moving the maximum life expectancy out so that one no longer lives with the vision of one’s finitude as a guide to how one chooses to spend one’s days, or blurring that ultimate line of what is a human being and what is an animal.

The University Dialogues

tween my contribution and the machine’s? Can we still differentiate between the machines and the people? What criteria would we use to explain the boundaries between my efforts and the machine’s? How will these lines blur further in 20 years? Will it become impos-sible to distinguish between the human and the inhu-man as humans become more dependent upon and integrated with information technology? Where is all of this taking us? Who is in the driver’s seat? Should we resist?

Now consider that these possibilities unfold very quickly during a period in which we seem to suf-fer from considerable confusion. It seems that every generation claims that its children are deteriorating—consider Socrates’ “corruption” of the youth of Ath-ens—but is this something different? Is information technology, in the words of T.W. Adorno, making us “stupider and worse” in that we seem to have a wealth of facts but a poverty of values?5 Although we have access to seemingly limitless information, this sort of data tells us very little about why it has value. Empiri-cal studies of various kinds have difficulty keeping up with the rapidly changing technologies, but the data increasingly suggest that we are indeed losing the abil-ity to concentrate and think critically.6 Google floods us with information before we know how to swim, and we seem forever floating on the surface of knowledge without knowing where we are headed. To paraphrase Thoreau, information gives us an improved means to an unimproved end. We are so drowning in informa-tion that we rarely have our heads above water to ask questions regarding ends—what we might consider the ultimate meaning and value of our lives. Information alone cannot make good decisions about justice, mo-rality, and purpose. For that we need good judgment, which requires a rather different set of skills than Googling.

The confluence of these historical circumstances should worry us: we must determine the future and shape of humanity in the context of information tech-nology yet our powers of evaluating questions of ulti-mate value seem rather weak for the task and increas-ingly dependent of that very information technology.

Even if we reached compelling reasons to slow the development of information technology, we might already be in too deep. Given competitive global markets, tremendous economic incentives propel the technologies forward. Few of us are likely to stop us-ing the devices, in large part because it would place us at a considerable competitive disadvantage. Imag-ine, for instance, if a lone student today attempted to

complete her coursework without using a computer. Likewise, suppose that one community decides that it has “too much information” and somehow restricts access or slows the development of its information processors. Could it compete with those without such reservations and who seek to develop their informa-tion economy? If one culture thinks Google’s artificial intelligence devices go too far, for instance, how will it fare against those who embrace the technology in matters of industry or warfare? This leaves us to won-der if we must adopt the technology or be left behind by those who use smarter machines. Such concerns should lead us to question the extent of our freedom to use such devices.

In this regard, computer scientist Bill Joy finds infor-mation technology similar to—and more threatening than—nuclear weaponry:

The nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) tech-nologies used in 20th-century weapons of mass destruction were and are largely military, devel-oped in government laboratories. In sharp con-trast, the 21st-century [information] technologies have clear commercial uses and are being devel-oped almost exclusively by corporate enterprises. In this age of triumphant commercialism, technol-ogy—with science as its handmaiden—is deliver-ing a series of almost magical inventions that are the most phenomenally lucrative ever seen. We are aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the now-unchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold financial in-centives and competitive pressures.7

National and international bodies could aggres-sively prohibit and regulate nuclear technologies primarily because they existed within closely guarded military domains and such inventions had limited commercial application. Compare this to informa-tion technology. Each of us is already heavily invested in information technology and we carry its power in our pockets. We want more. Relinquishment—or even a momentary pause in the information arms race—seems unlikely. Barring global catastrophe that severely limits our energy supply, we are taking this train wherever it leads us.

So again, where is the information technology taking us? Robert Oppenheimer—often referred to as “The Father of the Atomic Bomb”—offered this defense of technology only months after the United

TMI: Decision Making in the Age of Information Overload

States obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to human-ity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge and are willing to take the consequences.”8 Applying this anthem to emerging information tech-nology raises grave questions. Is knowledge always intrinsically valuable, or must we put it to use toward human admirable human ends? Might information become a threat to humanity or even contrary to hu-man survival? If information threatens humanity, which side should we be on: humanity or knowledge? Surely humans are not the conclusion of evolution, but should we resist if “smarter” things surpass us? If it is our intelligence that makes humans valuable, should information processing power determine a thing’s rights and access to resources? By this stan-dard, might a machine of the near future deserve en-ergy more than I do? If processing power does not de-termine something’s value and rights, what does? Can we preserve a privileged place for humanity without invoking our religious traditions? Compared to the information processors of the future, is there any rea-son to believe that we won’t be “stupider and worse”?

References1. Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods (Chapel Hill:Algonquin Press, 2005).

2. Wesley Smith, “A Conversation with Leon Kass: ScienceDoesn’t Trump All,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 20,2002. The interview is available here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/10/20/IN232250.DTL.

3. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” TheAtlantic, July 2008. The article is available here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-mak-ing-us-stupid/6868/.

4. See Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in anEngineered Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2003).

5. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from aDamaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (New York: Verso,1974), 25.

6. See Matt Richtel, “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying aMental Price,” The New York Times, June 7, 2010. The ar-ticle is available here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html. Also consider the studies collectedin Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

7. Bill Joy, “Why the future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April2000. The article is available here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html.

8. Richard Mason, Oppenheimer’s Choice: Reflection fromMoral Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 56.