I know it's Friday after lunch, so bear with me. It's gonna be a bit of a philosophical and a bit of an abstract session, but I promise the topic is technology. Anyone enjoys philosophy? Yeah. Good.
All right, good. So first I'm gonna introduce the session by giving a brief introduction on what the en enlightenment is and introduce some of its discontents. Then I'm gonna talk about the concept of technological dominance, or in other words, technological orientation. Then I will discuss some of the ethical and responsibilities, ethical implications that we have in the industry, and then some of the future challenges and opportunities.
So first, what is enlightenment? So this was the name of the essay written by Emmanuel Kent in 1784. What is Enlightenment? And he defined it as Enlightenment is a man's release from his self incur tutelage. Tutelage comes from Latin, it comes from Tu, with, which means guardianship or protection over for cant.
Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his own understanding without direction from another self. Incur is tutelage when its cause lies, not in lack of reason, but in lack of courage. So in a simpler way for cant enlightenment is sape, meaning have courage to use your own reason.
That is the motto of the Enlightenment. And I want you to keep this definition as we progress in this session, because this definition is emphasizing the role of the individual. And as we will see in the next slides, I'm gonna talk about some of the philosophers that criticize the main ideas of the Enlightenment.
So again, the enlightenment was an intellectual movement. Some historians say that it started in the second half of the 17th century, and it ended in the early 18 hundreds with the dead of Emanuel Kent. And it comes from a French term that in English can be translated as illumination in a way.
So it's this period of human progress, let's say, where we finally get out of these dark ages of the middle of the Middle Ages.
So the famous French philosopher, Michelle Fuko, he talks about how we can't philosophy acquired a new dimension that focuses on dealing with the actuality of what's happening now, before us. Because if we look at previous philosophers before Kent, for example, Rene Decar, who for many, that's the founder of modern philosophy, he has this famous quote, meaning, I think therefore I am. But he was more focused on, on the human mind, rather on the outside world.
For, for the cart, the outside world was something he called Reten, and that was all in God's hands. So the human mind cannot really access the other, the object, the material world. But with Kent, we have a sort of epistemological break when he starts to realize, and in fact, there's something outside.
But however, he's a bit skeptical. He's saying that we cannot really know things in themselves. We know that there's something outside of our mind, but we cannot know them as they are in themselves.
And then we see someone like Hale that came few decades after Kent, and he's all about the absolute spirit, that we are all part of the same substance. And that's a philosophy of history, of actuality, of the present.
For Fuko, that's a sort of contradiction because for Fuko, in order to gain knowledge out of something, the mind needs to, the subject needs to conquer the object, needs to confront the object, needs to subjugate the object. That's how you get knowledge. And that's why Fuko is famous for his structural, his philosophy that looks at power structures and how they attain knowledge to suppress and understand other entities.
Here's a picture of of Manchester, maybe Michael will like that picture. It's in the year 1889. We can see the impact of the industrial revolution.
It, it looks more like a modern city of today. And in the decades following Ks famous essay, even in the years following that, we see the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England. And it starts to slowly spread into the continent and other parts of the world. Here we have a famous painting, but if you really pay attention in the background, there's some child labor, there's some man drinking, a lot of alcohol. So this idea of progress, of having new tools, new machinery, new solutions to make things easier, it also comes with some sort of irrationality and some contradictions.
So the main critics, or let's say the most famous critics of the concept of the Enlightenment are Te Adorno and Max Heimer from the Frankfurt School. They wrote this book, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, in the year 1944. And I think we all know what was happening during those days.
In Europe, technology was being used to create new weapons, to create more violence and to subjugate people. So sometimes I'm a bit, I'm a bit skeptical when we try to criticize past movements or people from other areas because we are far from that context. So in their context, that criticism was accurate, of course. And something that I would like to emphasize in this session, at the end, I would like to revision the critique of the critique of the enlightenment to see if it's adequate in the 21st century.
So they challenged the enlightenment ideas from three sides, from the economic, political, and cultural side. One example that is probably relevant is the, the radio. And that was something that we discussed in the previous panel. Germany was the country with most radios in the 1930s. And that was a sort of new technology that was, let's say, taking advantage by political forces. And it had a tremendous impact in the economy and also in the cultural space.
So a dornan heimer, they talk about how paradoxically the concept of a scant view it, of the human mind, of the human mind being self-driven and rational. It comes with contradictions. They argue that individuality has been undermined, undermined and reduced by political forces, the culture, industry, and consumers. Adorno hated jazz. I don't know why I, I love jazz, but he saw these new music styles, new technologies, as a threat to society, especially in the forms of authoritarian governments.
So according to them, the individual is transformed from a three dimens, three dimensional autonomous entity to a two dimensional caricature. And this reduces individual from the true autonomy.
So if we look at this picture, for example, I think this could be a sort of metaphor of what can't try to express. This is the city of Uru. It's the one of the most, not the most ancient city in sumaria, the crowd of civilization.
So if we see, you could, you could argue that the human mind constructed some sort of walls with the use of reason to have a sort of immunology immunity against natural and outside forces. But when the walls crumble, we just see irrationality, the forces of nature and subconscious impulses entering and creating more chaos.
And that's relates to this slide. One of the main thesis of, of my session and and of adorn and her heim's work is the impact that technology has on nature. It unexpectedly had a reversal.
We tried to control nature in order to survive and, and to be protected against it, against the most ugly size of nature. But we have instead controlled na, we got to know nature. And we're now in this economic system that we have today being exploited nature, we're being exploiting nature. And that's one of the critiques of this work. And the very tools of reason and science have an impact on the way we relate to, to the planet, to the world. That's something I'm gonna talk about later on.
But you know, we're in the industry of technology, so I thought that bringing this conversation to the table would be meaningful. In the next slide, we have a painting by John Constable. I think it's a bit, it's not the complete painting. It was painted in 1821, and he's one of the romantic painters. That whole movement was a sort of reaction against technology and against the new faces of the economic system seen in England. And later on in, in the continent.
Perhaps the most famous quote from the book is the one below the title, which is Midori, enlightenment and Enlightenment Reverse to Mythology. My own critique, let's say, or observation of, of this work by Iora Heimer, they seem to see mythology as a sort of very primitive and a bit irrational. But if we look at characters like Odysseus in the Odyssey, or Gilgamesh in the epic of Gilgamesh, these are already characters that are using reason to solve very complex problems. For example, the epic of Gilgamesh is the most ancient text.
Some historians argue that Gilgamesh is the first individual to appear in a story. And Gilgamesh was the king of Uru. And apparently he was a very bad king, but he decided to get out of the walls to reach for immortality. At the end, he fails, he realizes that he has to die like everyone else. So he comes back to Uru and decides to rebuild the walls of the city.
So that's, I'll say that's a bit deep, you know, for, for a story that took place 5,000 years ago.
But Arna Heimer argued that the alignment, while seeking to demystify and rationalize the world, it regresses back to the structure of mythology, and in particular in authoritarian governments with cultural personality and all of these sort of things that we see even today. Here's a scene of the Odyssey. Heimer has a dedicated chapter.
I don't think we can see the whole picture, but basically Odis use is tied, and he has some wax in his ears because some of the sirens are approaching the, the vessel and all the sailors are following the, the song from the sirens, and they're falling into the water. So he decides to tie himself and to put some bug in his ears to prevent that from happening to him. And that's a sort of rational act in a mythology. So if we reassess a doorman or Heim's work today, I'd say that it's a bit Eurocentric.
But again, in their context, they were writing this in, in Germany, in Europe, in the 1940s. But they, I'd say that if we look at it today, they really failed to study how other civilizations and cultures understand technology and how they attempt to harmonize their life around that.
And there are also some positive as positive aspects of meat, as I mentioned, in the case of EU or, or Gilgamesh. Or if we look at Tinkers like Yung or Gene GEPs, they, they have some interesting thoughts on, on mythology and how it relates to our present. We have a few more slides.
The key takeaways would be to understand that the idea of the enlightenment of, of rationality leading to progress has failed. And that was absurd by Iora Heimer in the forties.
And today, we can realize that our planet is not having a good time. We don't have a sustainable economic and political system, I'd say. And the threat of technology comes from having a particular technological orientation of the world. And one of the philosophers, continental philosophers of the past century, they discuss how technology is not just a human behavior or a means to an end or an instrument, but it's a way that reveals the being of human beings.
It, it disclosures something about the world that we didn't know before. And through that interaction, we learn something new about ourselves. So technology in a way is a way of being. So it's not neutral, right? There is something deep in that, in that understanding, I'd say because we are in the industry and we have power to influence how technology can be used. And I think that we need to do a better job at realizing the, the threat of this economic system that we have.
And with my discussions with Scott before this session, we, we talked about how the concept of interoperability, it's not only used in hardware or software in systems, but it can also be applied to human civilization to understand human systems and how they synchronize with natural and, and technological ecosystems. It needs to be wise and sustainable, right? It needs to focus on the wellbeing of the people interacting with technology.
It needs to ensure care and interoperability can guide the integration of technology with environmental goals.
Many businesses and organizations are sometimes struggling to meet those environmental goals. So it's also about the ecosystem. The world is facing unprecedented challenges from climate change to the rise of ai, to fragmented international system that is increasingly becoming more problematic with the rise of China. And they wanna have their own space of influence. And Russia is doing the same, and we see Iran and the us. So it's hard to have a sort of platform of cooperation. I wish the UN was more functional, but it really isn't.
So I think that people in the industry, we, we really have a, a role to play because we can bridge that gap. So some of the ethical dimensions, oh yeah, just quickly, I'm, I'm almost done. Here are some of the, the points that we can take home today. Cyber security isn't just about protecting data, it's about safeguarding the integrity of our natural environments. We should encourage the adoption of green technologies.
And yeah, back again to this quote, let's keep in mind that the message of the enlightment was about the individual. So if we empower individuals with the use of technology, we can have a more sustainable future. And just to conclude, he tried at least. Thank you. Thank.
