“I think the history of humanity is the history of our co-evolution with devices and artifacts that make our lives easier. And I think it's now a question from moral philosophy — not for science — to decide how we use them and what it would mean to be enslaved by them, whether we do so willingly or reluctantly and genuinely.”

App Intelligence, NPR’s To the Best of Our Knowledge, November 27, 2015 https://www.ttbook.org/interview/app-intelligence

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I think the history of humanity is the history of our co-evolution with devices and artifacts that make our lives easie…" by David Krakauer?
David Krakauer photo
David Krakauer 3
scientist 1967

Related quotes

R. G. Collingwood photo
Dana Loesch photo

“I think it’s easier to mourn over a lion that’s been killed than over a baby that’s been killed, I think that’s how far we are from our humanity”

Dana Loesch (1978) American conservative political commentator

Loesch: More Outrage over Lion's Death Than Planned Parenthood Videos http://insider.foxnews.com/2015/07/30/dana-loesch-more-outrage-over-cecil-lion-planned-parenthood-videos (July 30, 2015)

Ai Weiwei photo
Gottlob Frege photo
Leo Tolstoy photo

“Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: 'what shall we do and how shall we live”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Quoted by Max Weber in his lecture "Science as a Vocation"; in Lynda Walsh (2013), Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy (2013), Oxford University Press, p. 90

Ted Chiang photo

“When we estrange ourselves from history we do not enlarge, we diminish ourselves, even as individuals. We subtract from our lives one meaning which they do in fact possess, whether we recognize it or not. We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it.”

Robert L. Heilbroner (1919–2005) American historian and economist

Source: The Future As History (1960), Chapter IV, Part 9, The Grand Dynamic of History, p. 209
Context: In an age which no longer waits patiently through this life for the rewards of the next, it is a crushing spiritual blow to lose one's sense of participation in mankind's journey, and to see only a huge milling-around, a collective living-out of lives with no larger purpose than the days which each accumulates. When we estrange ourselves from history we do not enlarge, we diminish ourselves, even as individuals. We subtract from our lives one meaning which they do in fact possess, whether we recognize it or not. We cannot help living in history. We can only fail to be aware of it. If we are to meet, endure, and transcend the trials and defeats of the future — for trials and defeats there are certain to be — it can only be from a point of view which, seeing the future as part of the sweep of history, enables us to establish our place in that immense procession in which is incorporated whatever hope humankind may have.

“All these things have happened in our history, and we need to talk about them. What kind of country are we that our history is so tragic?”

Yuan Tengfei (1972) history teacher in Beijing, China

Reported in Didi Kirsten Tatlow, "A System Afraid of Its Own History", The New York Times (September 16, 2010).

Related topics