Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…[laughs] Or a worrier about technology. I think his worries about the analogy he’s making there between fascism and technology, that they enslave us — I don’t think they enslave us the way our phones enslave us, but they have the potential to be a system. I think of the man of system, the Adam Smith quote from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, this idea that if you have a view of the world that you want to impose on the chessboard of the human experience, you’re going to do some bad things. I take it to be in that spirit. Note also the middle paragraph, where he’s talking about humans. He cites, first, childhood memories, and a bit later on, a mother’s tenderness, thoughts of death. The main themes of the novel are being echoed by this interlude, where he is contrasting humans to the machine. The machine, for him, eventually becomes all-powerful. It becomes a kind of god and can create humans in its image that are in a way superior, and I think he’s terrified by this. Yes. Just like I am a little bit. Fair enough. I didn’t mean to suggest it didn’t belong at all. It’s just a wonderful little interlude. I think I was overwhelmed by the fact that it seems like most of it could have been written yesterday. The other part that I just was fascinated by was his comparison of fascism to quantum mechanics and the cutting edge of physics. What were your thoughts on that analogy and how . . . Forgetting this particular example — I want your thoughts on that — but this idea that scientific metaphor and scientific narrative and the way we see our role in the universe doesn’t just affect the progress of science. It comes into our culture in all kinds of ways. That’s a very provocative idea.…

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