Stephen Downes

According to this article, technologists need to study more of the liberal arts, while those in the liberal arts need to embrace technology. "By suggesting that we need to fuse technology and the liberal arts, we are explicitly affirming the need to balance topics like economic growth, political expediency, and human desires with the humanistic insights developed over the centuries." Otherwise, "technology's effects could well be harmful." Even assuming anyone has the time to study all that (and over my lifetime I have genuinely tried) it's not clear that any genuinely deep civilization-saving insight results. We already know that systems devoted to the single-minded pursuit of anything - whether paperclips or money - lead to undesirable consequences, but we build them anyway. But more, I just don't see this argument as particularly deep. Sure, we should pool out knowledge. But then what? Do we even know what we want and what we reasonably fear? I don't get a sense of that here. Via Mark Oehlert.