Ever Not Quite

About Ever Not Quite

Audio essays from Ever Not Quite: Essays About Technology and Humanism https://evernotquite.substack.com/ By Patrick Jordan Anderson

Publisher

Patrick Jordan Anderson

Category

technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

26 Mar 2024

Latest episode

29 Jun 2025

Latest episodes

14 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   29 Jun 2025

   And Death Shall Have No Dominion

   The host explores tech-entrepreneur Bryan Johnson's pursuit of biological immortality through the lens of Ernest Becker's "Denial of Death," revealing modern cultural assumptions about death.

2. 

   28 Mar 2025

   The Anthropological Aura

   Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism. This essay attempts to name something for which—or so it seems to me—we have lacked a satisfactory term. I have argued before against the reasoning which attempts to defend human preeminence by insisting that “no technology could ever do ‘X’”, however sophisticated or impressive the ‘X’ in question might be. This, it seems to me, is a weak position from which to secure humanistic values, for reasons which I’ll explain below. Here, I offer an alternative basis on which to think about what distinguishes us from even the most powerful simulations of human competencies. I am calling this the “anthropological aura”. These reflections, of course, don’t exhaust all we might wish to say about what is at stake in the present unfolding of artificial intelligence, but I hope they provide a helpful category which may perhaps be of some use in your own thinking about these issues.

3. 

   11 Mar 2025

   Without Regard For Persons

   How industry is talking about the AI rollout

4. 

   22 Feb 2025

   Building in the Ruins

   Building in the Ruins On what comes after techno-optimism

5. 

   22 Feb 2025

   Crisis and Revelation

   Crisis and Revelation “Things Aren’t Getting Worse. The Truth is Just Being Revealed.”

6. 

   22 Feb 2025

   Strange Shadows [Part II]

   Strange Shadows [Part II] Two centuries of photography have prepared the way for algorithmically-generated images. Now the image-world is becoming a Museum of Babel.

7. 

   22 Feb 2025

   Strange Shadows [Part I]

   Strange Shadows [Part I] Two centuries of photography have prepared the way for algorithmically-generated images. Now the image-world is becoming a Museum of Babel.

8. 

   22 Feb 2025

   This Is Not an Automated Message

   This Is Not an Automated Message On what we lose when machines do the writing

9. 

   22 Feb 2025

   All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

   All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace Reflections on the “humanity of the gaps” and techno-humanism Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism. I began the line of thought that grew into this essay modestly, by wondering about our expressions of enthusiasm for technological innovation—for new things and gadgets generally. Why do such feats of engineering elicit, for instance, the reflexive use of the word “cool” so readily and so reliably? But that isn’t what this essay is about; from there, I began to speculate about the implications of taking seriously the idea that technological capabilities have no inherent limitations—that perhaps just about everything is, at least in theory, technologically possible. It surely matters whether we believe this to be true or not—and if we do, what does that suggest about what we think we’re doing with technology, and what its history and future represent? I had intended for this post to be a short reflection on these themes and observations, but soon it became clear that I had wandered into some serious issues, and I decided to accept the opportunity to linger and explore them in greater depth. I began to consider the idea of what has been called the “humanity of the gaps”, that is, as machines become capable of more and more, we begin to define ourselves by contrast with them, locating our humanity in our ability to do what no machine can yet do. We frequently encounter attempts to quell fears about human obsolescence which urge that a more automated world, in which machines have taken over much or all of what is currently human labor, presents unprecedented opportunities for us to discover something new and profound about our own humanity. According to some versions of this view, whatever machines become capable of doing, this can only present us with opportunities to embrace our humanity all the more completely, and to develop more fully into our true nature: no machine can ever do everything we can do, so each advance only serves to elevate our unique abilities. I worry that these expressions of optimism suffer from two major shortcomings: first, the deeply unimaginative assumption that machines will never be capable of matching or surpassing human skills, and second, the implicitly utilitarian understanding of human purpose which reduces us to our functions and presses us into competition with machines in the first place. I conclude with a few thoughts about techno-humanism, a perspective which manages to avoid some of these difficulties, but which tends, in the process, to deliver us over to the contingencies of technological change and implicitly encourages a posture of acquiescence to its pressures. As always, what follows is a consideration of these issues as I have come to understand them—characterizations are incomplete, proposals are exploratory, and conclusions are tentative.

10. 

    2 Apr 2024

    Control Group - Effective Altruism and the Technologization of Ethics

    Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism. This post is my attempt to take stock of the effective altruism movement (EA), which has made major inroads into the popular mind over the past several years, and with which most readers are likely already familiar. The twentieth century Buddhist philosopher Keiji Nishitani once wrote that a consequence of the modern scientific interpretation of nature solely as matter and extension was that “[t]o the self-centered ego of man, the world came to look like so much raw material.” Within the domain of ethics, we could imagine that this perspective might express itself in the form of a totally amoral—or perhaps even openly immoral—form: when all former horizons of moral evaluation cease to make a claim upon our reasoning, we might conclude, no good remains but that of the selfish individual. But something less straightforward—and, to me, much more interesting—has occurred in the case of effective altruism (and this is closer to what Nishitani was getting at): Rather than defending a kind of moral egoism, the movement draws deeply from what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called a “rich moral background” which lies behind many modern deployments of instrumental reason, and, far from rejecting ethics as a mere hangover from a more naïve epoch, EA understands itself as a supremely selfless and humane initiative that is possible precisely because human-centered values have finally been able to claim their rightful centrality within the field of ethics. What first drew my interest in effective altruism was what seemed to be its unique influence on the modern tech industry, particularly in Silicon Valley. I wondered about how ethical questions came to be understood so comfortably in the technical and scientific terms in which both EA and Silicon Valley see the world, and to what extent the movement’s close relationship with modern technology was a consequence of their shared intellectual sources. In this essay, I try to provide readers with a sense of the landscape of the effective altruism movement: these specifics are important because a major part of my argument is that the actual words and actions of modern-day effective altruists are remarkably clear expressions of the theoretical sources which the movement shares with the general orientation of modern technology: In both cases, the common theme is the conviction that the world can and must be set right by means of human control.

11. 

    26 Mar 2024

    On Common Sense and Expertise

    On Common Sense and Expertise - Hannah Arendt on technology and scientific knowledge Read the post here (https://evernotquite.substack.com/p/on-common-sense-and-expertise). Happy New Year! And welcome to Ever Not Quite, a newsletter about technology and humanism. This essay responds to what I call a “strange fissure” that seems to run through modern technologists, who possess a technical competence that gives them authority over those who don’t share their expertise, but who nonetheless remain human beings whose perspective is still rooted in the same human experiences as the rest of us. At bottom, this fissure demarcates two ways of conceiving the world: one scientifically objective, having freed itself of any particular interest in human concerns as such, and another social and political outlook that is ineluctably rooted in a human standpoint. How best to think about this internal division has been the subject of much debate for centuries now. Here, I argue that perennial debates about the relationship between politics and expertise continue to reverberate through our contemporary discourse about the human implications of artificial intelligence and the algorithmic management of our world. The emergence of AI in particular raises questions about the place of the human being in the universe that echo those posed by the prospect of space travel in the mid-20th century; in both cases, technological devices and practices take up and reflect a prior theoretical displacement of the human being within the immensity of the universe. I look to Hannah Arendt’s short 1963 essay (https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-conquest-of-space-and-the-stature-of-man) “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man”, which proves to be a surprisingly relevant and prescient guide to these topics. I hope you find it interesting, and as always, thank you for listening!

12. 

    26 Mar 2024

    Teaching Silicon to Talk

    Read the post here (https://evernotquite.substack.com/p/teaching-silicon-to-talk).

13. 

    26 Mar 2024

    When the Machine Consumes Itself

    Read the post here (https://evernotquite.substack.com/p/when-the-machine-consumes-itself).

14. 

    26 Mar 2024

    Neil Postman's Technopoly at 30

    Read the post here (https://evernotquite.substack.com/p/neil-postmans-technopoly-at-30).

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