What The Computer Says About Who We Are

You can tell a lot about the sort of creature we think we are, by the value we place on the things we make. In October 2010, the Economist staged an on-line debate on the most important technological innovation of the 20th century. The challengers: the digital computer and the artificial fertiliser. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the computer won by a margin of 3-to-1. Why was this result not surprising? After all, the artificial fertiliser is arguably the invention most responsible for a fourfold growth in the world's population over the past century, as well as cutting the proportion of suffering from malnutrition by at least two-thirds. It would be difficult to think of another product of human ingenuity that has had such deep and lasting benefits for so many people.

Yet, the computer won - even though its development has tracked and in some cases amplified, global class divisions. ...over the ten days of debate it became clear that the computer was bound to win because, for better or worse, we identify more strongly with the extension than the conservation of human potential.

A new book by the media theorist David Berry, The Philosophy of Software, Amazon explores the implications of this development in terms of such computer-based technologies as iPhones and iPads that increasingly constitute the human life-world.