One of my all-time favorite quotes is from this essay. It gives a lot of color into how we all get sucked in to technology.
“It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious. We won't be able to construct machines like ourselves until we've understood this, and we're not even close. All we know is the phenomenon: we spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function; it is what we do with our lives.”
Lewis Thomas' many essays were collected in book form over the years [1]. In addition to commentary, he shared many insights on biology, society, and language prior to his untimely demise. If you enjoy this, you'll likely enjoy his other books as well.
I'm a fan of Lewis Thomas, but some essays in the book hold up better than others. In particular, the one on computers and AI is a bit amusing in retrospect:
"Even when technology succeeds in manufacturing a machine as big as Texas to do everything we recognize as human, it will
still be, at best, a single individual. This amounts to nothing, practically speaking. To match what we can do, there would have to be 3 billion of them with more coming down the assembly line, and I doubt that anyone will put up the money, much less make room."
But to be fair, he was bringing up computers to emphasize just how more complicated living beings are than any computers existing in 1974. Not that we are really at the human-level computer stage either, but when we do, they won't be huge Texas sized things made in isolation of each other.
“It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious. We won't be able to construct machines like ourselves until we've understood this, and we're not even close. All we know is the phenomenon: we spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function; it is what we do with our lives.”