The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines (Mit Press)

Should digital technology be viewed as a new life form, sharing our ecosystem and coevolving with us?Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In this book, Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that we are less in control of the trajectory of technology than we think. It shapes us as much as we shape it, and it may be more defensible to think of technology as the result of a Darwinian coevolution than the result of topdown intelligent design. Richard Dawkins famously said that a chicken is an eggs way of making another egg. Is a human a computers way of making another computer? To understand this question requires a deep dive into how evolution works, how humans are different from computers, and how the way technology develops resembles the emergence of a new life form on our planet.Lee presents the case for considering digital beings to be living, then offers counterarguments. What we humans do with our minds is more than computation, and what digital systems dobe teleported at the speed of light, backed up, and restoredmay never be possible for humans. To believe that we are simply computations, he argues, is a dataist faith and scientifically indefensible. Digital beings depend on humansand humans depend on digital beings. More likely than a planetary wipeout of humanity is an ongoing, symbiotic coevolution of culture and technology.