In his 1928 short story “The Machine Stops”, EM Forster imagines a ruined Earth where humans occupy isolated pods lined with buttons to serve their every need, from cold baths to literature, connected by an all-seeing communications machine. Even before the pandemic, this little-known story was traded among technologists as a prescient vision of the contemporary internet. A quote from it opens Shannon Vallor’s clarifying new book, The AI Mirror.Vallor is a philosopher of technology who has spent most of her career in Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara University, latterly moving to the University of Edinburgh. Her first book, Technology and the Virtues (2016), was bathed in California sunshine. It gently asserted the relevance of “virtue ethics” — philosophical approaches dating back to Aristotle, Confucius and Buddha that centre around human qualities such as courage, moral imagination, honesty and empathy — in learning how to thrive in today’s technological age.
E•M•福斯特(EM Forster)在他1928年的短篇小说《大机器停止》(The Machine Stops)中想象了这样一种场景：在已成一片废土的地球上，人类生活在一个个孤立的舱体里，舱体里有各种按钮来满足他们从冷水浴到文学的各种需求，他们通过一台无所不见的通信机器相互联系。甚至在疫情爆发之前，这篇鲜为人知的小说就在技术迷之间流传，被视为预言了当代互联网的状况。香农•维勒(Shannon Vallor)令人耳目一新的新书《人工智能之镜》(The AI Mirror)引用了这篇小说中的一句话作为开头。