Tech Progress - Always a Good Thing?

The Transformative, Alarming Power of Gene Editing
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/11/the-transformative-alarming-power-of-gene-editing
 
Virtual-Reality School Is the Next Frontier of the School-Choice Movement
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/virtual-reality-school-as-the-ultimate-school-choice
The conservative education activist Erika Donalds envisions a world where parents can opt out of traditional public school by putting their kids in a headset. 

A warning from 2016: After the Fact

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/21/the-internet-of-us-and-the-end-of-facts

“Michael P. Lynch is a philosopher of truth. His fascinating new book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data,” begins with a thought experiment: “Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain.” As thought experiments go, this one isn’t much of a stretch. (“Eventually, you’ll have an implant,” Google’s Larry Page has promised, “where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the answer.”) Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations, people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used to learn—by observation, inquiry, and reason. Then picture this: overnight, an environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes. It would be, Lynch says, as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know. I Google, therefore I am not.

Lynch thinks we are frighteningly close to this point: blind to proof, no longer able to know. After all, we’re already no longer able to agree about how to know.”