“Technology shows up in our lives so often that it’s hard to identify when it has infiltrated some new place. And in its initial guise, it’s usually so helpful that we have no choice but to embrace it. Who doesn’t want the perfect shade of foundation, the “best fit” college experience? If a little digital photography or basic algorithm can take out the guesswork and enhance the outcome (thereby saving us some money), why say no? Here’s why. I fear that with all this technological help we are unwittingly eroding two critical dimensions of the human experience: error and aspiration. This is worrisome because failure and hope are the very things that have propelled human progress to date.[…] So, when machines quietly begin to strip us of our capacity to be wrong and learn from our mistakes, or to want more than is demonstrably possible, they begin to go to work on our basic humanity. And when this happens, we face perhaps the most insidious side effect of all. We begin to lose trust in ourselves.” Guesswork

Today take time to read this article, we mean take time. Allow 3 times as long as you think you need, savour it. We found it to be the kind of writing that stays with you like an earworm song you cannot get out of your head, it speaks with compassion about the tension that exists between us humans and our choices about using technology to ease our lives. Best we read in a while.

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