I suppose I'm not alone when I go on rants here and here. Not that I claim to be one of the smartest people in the world, however, I might not be too crazy after all. 5. That the age of accelerating technology will overwhelm us with opportunities to be worried. – Dan Sperber, social and cognitive scientist 9. That the internet is ruining writing. – David Gelernter, Yale computer scientist 12. That search engines will become arbiters of truth. --W. Daniel Hillis, physicist 17. That digital technologies are sapping our patience and changing our perception of time. –Nicholas G. Carr, author 25. Cultural extinction, and the fact that the works of an obscure writer from the Caribbean may not get enough attention. –Hans Ulrich Obrist. curator, Serptine Gallery 36. That technology may endanger democracy. –Haim Harari, physicist 39. “The diversion of intellectual effort from innovation to exploitation, the distraction of incessant warfare, rising fundamentalism” may trigger a Dark Age. –Frank Wilczek, MIT physicist 42. That Americans are homogenizing and exporting their view of a normal mind around the world. –P. Murali Doraiswamy, professor of psychiatry 44. That the new digital public sphere isn’t really so public. –Andrew Lih, journalism professor 48. That we will literally lose touch with the physical world. –Christine Finn, archaeologist. 49. “We should all be worried about the gaping psychological chasm separating humanity
from nature” –Scott Sampson, dinosaur paleontologist. 50. That we are becoming too connected. –Gino Segre, professor of physics & astronomy 61. “We should be worrying about a growing dominance of the Fourth [pop] Culture and how it may directly or indirectly affect us all." –Bruce Parker, professor 65. That we "are inarticulately lost in Modernity. Many of us seem to sense the end of something, perhaps a futile meaninglessness in our Modernity.” -- Stuart A. Kauffman, professor of biological sciences, physics, and astronomy 67. Augmented reality. –William Poundstone, journalist. 69. That we will spend too much time on social media. --Marcel Kinsbourne, neurologist 72.“I worry we have yet to have a conversation about what seems to be a developing "new normal" about the presence of screens in the playroom and kindergarten” --Sherry Turkle, pshcyhologist, MIT 73. “That we will become irrationally impatient with science” --Stuart Firestein, professor who is working as hard as he can, dammit 88. “What I worry most about is that we are more and more losing the formal and informal bridges between different intellectual, mental and humanistic approaches to seeing the world.” -- Anton Zeilinger, physicist 110. “The illusion of knowledge and understanding that can result from having information so readily and effortlessly available.” -- Tania Lombrozo, assistant professor of psychology 115. That “in one or two generations children will grow up to be adults who will not be able to tell reality from imagination.” --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist 135. “We should be worried that scientists have given up the search for determining right and wrong and which values lead to human flourishing just as the research tools for doing so are coming online” –Michael Shermer, publisher, Skeptic magazine 142. That knowledge is getting too fast. –Nicholas Humphrey, prof. at the London School of Economics 144. The homogenization of the human experience. –Scott Atran, anthropologist