This is the Abstract of a lecture that I will give sometime in 2011-2012, at a location to be disclosed later.
In my Preface to Gianna Maria Gatti’s book The Technological Herbarium (2010), I summed up my interpretation of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey: “What is implied by Kubrick and Clarke is the imminence of a change in what technology is for humanity, shifting from being a tool for the ‘domination of nature’ and a weapon in the killing-madness of war to technology redefined as a ‘Friend of the Earth’ (T.C. Boyle) and a helper in the life-affirming organization of peace.” In this lecture, I will present an overview of my work in the philosophy of technology and how it relates to the vision of this turning point for technology and humanity. I will briefly touch on the following 12 subjects from my research: what is Star Trek’s vision for technology?; Martin Heidegger’s Off the Beaten Track and the TV show Lost; Jean Baudrillard’s idea of “the radical illusion beyond art”; Gatti and the “Italian” perspective on art and technology; my essay “A Proposal for Developing Quantum Computing in Software”; my essay “Towards a Unified Existential Science of Humans and Androids”; the business and academic idea of Humanities Informatics; the Car of the Future; the Library of the Future; the Museum of the Future; the Wikipedia of the Future; and dance and digital/virtual technologies.
