World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

Over the centuries, mathematicians and logicians—Gottfried Leibniz, George Boole, Alfred North Whitehead—aspired to create a new system that would express thought in its purest (and therefore most divine) form. But for all the genius of these new systems, the prison of the body remained. Philosophy couldn’t emancipate the mind, but technology just might. Google has set out to succeed where Descartes failed, except that it has jettisoned all the philosophical questions that rattled around in his head. Where Descartes emphasized skepticism and doubt, Google is never plagued by second-guessing. It has turned the liberation of the brain into an engineering challenge—an exercise that often fails to ask basic questions about the human implications of the project.