Some final thoughts

A summary of:
Lanier, J. (2010). You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Allen Lane: London.
Part 5, Chapter 14: Future Humors

The book concludes somewhat less triumphantly than expected. E.g.:
"I've argued that when you deny the specialness of personhood, you elicit confused, inferior results from people. On the other hand, I've also argued that computationalism, a philosophical framework that doesn't give people a special place, can be extremely useful in scientific speculations. When we want to understand ourselves on naturalistic terms, we must make use of naturalistic philosophy that accounts for a degree of irreducible complexity, and until someone comes up with another idea, computationalsims is the only path we have to do that" (177).

But we simply must do better! "Treating people as nothing other than parts of nature is an uninspired basis for designing technologies that embody human aspirations" (178).

Lanier seems to be articulating something very similar to my argument that we need more "spiritual" engagements with technology; i.e. these engagements need to be uplifting and meaningful. The final sentences of his book read: "For me, the prospect of an entirely different notion of communication is more thrilling than a construction like the Singularity. Any gadget, even a big one like the Singularity, gets boring after a while. But a deepening of meaning is the most intense potential kind of adventure available to us" (192).