I have been trying to be more intentional about my relationship with computers. More recently, this has been triggered by the realisation that I spend more time interacting with computers than with people.
That's a question I have been asking myself recently. What do I need computers for? What is it that I need to compute?
For most of us, these days, we want our computers as internet machines. We don't really care about their capacity to perform calculations, or computations. We don't really care about their programmability: what we want are terminals into the internet.
The fact that the machines that accomplish this happen to be Turing-complete seems to be a mere historical accident.
Are we really augmenting human cognition?
We were promised bicycles for the mind, but we got aircraft carriers instead – Jonathan Edwards