Reading Ellul: how Technique swallowed science itself
StewartalsopIII · x · 2026-09-19
The author's takeaway from Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society: Ellul defined Technique (capital T) as "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity" — far more than tools. Science was once exploratory and open-ended, pursued by eccentrics for wonder; now it's systematized in labs, fused with state and corporations, building organs-on-chips toward known goals — devotion to Technique rather than wonder.
More from AGI Musings
- NYT Mathematician Argues Classrooms Should Be Like Gyms in the AI Era — stevenstrogatz · 2026-09-19
- Connor Leahy on 'When AI Becomes an Enemy': misaligned systems and existential risk — The_Flaneur_Films · 2026-09-19
- XBOW's Brendan Dolan-Gavitt: LLMs killed security through obscurity — moyix · 2026-09-19
- Schmidhuber: I published the first concrete RSI algorithms back in 1987 — SchmidhuberAI · 2026-09-19
- NBER field experiment: AI boosts patent lawyers' skill, but gains accrue only to senior lawyers — avicgoldfarb · 2026-09-19
- Philosopher Piccinini: phenomenal consciousness outstrips computation, so AI won't be conscious via compute alone — pwlot · 2026-09-19