Just when we were patting ourselves on the back for eluding the end of the world and avoiding the fiscal cliff, the folks at The Edge have let loose a flood of new things to worry about.
Every year Edge.org poses an Annual Question to dozens of scholars, scientists, writers, artists and thinkers. The respondents this year include the reasonably famous, such as Arianna Huffington, Steven Pinker, Brian Eno, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and 13.7's own Stuart Kauffman, as well as the not so famous (like me).
The 2013 question is: "What should we be worried about?" Respondents were urged to raise worries that aren't already on the public radar, or to dispel those that are.
The answers, released just this weekend, fall into a few common themes. Many worried about the impact of technology on individual minds and human relationships. My own entry was among them, raising the concern that fast and efficient access to information isn't always better access to information. Thanks to features of human psychology, effortless information retrieval can engender illusions of knowledge and understanding. Others had related concerns:
... ours is an age of information glut, not deep knowledge. Noga Arikha, historian and author at the Paris College of Art