Physics & Technology | 1 min read

Technology Is Most Interesting When It Changes Human Attention

I am less interested in gadgets than in the way tools rearrange memory, focus, ambition, and the stories we tell about progress.

Technology Is Most Interesting When It Changes Human Attention

Most conversations about technology become shallow very quickly.

We ask whether a tool is useful, fast, disruptive, intelligent, or dangerous. Those are fair questions, but they are not the deepest ones. The deeper question is what a tool rewards in the people who use it.

Does it reward patience or impulse?

Does it increase agency or dependency?

Does it make a person more capable of sustained thought, or merely more efficient at reacting?

This is one reason I am drawn to both physics and technology. Physics asks what the world is like beneath appearances. Technology asks what we can build once we understand enough of that world. But between those two sits the human being, who still has to decide what is worth building and what kind of mind he wants to become.

I want this blog to be a place where that middle question stays alive.