Summa Technologiae
* Book: Stanisław Lem. Summa Technologiae.
URL = https://existentialtech.antikythera.org/
Description
Bogna Konior:
"On the surface, the book is merely symptomatic of all the intellectual excitements of the 1960s, bringing together the natural sciences and the emerging field of cybernetics within an overarching framework of two evolutions — natural and technological — paralleling each other, overlapping and diverging. Though Lem described Summa as "a dreadful text full of showing off," as if sheepishly aware that he bit off more than he could chew, biophysicist Peter Butko considers it equal to acclaimed books that engaged with evolutionary theory and complexity, such as Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976) or Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), noting that it was Summa that first comprehensively addressed some of the topics that made these subsequent books so influential and widely read. Below the surface— and this is more interesting — Summa Technologiae is also a peculiar morality tale, with an ambiguous stance on how we might orient ourselves toward the largely unpredictable force that is technological change."