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Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)

Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)

Just a cou­ple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweet­ed out a video pro­mot­ing, “the new iPad Pro: the thinnest prod­uct we’ve ever cre­at­ed.” The response has been over­whelm­ing, and over­whelm­ing­ly neg­a­tive: for many view­ers, the ad’s imagery of a hydraulic press crush­ing a heap of musi­cal instru­ments, art sup­plies, and vin­tage enter­tain­ment into a sin­gle tablet inad­ver­tent­ly artic­u­lat­ed a dis­com­fort they’ve long felt with tech­nol­o­gy’s direc­tion in the past cou­ple of decades. As the nov­el­ist Hari Kun­zru put it, “Crush­ing the sym­bols of human cre­ativ­i­ty to pro­duce a homog­e­nized brand­ed slab is pret­ty much where the tech indus­try is at in 2024.”

One won­ders whether this would have sur­prised Aldous Hux­ley. He under­stood, as he explains in the 1961 BBC inter­view above, that “if you plant the seed of applied sci­ence or tech­nol­o­gy, it pro­ceeds to grow, and it grows accord­ing to the laws of

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High school students’ technology helps this man who uses a wheelchair mow his lawn again

High school students’ technology helps this man who uses a wheelchair mow his lawn again

Rob Piper says he loves cutting his grass, so much so that he even considered launching his own lawn-cutting business.

But around five years ago, the Windsor, Ont., man was injured in a cycling accident — he’s been using a wheelchair ever since.

Piper said he took to Facebook to say how much he missed it and was eventually connected to the technology program at St. Anne Catholic High School to find a solution.

“I’m so excited,” he said.

“The boys and girls did an amazing job on it. Tried it out for a couple rows and … ready to go cut the whole neighborhood.”

Rob Piper’s wheelchair now connects to a lawn mower to allow him to cut grass, something the Windsor, Ont., man loved before getting injured five years ago. (TJ Dhir/CBC)

Mike Costello, who teaches manufacturing and technology at St. Anne, said he and a group of

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