Plato and the Nerd: The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology

Edward Ashford Lee explores the ways that engineers use models and abstraction to build inventive artificial worlds and to give us things that we never dreamed of-for example, the ability to carry in our pockets everything humans have ever published. But he also attempts to counter the runaway enthusiasm of some technology boosters who claim everything in the physical world is a computation-that even such complex phenomena as human cognition are software operating on digital data. Lee argue...