In a recent announcement, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company writ large would be undergoing a name change.
They will now be known as Meta. You can find a truncated version of the announcement here.
The announcement was....interesting, which you will notice if you take the time to watch. As someone who comments publicly from a variety of perspectives, there's no shortage of commentary I could create from simply that 11 minute video.
To pique your interest, for example, I could write about how the Utopian future advanced by the presentation is both exciting and extremely alarming. I could talk about how cool the technology advancements are, or how troubling it was to see a vision for the future painted that tries to bring the real world into digital reality, further detaching people from *actual* reality.
But for all of that fodder, the most fascinating line of the announcement came when Zuckerberg asked a colleague to explain one facet of their new technology.
He recognized that the human hand was an engineering marvel, and therefore a great place to start when it comes to merging these worlds. His words made me stop and reflect. The human hand is an engineering marvel.
Now, the word "engineer" comes with some baggage.
The reason being, of course, that most people believe the world is a result of cosmic, chemical, and biological evolution. Natural selection working on random mutations, with a whole bunch of time to let it happen. By this token, "evolution" is the engineer.
Think about it for a minute, though. Can evolution "engineer" things? No. Evolution is a blind, directionless, random process, as admitted by its own promoters.
To call evolution an "engineer" would be to endow it with a sort of personhood, which is a logical fallacy--namely, the fallacy of reification.
Of course, if challenged (and assuming he's a naturalist), he may try to be more careful and lessen his claim. He may simply want to claim that the human hand is so amazing, it *looks like* something a brilliant human mind might engineer.
But this is simply to restate the same point a different way! The fact is, the human hand looks as though it was intentionally, intelligently designed. So much so that it is at least worthy to be compared with other engineering "marvels" the likes of which humans have created.
How amazing to think of the scores of people who remain deceived into thinking that bridges, airplanes, and timepieces are crafted by intelligent humans, but the human hand is crafted by a blind, random, undirected process of nature.
The hand--and everything else it is attached to, is indeed an engineering marvel. Of God, the Master Engineer.
They will now be known as Meta. You can find a truncated version of the announcement here.
The announcement was....interesting, which you will notice if you take the time to watch. As someone who comments publicly from a variety of perspectives, there's no shortage of commentary I could create from simply that 11 minute video.
To pique your interest, for example, I could write about how the Utopian future advanced by the presentation is both exciting and extremely alarming. I could talk about how cool the technology advancements are, or how troubling it was to see a vision for the future painted that tries to bring the real world into digital reality, further detaching people from *actual* reality.
But for all of that fodder, the most fascinating line of the announcement came when Zuckerberg asked a colleague to explain one facet of their new technology.
He recognized that the human hand was an engineering marvel, and therefore a great place to start when it comes to merging these worlds. His words made me stop and reflect. The human hand is an engineering marvel.
Now, the word "engineer" comes with some baggage.
The reason being, of course, that most people believe the world is a result of cosmic, chemical, and biological evolution. Natural selection working on random mutations, with a whole bunch of time to let it happen. By this token, "evolution" is the engineer.
Think about it for a minute, though. Can evolution "engineer" things? No. Evolution is a blind, directionless, random process, as admitted by its own promoters.
To call evolution an "engineer" would be to endow it with a sort of personhood, which is a logical fallacy--namely, the fallacy of reification.
Of course, if challenged (and assuming he's a naturalist), he may try to be more careful and lessen his claim. He may simply want to claim that the human hand is so amazing, it *looks like* something a brilliant human mind might engineer.
But this is simply to restate the same point a different way! The fact is, the human hand looks as though it was intentionally, intelligently designed. So much so that it is at least worthy to be compared with other engineering "marvels" the likes of which humans have created.
How amazing to think of the scores of people who remain deceived into thinking that bridges, airplanes, and timepieces are crafted by intelligent humans, but the human hand is crafted by a blind, random, undirected process of nature.
The hand--and everything else it is attached to, is indeed an engineering marvel. Of God, the Master Engineer.
—
Steve Schramm
IG: @swschramm
Steve Schramm
IG: @swschramm