The Science of Wishes

James Poulos on engineering

The chapter titled “Engineers” is the center of James Poulos’s fascinating, eccentric Human, Forever. Poulos’s central contention is that “digital catastrophe” isn’t looming. It’s happened. We’re already living in the “swarm,” having delegated much of the governance of our world to machines we can’t control. Tools always alter the humans who use them, shaping us “in ways we can never shape ourselves – that is, ways we can never control” (44). That’s bearable, as long as we don’t let our tools take over our politics. But we have.

Engineering is at the heart of this crisis. Through the Middle Ages, “engine” referred specifically to a machine of war. Since the mid-seventeenth century, “engine” and “engineering” have merged with the etymologically related concepts of “genius” and “ingenuity,” words that name the ineffable spark of divinity that enables some few to expand their consciousness beyond normal human limits. “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” Einstein said, “Imagination encircles the world” (quoted, 126). Buoyed by imagination, engineering becomes something more than tools or the design of tools. Engineering is the science of making dreams come true.

At the same time imagination was reaching its apotheosis, memory was slipping in cultural importance, a reversal of the medieval conception that grounded the human capacity for creativity, vitality, and discovery in “richly retentive memories” (129, quoting Mary Carruthers). The digital world arises from this mix of engineered imagination and scorn of memory.