Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'technology'

Put Down the Phone and Pick up the Psalms

Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age makes a compelling argument. Its author, Samuel James, asks readers to consider how long it’s been since they’ve checked a phone for notifications, or whether they’re in the habit of checking email while talking with people in person—or checking texts while driving. Continue Reading...

How Cars Can Keep Us Human

Truck drivers are cowboys. I work at a food warehouse. Truckers show up with 40,000 pounds of primal-cut beef, equivalent to maybe 50 head of cattle, driven from Nebraska, by a team of horses, bit, bridled, and reined by internal combustion. Continue Reading...

How “real” is a customized reality?

In a market economy, competition plays a crucial role. The capacity of both producers and consumers to outbid one another in selling and securing products allows for the optimal allocation of resources according to relative demand and supply. Continue Reading...

Rising to the challenges of ‘so-so automation’

Fears about job loss and human obsolescence continue to consume the cultural imagination, compounded by ongoing strides in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The job-killing robots are almost at the door, we are told, mere moments away from replacing the last traces of human inefficiency and heralding the dawn of a world without work. Continue Reading...

St. Nikolai Velimirovic: How Christians should view technology

Like Americans today, St. Nikolai Velimirovic witnessed dizzying technological changes between his birth in 1881 and the day he died in 1956 in a rural Pennsylvanian monastery. The former bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church, who spent time in the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, shared how Christians should view technology – something equally important in our day, as everyone from parents to legislators offers their own solutions. Continue Reading...

Google and surveillance capitalism

Business Insider reported last week that Google failed to disclose the existence of a microphone in their home security system, NestSecure. This came as a surprise to many Nest customers who complained that they were not informed that the security system even had a microphone. Continue Reading...