Christopher Watts, from St. Lawrence University, created the following video for a New York Six event. The premise of the talk creatively explores how the obsession with quantifying information without qualitative considerations can lower the bar for what it means to be alive. If we increasingly value data points as the primary form of knowledge, but lose our ability to understand the implications of that quantified data on society at large, then we become zombies who rely on technology without internal awareness and critical thought.
The arts and humanities must take the lead in studying how technology influences human thinking so that we can direct the change that happens in our age of information.