The lecture is dedicated to the role of digital technologies in human life.
Blaise Pascal invented the first mechanical calculator in the seventeenth century. In the 1940s, Alan Turing created a universal discrete machine that would become the prototype of modern computers. Digital technologies have since acquired enormous importance in our life. But what is the electronic environment today: is it an incredible expansion of human abilities—or an autonomous self-developing reality? This question became the core of the argument between two philosophers, Friedrich Kittler and Marchall McLuhan.
“We are very well aware that this machine doesn't think. We made the machine, and it thinks what it has been told to think. But if the machine doesn't think, it is obvious that we don't think either when we are performing an operation. We follow the very same procedures as the machine.”
(Jacques Lacan. Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics, or On the Nature of Language. 1955)