Professor Edward Lee Publishes "Plato and the Nerd"

Professor Edward Lee publishes Plato and the Nerd: The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology(link is external) (MIT Press, 2017). Professor Lee observes that engineering is a deeply intellectual and fundamentally inventive process and that the producers of digital technology have an unsurpassed medium for creativity. In his book, Lee argues that technology has advanced to the point where its progress is limited not by physical constraints but by the human imagination, and that our aim for artificial intelligence to reproduce human cognitive function vastly underestimates the potential of computers. He goes on to argue that technology is co-evolving with humans - that while it augments our cognitive and physical capabilities, we nurture, develop, and propagate technology itself.