Comfortication

Every convenience is a small trade, and no one ever asked you to sign for
it. The dishwasher took the drudgery. The calculator took the arithmetic.
The map took your sense of where you are. Each was a fair bargain on its
own terms. Now a machine offers to take the thinking, the writing, the
deciding - and the same fair bargain arrives at the one workshop that made
you who you are.

This is a book about what goes missing when nothing is hard, and about the
older, more stubborn idea that some difficulty is not a cost to be cut but a
craft to be kept. Where do you want to hold on to the friction?

Set Lonnert has been exploring, teaching, and writing about computers since the early 1980s, publishing on programming, internet technologies, and web development. Working in an analytical vein, Comfortication treats technology as inseparable from ideas about how we ought to live and think, and asks what human becoming loses when artificial intelligence removes the last hard thing: thought itself.